Y’all I spent so much time at The Toast! I loved, loved, loved it. Enough that I go back and read my favourite posts over and over again—especially the art history ones, like this one. So, I’m just gonna say it. I did not like The Merry Spinster very much. Oooof, that hurt. This book was on everyone’s radar, and every review has praised its inventiveness. I get it. But it was fine. It was just, fine. I didn’t finish it all that long ago, but I honestly […]
No amount of redistribution or reorganisation of rotten meat will make a dead body more palatable.
Quarter Cannonball achievement unlocked! I am a huge fan of Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein story, so I was super intrigued by Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. I wasn’t disappointed by this retelling, some of it told from the monster’s point of view, but I’ll admit there were parts of the story that just didn’t grab me. Frankenstein in Baghdad is a darkly comic story of life in Baghdad during the years just after the US invasion of Iraq. It’s an English translation from the original Arabic, so I’m […]
When Uncle Stevie tells us that a book is scary, we should most definitely listen. #CBR10Bingo
I’ve been away on vacation (or a series of vacations) for a little over a month, and have a large stack of books to review. But this one had to be first. The quiet horror of it will last with me for a long time. I first heard about The Hunger from Stephen King, who tweeted about it in March: THE HUNGER, by Alma Katsu: Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark. Of course, that shot it up to the […]
“You can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”
The Girl With All the Gifts is a bit slow moving at first. We start with Melanie, a precocious young girl who is being raised in captivity on a military base. She, along with two dozen other children, have various teacher who give them a variety of lessons. Ms Justineau is Melanie’s favorite teacher in part because she reads Greek myths to the class. But this isn’t a regular school; the children are kept locked up in cells and they attend their classes bound to wheelchairs. […]