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 […]
My first memory is of vomiting upon contact with the ginger-drenched air.
I wasn’t initially sure if I was liking this or not liking this book. The challenge is that like a lot of books written from an immigrant perspective there’s a kind of tendency to write into the novel a sense of totalizing voice, as if this will be the only book ever written about the experiences of, in this case, Ethiopian, immigrants. This book does challenge that structure to some extent by the end, especially given that this book is as much a geopolitical thriller […]
You’ve really got a hold on me
As I have mentioned before, fairy tales were my jam when I was younger. I also love some good remixes — musical or cultural — and humor, so things like Texts from Jane Eyre were absolutely delightful to me. When I heard that Daniel Mallory Ortberg was putting out a book of retold fairy tails (as Mallory Ortberg), I immediately put in a pre-order. In my haste and my assumptions based on the humor of Ortberg’s other work, having missed the “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” […]
does he have a horse? is that what this is about? does he have a sword gun or a railroad or a ..a nice hat or something?
I stumbled upon Ortberg’s hilarious “How to Tell if You are in a Jane Austen Novel” a while back on The Toast web site so when this popped up as a Goodreads recommendation I took it to heart. A quick search of the CBR site tells me that quite a few of you have laugh snorted through this one. It’s a difficult one to review and I’m very tempted to just say, it’s very funny so go read it, but there is that pesky 250 word […]