The British have apparently long been fascinated with crime and criminals, from the crowds that would gleefully gather to watch public executions hundreds of years ago right up to the Sunday night telly watcher, inhaling the latest series of Sherlock. In A Very British Murder, Lucy Worsley – she who’s also regularly on telly as one of its more engaging historians – looks at the British appetite for murders most foul, and how those appetites have affected and evolved our most popular forms of entertainment. […]
Myth, history and culture collide
Ho Lin’s short story anthology was an interesting read. Each tale aimed to shed light on random moments from varying points of view. He pulls in the reader with unexpected juxtapositions of settings and tone. The collection exudes emotion as if the stories were collective memories meshed together. He rarely delves deep into any specific narratives. The stories bounced between Asia and American even within the same story. We meet an American ex-Pat in China, then a host of characters in San Francisco, while another […]
Cracked, plain and simple.
Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com. The […]
Ratting in New York City
This isn’t exactly the book I hoped it would be, but it was fascinating nonetheless. In the author’s (after)words: “Ratting, for me…is not just about rats; it is also about seeing another side of a given city.” And that’s exactly what he sets out to show his reader.