I have a lady crush on Sue Perkins. I do not feel that this is an unheard of situation. I was introduced to her via Ale, who was watching the series Supersizers Go/Supersizers Eat from the BBC2 all about food history (it is available on Hulu and YouTube… offf you go). We LOVE food history. This lead to my comfort television becoming watching Sue and Giles drink their way through terrible food. The next great epoch in my Sue fandom was a late to the […]
I waited a few months, and it still made me sad
I am still sad about Carrie Fisher dying. I thought I would wait a few months until I felt ready to read the Princess Diarist, but it wasn’t long enough to keep me from feeling wistful while reading it. Fisher’s newest book was inspired by her rediscovery of journals she kept while shooting the first Star Wars movie – she began to reflect on her life as it was as her acting career began, when she was about seventeen years old. She briefly discussed what […]
Too much dry travel writing, not enough DRAGONS for my taste
3.5 stars Purported to be the first of Lady Isabella Trent’s journals, chronicling her life-long exploration of the world and its dragons, this book is a historical novel set in an alternate universe, where dragons obviously exist. I’m unsure of whether the time period in these books would be the Regency or more like Victorian times in our history, but the fictional country that our protagonist, Lady Isabella is from, is clearly modelled on historical England. We follow our heroine from childhood, where we learn […]
A Warrior Armed With Words
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (published in 1976) is known for its feminism and for giving voice to the experience of being first generation Asian American. It is an intersectional masterpiece that is part factual memoir and part “talk-story,” i.e., creative storytelling, not just about Hong Kingston’s childhood but also about her female relatives. Through these women, we see the juxtaposition of strength and powerlessness, of warriors and ghosts, of Chinese and Chinese-American. For Hong Kingston, being able to use one’s voice meant being […]