Last summer I helped my boss chaperone his student study-abroad trip to Australia, and the class read this book on the plane going over. I was far more enticed with Air New Zealand’s extensive on-flight entertainment package, and so I spent my plane ride in the iron-a** challenge watching all six (extended) Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films instead. Since returning, my boss has been passively placing The Secret River in obvious places on my desk, which I’ve learned is his silent way of […]
Crimson Word Vomit
For ease of reading, here are our handles’ abbreviations: crystalclear – CC faintingviolet – FV Ale – just Ale (you’re welcome) CrystalClear: So, this is all my fault. I decided to rent Crimson Peak for movie night, mainly to see Tom Hiddleston’s ass. And while it was indeed a glorious sight, the rest of the movie was not worth it. My memory is absolute shite, so here’s what I remember of the movie before delving into the book: We have the girl, who played […]
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!
First Bingo!!!! I’m going to be teaching “Dubliners” to my Advanced Fiction students this semester, so what luck that we had a square for old books :) Written in 1914, James Joyce hoped to capture the tenor of his city in a series of short stories that act like windows into the lives of Dublin’s inhabitants in the early 20th Century. Did I like this book? It grew on me. It’s not thematic or cyclic, nor does it have any reoccurring characters. At its core, […]
A Woman Will Always Sacrifice Herself
I decided I would find a more obscure banned/challenged book for the bingo game and came across Daughter of the Forest, which was challenged in a Missouri high school in 2015 for the rape scene that happens about a third of the way into the book. Since the rest of the story is filled with violent warfare, torture, imprisonment, and an attempted witch burning, I found it ironic that the most unwholesome plot point to the challengers was the rape and subsequent PTSD our main character […]