[BINGO #2!] In this most holy month of guerrilla bargain shopping which begins with the Happy Holiday season of Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, I couldn’t think of a better book to review than Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Both Roxanne Gay and George Saunders are singing the praises of this fresh young author, and everyone should be reading this outstanding collection of short stories. Adjei-Brenyah’s tales whipsaw between dystopian near futures of shopping madness in “Friday Black,” where stores just pile up the dead bodies so […]
Sea Section seems like a perfectly reasonable name for a beach house.
So I picked Calypso by David Sedaris as my “Brain Candy” square for CBR10 Bingo, which after reading it, seems like maybe not the best choice, because these short stories are a bit darker than usual. Sedaris’ sister Tiffany committed suicide in 2013, and this, his mother’s alcoholism, and a strange tumour growing on his side become the running topics in many of the stories in his first compilation in five years. Calypso is still hilariously funny, in exactly the ways you expect it to be. I’ve always had […]
Love the guy, hated the book.
OK, I’ll just say up front that if I had read Between the Bridge and the River when it came out in 2006, I’m pretty sure I would have loved it and written a rave review. Unfortunately reading it in 2018, I just didn’t have that reaction. I’ve always liked Craig Ferguson, and his sense of humour. He was my favourite part of “The Drew Carey Show,” and his most recent comedy special on Netflix, “Tickle Fight” made me laugh out loud. He’s a good guy, who’s been […]
An epic tale about the hopelessness of being The Other
[BINGO!] I’ve been mulling over this review of Frankenstein for a couple of weeks now and I have so many thoughts and feelings! I’ll first admit that I had never read Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus before this year, and truly believed that the gothic horror story was just the same as James Whale’s Frankenstein movie. And it is not. At all. The same. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote her epic tale about the hopelessness of being The Other, of the misery of the life unwanted, and uncared for. The monster is a […]