The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, […]
“We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
Happy New Year Cannonballers! Last year, despite achieving my goal of 120 books read and reviewed, I read about 20 books less than during Cannonball 9 which I attribute to spending a lot of time on books I either didn’t finish (Between the Bridge and the River) or spent more time than was necessary sloughing through (Map of Days). My goal this year, besides a humble Double Cannonball, is to allow myself to make quicker decisions regarding books I don’t want to finish. Luckily, I […]
I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.
It takes three books to officially make it a theme, yeah? Amazon pushed Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia at me after I finished Song of Achilles and Circe, and it fit perfectly in my left-side-takes-on-mythology streak. LeGuin plucks Lavinia, the last wife of Trojan refugee Aeneas, from a single mention in Virgil’s poem and crafts a world around her. In her hands, Lavinia comes alive as a beloved daughter of a beloved king who marries a foreigner and becomes a mother of Rome. Lavinia comes of age […]
A beautiful, melancholy story from my Book Exchange buddy
I have a friend who likes to loan me sad books, and when I finish one and say “OMG that was sad!”, she’ll say, “I know, but wasn’t it SO well written?” I have a feeling that my friend and KatSings would get along well. My Book Exchange buddy got me this lovely, sprawling book, which is beautifully written and has an air of pervasiveness melancholy about it. I adored it anyway, and I appreciate that KatSings got me to read something that would not […]