If you don’t yet know about the LeVar Burton podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads” let me have the distinct pleasure of being the one to tell you about it. LeVar Burton, he of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: TNG reads you short stories. AND IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. He is an amazing reading and storyteller and just brings a big ol’ story to my face. Each episode is 45 minutes to about an hour, and he reads you the story and at the end, […]
Hopefully, there’s nowhere to go but up!
This is a book of Pride and Prejudice variations by Elizabeth Ann West. I am not particularly pleased with any of them, although the first at least has an ending of sorts. (And there are no actual ‘dates’ like we think of today. Title fail.) Hopefully my journey through P&P variations gets better from here. “Much to Conceal” In this story, Elizabeth reveals to Jane in London what happened with the disastrous proposal in Hunsford a week prior. Jane and their Aunt Gardiner plot to […]
Drop-kick That Magic Lamp into Mount Doom
Short story collections are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you have to gnaw some nuts and chews to eventually find that chocolate truffle. That said, The Djinn Falls in Love is phenomenal. Six of the twenty-one stories are among the best short stories I have read. Ever. (Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m sorry to report that you’ve been bumped.) The editors’s international ensemble of authors clearly did their research, populating their confident tales with every manner of djinn, jinn, and genie. Some lie in wait in […]
Oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence
I read this book because of how often it’s mentioned in 19th century Victorian novels (as well as novels about Victorian England) as being just one of those novels on the shelves in houses for children. There’s something fascinating about this book in a kind historical sense, and relatively boring in a literary sense. So the book was published in 1807 and is a prose version of a handful of Shakespeare plays: King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, […]