The Birthright books are very, very similar in tone and flow into each other plot-wise, so it’s easiest to review them together as a group, but I’ll break down the exact plot in each for posterity’s sake. The series is composed of: 1. All These Things I’ve Done — Anya Balanchine is a teenager who happens to also be the eldest daughter of a deceased crime boss, though the family still operates under the guidance of her uncle. Their trade is chocolate, because in near […]
A superfluous review
Everyone else has very eloquently summarized the plot of Station Eleven the first hundred times it was reviewed, so I’ll let Goodreads do the heavy lifting here (this is a half joke because I let Goodreads do the heavy lifting a lot of the time even when I’m not the last person in line to review a book): “One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and […]
Revisiting a sci-fi classic.
“‘Everything is true,’ he said. ‘Everything anybody has ever thought.’ ‘Will you be all right?’ ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.” Philip K. Dick isn’t an author I’ve had much exposure to. I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? twice now, and I just finished The Man in the High Castle this weekend. I remember liking Androids when I first read it sometime around 2006. I read it for a Film & […]
You gotta learn to play the game.
You know how sometimes you go to review a book and you just can’t figure out what to say about it? For, like, weeks on end? And meanwhile you keep reading, and your stack of things-to-review just keeps growing. And growing? And grooooowwing. This is one of those times. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts and feelings, and not that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did and I do, but I’m having a hard time getting up the energy to condense and organize all […]