needs more demons?

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described [...]

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Real journalists have to turn in their year’s best lists to be published in the month of December, a practice which invariably makes me cringe. “What,” I always think to myself, “if in the dregs of the year* you hear/see/read something amazing that demands you re-order the list?” And it happens from time to time. [...]

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Like its predecessor, Prospero Lost, aspects of Prospero in Hell evoke other works — most prominently The Tempest and The Inferno, but Lamplighter’s squabbling, centuries-old, magic-wielding siblings recall both Gaiman and Zelazny — while remaining wholly its own thing. Prospero in Hell addresses some of the weaknesses that bothered me about the first volume. Narrator [...]

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The arrest of James “Whitey” Bulger this past June left me feeling like I was missing too much context: it clearly closed a significant chapter for my new home, and I had only a vague (and mostly incorrect, it turns out) awareness of his role in Boston history. And I’d seen people reading Black Mass [...]

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Lyga’s descriptions of what it’s like to be an unpopular, un-sporty, picked-on high school sophomore match so many specific details of my own memories that it’s uncanny. Big ugly bruises on the arm where punches land every day? Check. Lurid homicidal revenge fantasies? Check. Narrator Donnie has an escape hatch, though: he’s secretly working [...]

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I was sorely disappointed by A Swiftly Tilting Planet when I first read it; I’m pretty sure I only read it once before. It may be worth mentioning that I first encountered this novel when my head was full of Tolkein and Star Wars — and it’s not exactly crammed with action-adventure teenage boy appeal. [...]

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As a kid, I distinctly remember thinking that A Wind in the Door was even better than A Wrinkle in Time.
I think this was mostly because of Proginoskes, an unusual and seriously awesome character.
But it’s not possible for me to sustain my former opinion of the novels’ relative merit this time around. The events in [...]

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Rebecca Steadman’s When You Reach Me impelled me to renew my affaire de coeur with A Wrinkle in Time. I read things with a different sort of eye than I did when I was, y’know, twelve, and some things stood out for me this time that didn’t before.

Yowza, one of my all-time favorite novels starts [...]

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Not long ago I was struck by just how unprecedentedly dependent I am on Google technologies: they power my phone and my e-book reader; they support the bulk of my browsing and email. My wife and I used Google docs and maps extensively in buying our home and planning our wedding. I use Google’s calendar [...]

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How the Universe Got Its Spots is either the most unusual science book I’ve ever read, or the most science-oriented memoir. I was delighted by both aspects. Levin, a no-nonsense, for-real, theoretical cosmologist grapples with, among other things, the shape of the universe, her acknowledgedly irrational preference for it to be finite, and a relationship [...]

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