About

I created this blog to record and share my thoughts about books and writing.

To start with, post types will include:
- First impression reviews
  These will be reviews of books I recently read for the first time, highlighting the good, the bad, and the 
  ugly.
- Re-read reviews
  As the name suggests, these are reviews of books I loved enough to read repeatedly...though some things
  I didn't like about them will also be pointed out.
- It oughta be a movie
  Tired of bland re-makes and by-the-numbers movies?  Me too.  Here are some unique stories with
  diverse casts of characters that I think would lend themselves to adaptation in a visual medium. In the 
  meantime...we can all read them and imagine.

I also hope to post a bit about my own writing projects...but we shall see how that develops.

Popular posts from this blog

First impressions review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Image
For the first 127 pages of this book, I thought its subtitle – ‘a novel’ – was inaccurate. What it seemed to be was a series of short stories with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous tree connections. An immigrant family travels west, carrying American chestnut seeds that take root and grow far from where the blight will strike. Adam, a probably-autistic boy, watches ants and obsesses over which trees his father chooses to plant to represent his siblings. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant tries to understand why her father killed himself under the mulberry tree in their backyard. Good, engaging stories, beautifully written, but not a novel. Then I hit Patricia Westerford. Patricia is a partially deaf girl who discovers her love of plants through her agricultural extension agent father (yes, another dad - moms just fuss in the background in this book). As part of her graduate work, she starts collecting the gases given off by trees, and comes to the startling conc...
Read more

First impressions review: Last Night At The Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo

Image
              This historical fiction follows Lily Hu, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and realizing she is in love with her classmate, Kathleen Miller. But it also has flashbacks to earlier episodes in the life of her parents and aunt that give more depth and variety to the depiction of Chinese-American life in the mid-twentieth-century. The titular Telegraph Club 1 that is both a welcoming and affirming place for Lily and Kath and a danger, given the frequency of raids and how association with leftists or homosexuals could be used as an excuse for deportation in this time period, not to mention general social ostracism. However, although there are some scary moments, this is overall a really sweet, uplifting, hopeful story.   1. Fictional, but based on several real San Francisco lesbian clubs that featured ‘male impersonators’.         ...
Read more

It oughta be a movie: Silence, by Heldris of Cornwall

Image
  This thirteenth century semi-Arthurian romance 1 featuring a female (or at least AFAB) knight contains some truly fascinating takes on gender for the period. Besides the titular knight, Silence, it also contains their parents’ love story, which is unusuall y sweet and well-balanced between the parties, even by today’s standards. All that, of course, only makes the “happy” ending more of a gut-punch! I was of course expecting that Silence would either die or go back to living as a woman, because that’s the kind of ending a medieval audience would accept. Silence doesn’t die, but…the person they are dies, in a more upsetting way than had to be the case.  However, one could easily adapt this as a more positive feminist and/or queer tale by tweaking the very end, and I’d quite like to see that done (indeed, I’m somewhat tempted to do it myself!)   1.Merlin appears in it, but Arthur does not   If you want to avoid further spoilers…just stop here a...
Read more