Weekly Book Giveaway: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer
This week's Book Giveaway pick is Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy. (I'm hoping that discussing it will magically encourage the universe to give me an update on the proposed Grand Sophy movie, which seems to have faded from our collective consciousness.) A full review will follow shortly...
If anyone sews any button eyes, I'm out.
According to io9, The Simpsons are working on a parody of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and the author himself will appear on the show. (This is actually his second appearance. He voiced himself back in an episode in season 23. This time, if the article is to be believed, he'll be voicing the family cat.) The...
Happy Birthday, Stephen King
I am informed that today is Stephen King's birthday. He can celebrate with this news: his novel IT has been holding the #1 slot in the "Fiction and Literature" category of Apple’s iBooks store for a couple of weeks now, presumably due to the success of the recent movie adaptation...
It works for Game of Thrones locations!
According to the BBC, the upcoming Hellboy reboot was allowed to film inside the 900-year-old Wells Cathedral, but only after church officials checked out the comic book and verified that it was a traditional good-versus-evil story. Nobody has mentioned how much the filmmakers paid for the church's use, but...
Back and forth
There's an interesting article on Jezebel about a New York Times review of Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus. From the Times' perspective, the book was fundamentally flawed—full of critical reporting errors. But as other reviewers and the author pointed out, the Times critic had to go back...
As long as the John Wick movies keep making money...
The trailer is out for Red Sparrow, the movie adaptation of Jason Matthews's 2013 novel of the same name. The film will star Jennifer Lawrence, and while it frankly looks a little cheesy (and a lot like someone decided to take advantage of the popularity of Marvel's Black Widow character), I am...
Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard
I have a daily ritual: every morning, when it's still too early for me face the news, I skim glossy cookbooks while I groggily eat my breakfast. Sure, my actual breakfast is totally boring (black tea and an English muffin), but I find looking at pictures of beautiful food to be extremely soothing. That is why I am so fond of the popular website Half Baked Harvest, and why I decided to review author Tieghan Gerard's new cookbook...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard
This week's Book Giveaway is a little unusual: we're giving away Tieghan Gerard's new cookbook, Half Baked Harvest. But even if you're not the huge fan of Gerard's pretty, pretty website that we are, might we recommend her cookbook as an excellent coffee table option? There's something so soothing about staring at pictures of beautifully-presented food, and this book has 'em in spades...
SO CUTE.
Normally I find most of the items from Pottery Barn's kid and teen lines mega-boring, like the kind of stuff you could buy at an extra-expensive, extra-WASP-y Costco. But once in a while they surprise me, and I am totally down with their "Harry Potter Collection", which...
Yeah, but... (Part II)
There's been an update on the recent literary scandal surrounding the publication of Lani Sarem's Handbook For Mortals, which recently rocketed to the top of the YA bestseller lists via some seemingly questionable sales practices. While...
Tastiness
There's a book trailer (so fancy!) celebrating the release of popular blogger Deb Perelman's second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant & Unfussy New Favorites. The above link includes information about...
Good luck in your future endeavors, sir.
Graydon Carter, longtime editor of Vanity Fair, recently announced that he will be stepping down after twenty-five years at the magazine's helm. Carter is regarded as a celebrity in his own right, and while his accomplishments as an editor, tastemaker, and Hollywood figure cannot be denied, I suspect his longest-lasting legacy...
Creepy
The Smithsonian magazine recently posted an interesting article about the history of book-burnings, and the motivations of the arsonists in question. That first picture (of a bunch of grinning Hitler Youth members, looking for all the world like cheery Eagle Scouts) is...
The Empty Grave, by Jonathan Stroud
For the past five years, I have welcomed every fall with a new installment of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. series. I don't know what cutesy name to give to the autumnal equivalent of a “beach read”, but that's totally what these books are—the perfect reading choice as the weather gets gloomier and we all start craving Halloween candy...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Empty Grave, by Jonathan Stroud
This week's Book Giveaway is Jonathan Stroud's The Empty Grave, the last book in our beloved Lockwood & Co. series. I'm strangely reluctant to start this book—it's a little painful to accept that this will be the last time we get to celebrate the beginning of autumn with a new Lockwood book. Where will I get my only-technically-G-rated scares now?!? Anyway, a review will be posted as soon as I accept the inevitable...
Thumbs up (for the review, anyway)
I've never heard of this movie, but the AV Club review is pretty great: they're giving the J.D. Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye a D+. Even the few notes of praise are extremely muted ("Hoult doesn’t embarrass himself..."), and the rest of the review is full of lines like these...
I hope their outerwear was top-notch
There's a great post on Atlas Obscura about the women who ran the The Pack Horse Library, one of the initiatives created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The Pack Horse Library was an organization of (overwhelmingly female) traveling librarians who rode their own horses or mules all over Appalachia, delivering books to remote households...
No pants = no moral authority
There's an article in the Guardian about a recent study of the moral effects of children's literature. According to the results, children who read stories featuring human characters behaving in moral ways were far more likely to emulate that behavior than children who read stories about anthropomorphic animals...
Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch
I originally bought Ben Aaronovitch's book Midnight Riot because I had heard it compared to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files and Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books. Midnight Riot doesn't actually have much in in common with those series, however. It reminded me far more of Kat Richardson's Greywalker books, although Aaronovitch deserves props for creating a protagonist with an actual personality...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch
This week's Book Giveaway is Midnight Riot, the first book in Ben Aaronovitch's PC Peter Grant series. While you're (no doubt breathlessly) awaiting our review, I recommend reading this post about the controversy surrounding the original US cover art, which has since been replaced with the artwork featured here. Nice call, publishers...
On Wednesdays we wear BLOOD SPLATTERS
According to Deadline, two (male) screenwriters have made a deal to create a new film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, only this time? All the characters will be girls. This...
Phony: Part II
The Guardian recently posted an update to the fascinating John Smelcer story, which we wrote about last week. It seems that the overwhelming pile of evidence suggesting that Mr. Smelcer is 100% full of garbage...
Store-brand Poe
Some streaming service that I've never heard of (Shudder) has bought the rights to all four chapters of Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories, a collection of short-film adaptations that originally aired on the UK’s Sky Arts last year...
Money was spent
The promotions for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel are mad fancy: Collider just premiered an “in-world” short film that explains what happened between the events of the first movie, set in 2019, and this sequel, set in 2049. This short takes place in 2036, and features...
Yeah, but...
Well, this is a mystery: Pajiba has recently posted an in-depth look at the latest New York Times YA bestseller, an extremely dorky-looking novel called Handbook For Mortals, by Lani Sarem. There's a lot that doesn't make sense about this book's meteoric rise...
Ash and Quill, by Rachel Caine
Ash and Quill is the third installment in Rachel Caine's The Great Library series. In these books, the world's knowledge is jealously hoarded by the all-powerful Great Library. Caine's protagonist is a book smuggler-turned-Great Library soldier named Jess Brightwell. Jess and his small band of allies have recently escaped from the Library's clutches, but soon find themselves in an even worse situation...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Ash and Quill, by Rachel Caine
This week's Book Giveaway is Rachel Caine's Ash and Quill, which, as it happens, is not the final book in a trilogy. (If I had known this ahead of time, my expectations might have been... different.) A full review will follow shortly...
Eagerly anticipating
This is why I will never stop watching Asian TV shows: their source material is so much weirder than ours. According to the website Dramabeans, this fall I'll be able to see a K-drama live-action adaptation of Japanese author Hideo Okuda's "Psychiatrist Irabu" series...
Phony
Okay, this article is great, and I strongly encourage you to go read the entire thing yourself. It's an investigation into the many alleged lies of an author named John Smelcer. It seems that Smelcer, who has been nominated for awards and given jobs based on his Alaskan Native ethnic heritage, might not be Native after all...
Not impressed.
The trailer is out for the BBC's adaptation of J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith's The Cuckoo's Calling. I did not realize the main character's name is "Cormoran Strike". That does not sound like a real character; that sounds like a military excercise...