Why 'People Who Eat Darkness' Is the Best True Crime Book I've Ever Read
Roppongi at night
Featured Bookstore: Murder By The Book
On a hot summer day in Houston, Texas, my friends and I found ourselves wandering into a very special bookstore called Murder By The Book. Why is this bookstore so special, you're wondering? Well, the most obvious reason is that they're a delightful independent bookstore that specializes in all things mystery. But there's so much more to love about this bookstore, and I'm here to tell you all about it.
Read moreLate to the Game: Hollow Knight
Look at that lil bug.
Welcome to Late to the Game, a blog post series where I explore games that I have played long after everyone else has finished them! This week, we’re looking at Hollow Knight, a 2017 platformer by Team Cherry.
Good Lord: A 'First Reformed' Story
The premise of this blog post is pretty straightforward, folks. Kelli and Emily both saw First Reformed, the new A24 joint written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Paul Schrader. Now they have feelings about environmentalism, religion, self-loathing, and Pepto-Bismol that they need to work through. Come along on their journey.
Read moreI Spoil Tau So You Don't Have to Watch It
Between the huge, futuristic mansion and the artificial intelligence theme, it looked like a cool Ex Machina-esque story. It was not.
Read more5 Reasons The Wheel of Time Doesn't Suck
We've moved into high fantasy territory.
I hate fantasy novels, and the genre as a whole.
Okay, that’s not completely true. I play two Dungeons & Dragons games a week and act as a dungeon master, too. I frequently inhabit fantasy worlds and write stories that take place within them, but I don’t read fantasy novels. Growing up and attempting the endeavor that is Lord of the Rings, I always found the genre sexist, racist, and overall, well...boring. As an adult, newly interested in tabletop RPG games, I thought maybe I should read some fantasy in order to get in the mindset of the games I loved. I tried some authors recommended to me, but most of it--even YA fantasy, which aims to break the mold of the genre--carried the vestiges of Tolkien.
Stylistically, fantasy has always seemed expansive, pages and pages of descriptions. Part of this is the world-building aspect of the genre. How do you describe a world that doesn’t exist? You explain it until you can’t anymore. But all that detail, delivered in painstaking monologues and narrator asides, wore me out. It’s not fair to say that all fantasy is this way, and I know that, but I’ve never been able to get into it.
I recently committed to read the first book in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. I’ve heard people at my local game shop talk about it, saying that it was great, or maybe terrible, or maybe something in between. In my mind, I simply said, “it’s a fantasy series, so I’m not interested.” But then someone I really like said it was a good series, that it was sort of different from other fantasy novels, and--since I trust his opinion on books and because I thought it might be fun to reread it together--I caved. I bought my mass-market paperback of The Eye of the World (TEotW) and started on the journey.
Read moreHope Never Dies?
Happy 5th of July. It's the day after Independence Day, and you might have a bit of a fireworks and freedom hangover today. If you are an angry liberal like me, you might also be wondering whether America is worth celebrating right now. You might be thinking back to happier Julys when our president wasn't a racist and when children weren't being held in literal cages and when Roe v. Wade didn't seem like it was getting overturned any time soon. You know, happy days when all Joe Biden wanted was an ice cream and our presidential memes were about friendship. You know the ones.
Read moreFare Thee Well, Filmspotting: SVU
In 2012, the year we were all supposed to die, I was just getting into podcasts.
I was in college at the time, and I found that listening to podcasts while I worked on various art school assignments — projects which involved a lot of work with my hands and little to no work with my brain — helped not only to keep me awake through many an all-nighter, but also reduced the stress I felt when I was working up against a critique deadline.
During that time, I was also exploring an interest in cinema that would eventually bloom into a pretty serious passion, one that deepened significantly when I started listening to a podcast out of Chicago called Filmspotting. It was the first film criticism podcast I had ever listened to, and I was hooked. Within a few months of discovering it, I was eager to find more movie talk to fill my poorly-planned hours. Luckily, it was around that time that the hosts of Filmspotting began to promote a new spinoff of their podcast: a show that would specifically feature content available to stream. Much like legions of Law & Order fans who flocked to its sister show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, I immediately became a diehard fan of Filmspotting: SVU.
Today, more than six years after it began in January of 2012, Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit dropped its final episode. When I learned that the show was ending a couple of weeks ago via Twitter, it was a gut punch, and I even resisted listening to the episode on which the announcement was made for SEVERAL DAYS (imagine) because I just didn’t want to believe it was true. Unfortunately, with today being the last episode, I am yet again forced to accept that it’s true what they say: all good things must come to an end. What follows is a messy and overly sentimental love letter to one of my favorite podcasts ever.
Read moreYA Book Club in Paradise Round 2: This One Summer
It's the second installment of YA Book Club in Paradise. For the month of June, we read This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. So why don't we get things started straight away and let Mary introduce the book?
Mary: Ok! This One Summer is a 2014 graphic novel (published by First Second, one of my favorite publishers) written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, who are cousins. The story follows friends Rose and Windy during a summer at Awago Beach. The girls watch scary movies rented from the convenience store, spy on the cashier, Dunc, and become interested in his personal drama--his girlfriend Jenny is pregnant. Meanwhile, Rose's mom has been depressed all summer, and gradually the reason why becomes clear. I don't know if that's a good summary or not, but this comic has a lot going on!
Read moreIt's Just a F***ing Blog Post: Some Sort of Personal Essay/Book Review About Dating and Dating Books
No-nonsense power couple Amiira Ruotola and Greg Behrendt
So there I was in 2018, 30 years old, freshly divorced, and ready to see what the dating world had to offer.
I wanted to be wined and dined, taken to concerts, cuddled with during movies, and all that warm fuzzy stuff. I didn’t really know how to go about it though. I got onto Audible to see why my old buddy Greg Behrendt had been up to since he helped me “turn my breakups into break-overs” in years past. Turns out, he and Amiira had collaborated again on another straight-talking dating book called It’s Just a F***ing Date: Some Sort of Book About Dating. If you know how I talk, you know this is my type of title. *Downloads immediately.*
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