A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
From the monthly archives:
If there is one genre I have gotten sucked into this year, it’s comic books. I started with Watchmen, then moved on to Fables, adding Blankets and Persepolis for good measure. When I came across The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, a fictional novel set during the Golden Age of [...]
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The 2009 Blog Improvement Project is starting one week from now, and I am really looking forward to it. If I counted correctly, there are currently 89 people signed up for the project, which is way more than I expected when I first proposed it!
That said, I have to admit I’m a little nervous; that [...]
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Back in September I signed up for the Fall Into Reading 2008 Challenge — a challenge to read a set list of books between September 22 and December 21. Because I was busy, I only choose four books for my list: The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, [...]
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When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is the story of both a family and a place, an ambitious undertaking for any book. For the most part, author Peter Godwin successfully balances these two complementary stories, resulting in a book that balances between a personal memoir and a well-reported look at the destruction of a country.
Godwin, [...]
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When I think about books, there are usually two qualities I think about — the strength of the story and the strength of the writing. In most cases, both qualities are good or both qualities are bad. This wasn’t the case for In the Land of Invisible Women, a memoir by Dr. Quanta A. Ahmed. [...]
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It’s been what, like six days since I last posted? I didn’t meant abandon Sophisticated Dorkiness for that long, but once I finished my book blogging paper (which you can download and read by clicking on the link), I just lost all motivation to do anything that involved thinking. So, no books read and no [...]
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I’ve mentioned at least once that one of my news assignments this semester was a story about independent bookstores getting ready for the holiday season. I just submitted the story for consideration at a local arts magazine, so we’ll see how that goes.
One of the things that didn’t make it into the draft I sent [...]
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Welcome to Day 17 of the Blog Advent Tour!
The movie that makes me feel it’s finally the holiday season is White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Cloony, and Vera-Ellen. My mom, sister, and I watch this movie every year (while my dad and brother sit in the background making fun of us). [...]
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Mark Dunn’s epistolary allegory Ella Minnow Pea takes place on the fictional island of Nollop, just off the coast of South Carolina. The island was named after Nevin Nollop, the man credited with coming up with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
When letters start to fall off the Nollop tribute [...]
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