I read ‘Heyday’ for my MFA, and while I was skeptical in the first few chapters due to the distinct lack of plot, I fell in love with this book by the last chapters. It’s 1847 and the heyday of America, and the whole 19th Century really. The story follows 5 characters: Duff and his sister Polly, their journalist friend Skaggs, an aristocratic British immigrant, Ben Knowles, and the one character that I guess was suppose to provide the plot, Inspector Javert , I mean, […]
Give Me ANY Word, and I’ll Tell You How It’s Irish
Faintingviolet is awesome and always on the hunt for research books for me. She sent along “How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads” and I was excited to read this since etymology is something I really enjoy. I was not disappointed. Daniel Cassidy began his interest of the Irish influence on the American language after inheriting a Gaelic dictionary from a deceased relative and realizing how many American words in modern language link back closely to the Gaelic. The book is […]
A Circus I Really Wished Was Real
Half Cannonball!!!!!! And I’ve reached my reading goal! This is my second read of this book and I think I loved it more than the first time. The Night Circus is centered around a magical challenge vetted between a magician’s daughter, Celia, and a mysterious ‘man in a grey suit’ and his protégé Marco. The two players are chosen against their will to compete in a game of skill until their masters decide who has bested the other. Their playing field is a circus, populated […]
Masters Programs Ruin You for Genre Reading
So I finished Scarlet during my first Creative Writing Masters’ Residency a few weeks ago, which may be part of the reason this book got 2.5 stars. True, I was having a hard time swallowing Wolf and Scarlet’s interactions before I went to the program, but after 9 days of intense seminars on nothing but writing and the craft of writing, my disappointment in these two characters solidified. But because I loved Cinder so much, and feel really terrible giving this book 2.5 stars, let’s […]
A Refreshing New Take on an Old Classic
I don’t know why I put off reading this series for so long. It’s GOOD. Meyer is an excellent story-teller and like alwaysanswerb says, Meyer uses the Cinderella fairy tale as her basis, but the story is 100% her own. I think the thing that makes this absolutely brilliant is moving the plot into a super-advanced technological future where we can’t make any real ties to the bucolic setting of the original fairy tale. Cinder (Cinderella) is a cyborg living in “new” Beijing (the old […]
Poetry…purposely complicated
Readings 4 & 5 for the masters program are two collections of poetry, “Holding Company” by Major Jackson, and “Poems” by Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve come out of it with the understanding that poetry isn’t for me. I mean, I sort of went in with that notion, but slogging through over 200 pages of it has really hit the nail into the coffin. This isn’t to say that I hated them; there were many of the 150 or so poems I read that I liked for […]
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