The democratization of the internet allows us all to find our own niches. It is easier than it has ever been in human history to bury oneself in only like opinions to oneself or to indulge in the types of art and leisure that the greater populace at large would never even think twice of to such an extent that you might never get through it all. There’s an absolute glut of content for all stripes. Pop culture is Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, and today we all get to […]
Live or Die, It’s Your Choice
First, I have to say how EXCITED I was to realize that this was a choose-your-own adventure story! They didn’t have these when I was a kid, but I remember reading them with my son in the 90s when he was small. I really liked the premise of choosing how the story would go, rather than just what the author thought, down a linear path. I normally am not a humongous fan of zombie movies, but I can handle “zombie lite”–reading without too much gore. […]
The Dig is a brutal book – both physically and emotionally. It’s also a constantly gripping and involving story that will stay with you long after you put the pages down. At its heart, the story centres around two very different people, and how they react to the land and animals around them. One is a farmer named Daniel, recently mourning the loss of his wife and struggling to maintain the farm by himself, and the other is a vicious badger-baiter and all-round vacuum of […]
A trip through Dante’s Inferno
As a true lover of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I must confess that Brown’s choice of inspiration for his fourth Langdon novel hit just the right spot for me. While some readers may be bored by his lengthy descriptions of Dante’s cantos on the odyssey from Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise, I wanted more. Some readers may find his near tour-guide-style descriptions of Florence and Istanbul to be a divergence from the plot, but I was entranced and nearly salivating at the chance to visit […]
Like The Da Vinci Code, only better
Another Nic Costa crime thriller set in Rome, which reads less like a movie script and more like a subtler and fully-fleshed version of The Da Vinci Code. Young cop Nic Costa has recently been partnered with burned-out detective Luca Rossi and is sitting outside St. Marks Square trying to figure out how to survive the intense summer heat and humidity when reports of a shooting in the Vatican galvanizes the bored Costa into action. Despite strict instructions to steer clear of Vatican affairs, […]
In need of some trimming and a new ending
I picked this up because I remember my teenage self enjoying the movie (or at least Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Sisto). That movie came out in 1995, and the book wasn