I was born and grew up in the 1980s. I was not a gamer, and was not much into pop culture. Even so, I had a lot of fun with Ready Player One. Set 18 years from now, the world is basically lived in a virtual setting known as OASIS. When the company founder, James Halliday, dies, he leaves a challenge, basically a treasure hunt through OASIS based on 80s trivia (the era of his youth). Naturally a culture of studying everything 80s from the […]
Just in case I needed another reason to dislike camping
Peggy Hillcoat is the daughter of a famous German concert pianist and an English survivalist, who despite the disapproval of his wife keeps stockpiling supplies in a shelter in their garden and preparing for the worst. Only eight years old, she doesn’t question what is happening when her father takes her away from their big house in London while her mother is away on tour. He takes her to the German countryside, to a delapitated cabin remote in the mountains, explaining that this is their […]
1980s + Real Characters = Young Adult Perfection
Now we are talking! This was the book club pick for the month of May, and after the letdown (created by moi) over one of Elmore Leonard’s not so good novels Djibouti, I was hoping for a winner. Luckily someone else had a great suggestion waiting in the wings, as they had just finished reading Eleanor & Park. And how fitting, that I finished this book at the tail end of #IReadYAWeek – bonus! This is a book about love, and heartache, and growing up, […]
Hey, you got 80’s nostalgia in my dystopian novel. No, you got dystopian novel in my 80’s nostalgia.
And, if you get my title reference, then you are the target audience for this novel, which is a fun read so chock full of 80’s references that it made my teeth ache. It’s a great set-up. It’s the year 2044 and teenager, Wade Watts, lives in the future version of a trailer park (only imagine all the trailers stacked on top of each other), trying to stay out of the way of his abusive aunt, who would love to sell his computer to buy […]
Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here!
A year or two I got back into comic books, and spent many a Saturday morning browsing garage sales and used book stores for anything that tickled my proverbial fancy. I bought a sealed grab bag of comics (gambling for collectors) and opened it up to find a few stray issues of Camelot 3000, a 1980s maxi-series written by Mike Barr and illustrated by Brian Bolland of The Killing Joke fame. The comic looked bananas, so in my weekly trips to the used book stores […]
A Real Love Story (in all its 80’s glory)
This YA novel has been on my to-read list for a while and I loved it just as much as I thought I would. Rainbow Rowell’s novel, set in the 80’s, tells the unlikely love story of Eleanor and Park, two high school students who don’t quite fit in their Nebraska high school but for very different reasons. Park is the only Asian in his school—the son of a white father and a Korean mom, and has dealt with being “different” all his life. Though […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6