High school comedies are my jam. As a child of the 90s, movies like Can’t Hardly Wait, Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, Get Over It, Bring It On, Stick It, and Dead Poets Society are my jam. Books like Space Station Seventh Grade (Jerry Spinelli’s first novel) and This Side of Paradise were formative. Even though I’m a bona fide adult now with a family of my own, I still have a soft spot for movies like The DUFF and Dope. The appeal […]
Coming of Age: Finding Direction in Lucy Knisley’s “An Age of License”
After an invitation to speak at Raptus Comic Fest in Bergen, Norway, Knisley takes the opportunity to plan a trip around Europe to visit friends and family. Over the course of her travels she struggles with past relationships, work, and an uncertain future. She spends pages analyzing her love life, both with her ex John, and her current beau Henrik. What makes this difficult for her is that she still has feelings for John that she can’t seem to move past, and yet she knows […]
Growing up (in the north of Sweden) is hard to do
Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in […]
Fear is the Original Sin
I have a fondness in my heart for Canada as a result of repeated readings of L.M. Montgomery’s Ann of Green Gables series during my childhood. Canada seemed like the opposite of Texas – cool, green, and full of people who loved you because you were difficult. I stopped reading Ann of Green Gables as a teen, but I would list it as a series that shaped my life. At no point, however, had it ever occurred to me that the author might have had […]
All Hail Russo!
Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. His ability to take you on a meandering tale, and keep you engaged, is unparalleled. He is a true master storyteller and one of a kind. I read his later novels first but this, his second book, holds up against all the rest. Though I was never a real fan of the series Russo’s writing always reminds me of Seinfeld, the show about nothing. There are never any grand plot twists: his novels are about the simplicity […]
Davita is more interesting than her story.
The Chancellor and I have been a bit frustrated with our book club these past few months. So we decided, along with our friend A, that a sub-book club might get us reading faster and more frequently. The Chancellor had April’s pick with Station Eleven, so he decided to pick our sub-book-club-book-club pick, as well (we’ve jokingly referred to the club as “A Book Club for Good Christians,” which is an inside joke). He’s been at me for *years* to read Davita’s Harp by Chaim […]
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