Weekly Book Giveaway: Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
This week's Book Giveaway is Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which I read and enjoyed during my recent vacation. (There's nothing to beguile away a three-hour-long ferry ride like reading about the political fixations of creepy billionaires, in my opinion.) A full review will follow shortly...
Be back soon.
A note to our beloved readers: as I will be on traveling next week in a place with iffy internet access, I am officially giving myself a week off. The occasional book-related thought might be shared on our Twitter account, however, so...
Not without Alexander Skarsgard, sorry.
According to the New York Post, there is a True Blood musical in the works. Nothing has been confirmed, but the Post has a fair bit of concrete-sounding information about the project...
From a High Tower, by Mercedes Lackey
There are things I admired about Mercedes Lackey's From a High Tower, but none of its virtues are enough to elevate it above B-grade pulp fiction. Everything about it, from its slapdash editing to its hokey cover art, smacks of a rush job by a competent genre writer...
Weekly Book Giveaway: From a High Tower, by Mercedes Lackey
This week's Book Giveaway is Mercedes Lackey's From a High Tower, a retelling of the Rapunzel story. I'm really not feeling that cover art (it looks super dated), but Lackey is a solid writer and I will give nearly any fairytale retelling a shot. A full review will follow shortly...
I'm gonna miss The Toast.
In one of the last posts on The Toast, author Lindsey Palka compiled a list of "Things Lucy Maud Montgomery Lied To Me About". This was my favorite part...
No sympathy
In a twist that will shock absolutely no one, Gerald Foos, the subject of Gay Talese's upcoming nonfiction book about a hotel owner who claims to have spent decades spying on his guests having sex, is possibly a liar, as well as a bonafide Grade-A creeper...
Sure...
I was interested in—although not 100% convinced by—Suki Kim's essay "The Reluctant Memoirist" in New Republic. Kim is the author of Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, a nonfiction account of Kim's time spent teaching ESL at an evangelical university in Pyongyang. While Kim viewed her work as investigative journalism, her publisher...
Temptation
If I didn't have boring grown-up expenses like a mortgage and a car payment, I would absolutely shell out $3000 for one of these Dr. Seuss "Unorthodox Taxidermy" statues...
Megan will be horrified.
According to The Nerdist, there is apparently going to be a series of books that serve as a prequel to the intensely creepy 1982 Jim Henson movie The Dark Crystal. Inexplicably, the people at The Nerdist seem excited about this news...
Stiletto, by Daniel O'Malley
As I mentioned in my review of The Rook, the first installment in Daniel O'Malley's Rook Files, these books have been optioned for TV by Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. Now that I've read the second book in the series, Stiletto, I am even more impressed by Ms. Meyer's foresight, because if they get this series even halfway right she is about to make piles of money...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Stiletto, by Daniel O'Malley
This week's Book Giveaway is Daniel O'Malley's Stiletto, the sequel to his 2012 novel The Rook, which we reviewed here. Admittedly, I have about a dozen books that I seriously need to finish, but I actually want to read Stiletto, so it's jumping the queue. Our review will follow shortly...
I do remember how terrible the covers were.
The website Lenny recently posted novelist J. Courtney Sullivan's gushing tribute to Ann M. Martin's Babysitters Club books. As a book-loving woman in my 30s, I'm definitely in the same demographic as Sullivan, but my parents tended to be a little dismissive of "series books"...
Head to head
According to Lainey Gossip, Paramount and Sony are developing competing biopics of Agatha Christie. Sony is going the traditional biopic route, while Paramount is focusing on the mystery behind Christie's 11-day disappearance in 1926. Emma Stone...
Confused
The first trailer is out for the movie adaptation of M.R. Carey's zombie novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The movie has a recognizable cast (including Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton), and it looks very artistically gloomy, but...
My mom will watch this (but she'll cover her eyes a lot)
Slate tells me that Sarah Polley is adapting Margaret Atwood's 1996 novel Alias Grace into a six-hour-long miniseries for Netflix. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Grace Marks, a Canadian housemaid who was convicted of murder in 1843...
When in doubt...
In light of their current struggles, Vertigo is going back previously fertile ground: they're reviving the Fables 'verse, which ended about a year ago. The new spin-off series will be called Everafter: From the Pages of Fables. Here's the...
Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho
Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown is a mildly amusing historical fantasy novel, full of nods to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. While her book features some ambitious ideas, Cho rarely explores them in sufficient depth...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho
This week's Book Giveaway is Zen Cho's debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown. I'm a little nervous about this book, actually. It has great reviews, but it triggers two of my rage buttons: the British get a VASTLY superior cover than we do, and I can't find a solid release date for the sequel. What if I really like it and book two doesn't come out until...
RIP, Ms. Duncan
YA suspense author Lois Duncan has died, according to the Washington Times. Ms. Duncan is best known for her book I Know What You Did Last Summer (which was made into a movie in 1997, transforming Duncan's somber novel about teens being forced to take responsibility for their actions into a slasher film, much to her irritation). Ms. Duncan...
Wicked the movie, for serious
According to The New York Times, a movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked (based on the Gregory Maguire novel of the same name) has been scheduled for a December, 2019 release by Universal Pictures. Rumors of this project have floated around for years, but...
Politeness costs nothing
Today, The Ugly Volvo posted an Open Letter to the Female Hat-Wearing Dog From Go Dog, Go that's pretty much perfection. Even as a small child, I remember being appalled by the hat-rejecting dog's rudeness. Didn't his parents ever teach him about the value of a polite redirect? Those conversations should have gone like this...
No loss
Awwwww: according to THR, Nicholas Sparks Productions, the film and TV production company founded by the author of the same name, is shutting down. The company launched in 2012, and went on to produce two adaptations of Sparks's cloying melodramas (2013's Safe Haven and 2016's The Choice)...
I would have pushed him down a well.
I normally avoid movies that scream OSCAR BAIT!!! this loudly, but I'm mildly intrigued by the new film Genius, about the relationship between notoriously verbose writer Thomas Wolfe and his long-suffering editor Maxwell Perkins. The trailer looks...
And I Darken, by Kiersten White
As one might expect from a story about a gender-swapped version of Vlad the Impaler, Kiersten White's And I Darken is heavy on angst and violence. On the other hand, it is also unexpectedly well-researched and thoughtfully constructed—despite the lurid nature of her subject matter, White has written a respectable alternate-history fiction, not the YA equivalent of Dracula Untold...
Weekly Book Giveaway: And I Darken, by Kiersten White
This week's Book Giveaway is And I Darken, the first installment in a new teen series by Kiersten White. This book is apparently (very) loosely based on the historical events surrounding Vlad the Impaler. I have no idea how a story about a murderous, sadistic, 15th century nutjob will translate into a darkly seductive YA novel, but I'm looking forward to finding out...
Another one to skip
I'd managed to forget that Kenneth Branagh was making a movie adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, but apparently the deal has been hammered out and Angelina Jolie is in talks to star. I have no idea what role she'll play (personally, I'm hoping for a gender-swapped Hercule Poirot)...
Murderously adorable
Man, Jonathan Franzen really doesn't like cats. According to this article in New Republic, Franzen thinks the time has come for cat genocide: “The bird community’s position is, we need to get rid of the feral cats, and that means cats must die.” He's also a big fan of the upcoming book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer...
Mediocrity in pretty dresses
Over the weekend, my mom and I went to see Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship, which has been receiving glowing reviews. I enjoyed the acting, the sets, and the fact that one of Jane Austen's lesser-known works (the novella Lady Susan) was getting some attention, but I thought the movie itself was pretty bad, and I blame most of that on Mr. Stillman...