Posts tagged with humor
Misfit City, Issues 1 & 2, by Kiwi Smith and Kurt Lustgarten
New comic series Misfit City sets out to recapture the oddball charms of 80s kids' adventure movies (specifically, The Goonies), but my favorite thing about this story is the way it depicts living in a real town that's best known as a nostalgia-driven tourist trap...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Misfit City, Issues 1 & 2, by Kiwi Smith and Kurt Lustgarten
Our latest Book Giveaway is the first two issues of Misfit City, a new comic series written by Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith and Kurt Lustgarten. The story features a lot of tributes to classic 80s kids' movies (particularly The Goonies), so if you're a fan of the kind of film that, looking back, you cannot believe was ever marketed to children, congratulations: you're in luck...
The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer
It's tough for most Georgette Heyer fans to choose their favorite of her novels*, but I think it's telling that The Grand Sophy is her first book to get a big-budget movie adaptation. (Allegedly, although I'm not getting my hopes up.) The Grand Sophy is a lively, witty, unabashedly good time, and perfectly encapsulates Heyer's appeal...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer
This week's Book Giveaway pick is Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy. (I'm hoping that discussing it will magically encourage the universe to give me an update on the proposed Grand Sophy movie, which seems to have faded from our collective consciousness.) A full review will follow shortly...
If anyone sews any button eyes, I'm out.
According to io9, The Simpsons are working on a parody of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and the author himself will appear on the show. (This is actually his second appearance. He voiced himself back in an episode in season 23. This time, if the article is to be believed, he'll be voicing the family cat.) The...
Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch
I originally bought Ben Aaronovitch's book Midnight Riot because I had heard it compared to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files and Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books. Midnight Riot doesn't actually have much in in common with those series, however. It reminded me far more of Kat Richardson's Greywalker books, although Aaronovitch deserves props for creating a protagonist with an actual personality...
The Boy is Back, by Meg Cabot
The Boy is Back is the fourth book in Meg Cabot's loosely-connected The Boy series, all of which are narrated via unconventional methods: texts, e-mail, diary entries, online reviews. This installment is set in Bloomville, Indiana, hometown of professional golfer Reed Stewart. Reed assumed he'd left Bloomville behind, but when his increasingly eccentric parents end up causing a scandal, his family calls him home...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Boy is Back, by Meg Cabot
This week's Book Giveaway is Meg Cabot's novel The Boy is Back. The story involves one of my favorite things to read about (organizing) and one of my least favorite things to experience in any medium (golf). One cannot win them all, I suppose. A full review will follow shortly...
The Case of the Forked Road, by John Allison
The Case of the Forked Road, the seventh installment in John Allison's excellent Bad Machinery series, is—as always—a whacked-out delight. There's time travel, puberty jokes, and a PG-rated adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross. The boys play a reduced role in this volume (although their stories are expanded from the online version), but...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Case of the Forked Road, by John Allison
This week's Book Giveaway is John Allison's The Case of the Forked Road, the seventh book in the Bad Machinery series. I am, as always, pretty stoked to see a new Bad Machinery book, but there are certain very obvious changes about this installment that do not thrill me. A full review will follow shortly...
Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan
You know that bit in celebrity magazine interviews where they list in painstaking detail the outfit the actress is wearing? Or describe her utterly fabulous house? Well, picture an entire book composed of those paragraphs, and you'd be covering at least 75% of the plot of Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan
This week's Book Giveaway is Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians, the book that inspired the currently-filming movie of the same name. I'm fascinated by the casting process for this film (which has been full of drama), so I thought I'd better read the book. Our review will follow shortly...
Good for the soul
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the "Midnight Confessions" segment from CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is going to be made into a book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster...
Magic for Nothing, by Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire's Magic For Nothing is my favorite installment in the InCryptid series to date... and that's saying something, because I've liked all of these books. But this book gives me something I didn't realize I was missing: a plausibly screwed-up heroine, despite her distinctly implausible circumstances...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Magic For Nothing, by Seanan McGuire
This week's Book Giveaway is Seanan McGuire's Magic For Nothing, the first novel in McGuire's InCryptid series to feature Antimony Price, the prickly younger sister of previous protagonists Alex and Verity. A full review will follow shortly...
Utterly Uncle Fred, by P.G. Wodehouse
Utterly Uncle Fred is an omnibus edition of P.G. Wodehouse's stories about the irrepressible Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, 5th Earl of Ickenham. This collection includes the novels Cocktail Time, Uncle Dynamite, and Service With a Smile, and well as the short story that introduced us to the character, "Uncle Fred Flits By"...
The more you know
NPR recently posted great article about the Merriam-Webster twitter feed, which has been sharing a lot of pointed political definitions recently. Frankly, I don't think the new president cares much about expanding his vocabulary...
The Mating Season, by P.G. Wodehouse
Regardless of whether they're 20 pages long or 200, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories are always the same: heavy on whip-cracking aunts, hapless young men, formidable young ladies, and romantic misunderstandings that can usually only be resolved by making an ass out of poor Bertie Wooster. Since there are so few differences between his novels and short stories, I prefer the short stories—they cram just as much awesomeness into far fewer pages...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Mating Season, by P.G. Wodehouse
This week's Book Giveaway is P.G. Wodehouse's 1949 Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season. I'm just sayin', apropos of... nothing special: in times of stress, there is nothing like Wodehouse. A full review will follow shortly...
Holiday Book Giveaway: The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily, by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
Today's Holiday Book Giveaway is David Levithan and Rachel Cohn's The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily, the sequel to 2010's Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, which we reviewed here. It's also the first book we've read all week that isn't about murder or mayhem...
Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays, by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon
Written by Onion alums Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon, Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays is an R-rated choose-your-own-adventure story that takes you through countless holiday misadventures, ranging from moderately gloomy to gross as hell. The set-up is simple: your family is out of town, and your relationship is too new for a shared Christmas, so...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays, by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon
Last week was devoted to our suggestions for stuff that we want for Christmas; this week we're thinking about others (occasionally, in between cookie breaks). Brace yourselves for five days of holiday-themed book giveaways, dear readers, beginning with Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon's Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays. A review will follow shortly...
Arabella, by Georgette Heyer
As a longtime Georgette Heyer fan, I was tantalized by the recent rumor that one of her books (The Grand Sophy) is being developed into a feature film. News on the project is scarce, but my hopes are high. The Grand Sophy would make a wonderful movie, but so would any number of Heyer's other books—not least her 1949 novel Arabella, one of her lightest and most beloved regency-era romances...
Chaos Choreography, by Seanan McGuire
After a two-book-long detour, the fifth installment in Seanan McGuire's InCryptid series brings the action back where it belongs: on ballroom-dancing, ass-kicking cryptozoologist Verity Price. In Chaos Choreography, Verity has set aside her dancing career in favor of full-time cryptozoology... but when she gets a call from the producers of the reality TV series Dance or Die, she decides...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Chaos Choreography, by Seanan McGuire
This week's Book Giveaway is Seanan McGuire's Chaos Choreography, the fifth book in her InCryptid series. I am resigned to the hideous covers at this point, but I'm really hoping this book fixes McGuire's unfortunate habit of ending the books in this series on a damsel-in-distress note. A full review will follow shortly...
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...
The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle, by Rick Riordan
While I thoroughly enjoyed Rick Riordan's 'Heroes of Olympus' series, I was dismayed by the way the author handled Nico di Angelo, his first major gay character. I applauded Riordan's efforts to be more inclusive, but Nico seemed downright tortured by his sexuality, which—considering both modern attitudes towards sex and other, far more pressing problems in the poor kid's life—felt unnecessarily overwrought. I'm assuming I wasn't the only person to complain, because...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle, by Rick Riordan
This week's Book Giveaway is Rick Riordan's new book The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle. Riordan has a gift for making total Mary-Sues into appealing, sympathetic characters, but humanizing an actual god might be a tall order, even for him. Our review will follow later today...
The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley
For a book that pretty much goes like this: infodump, infodump, action sequence, rinse, repeat, Daniel O'Malley's debut novel The Rook is astonishingly entertaining. It strongly reminds me of Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books, although I'm happy to report that I like The Rook even better...