In my mid-20s, I smoked a helluva lot of weed. One night, my buddy Mike and I were six or seven bong rips deep on my couch, and we threw on Netflix’s Altered Carbon. I had neither seen nor heard anything about the show. And when I tell you that I recall exactly zero percent…
Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence is an intriguing, strange, and brutal story. This was my first time reading something by Lawrence, and my experience with Crows has inspired me to read more of his catalog. In his newest book, Lawrence tells a story that is mostly about the Academy of Kindness and how it…
Tchaikovsky is out of control this year. We have had to divvy up his Q1 releases (Q1, not the full year) in order to try and cover them all. I ended up with the latest entry in the Children of Time series, Children of Strife, and I couldn’t be happier. If you are unfamiliar with…
Continue reading ➞ Children Of Strife – What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger
The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan has got me howling; it’s so good. The book’s synopsis had me at monster slayer, but then give that monster slayer immortality and a demon that lives in his head? Hi, hello. I’m your girl, and this book is right up my alley. There’s horror. There’s a mystery. And…
I enjoy comics and graphic novels, but I have always found the big DC and Marvel comics to be very unapproachable. Their comic universes are so complicated and sprawling at this point that I have never seen what felt like a good jumping-in point, despite liking many characters from both universes. So, when I saw…
You guys will never guess where Stephen King is taking us next, folks. That’s right, Maine! Specifically, in the deep woods of our only single-syllable state, there’s a mysterious compound where children with special powers are imprisoned and used for their talents in nefarious ways. The Institute is a dark subversion of the magic school…
My high school reading list and I did not get along. There were very few books I enjoyed reading at that age, and the one I remember loving the most was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. And honestly, that tracks even to this day because I do love a dramatic, gloomy, and depressing affair with…
“We still can’t reach the speed of light. But people are acting like we’ve conquered the universe. When all we’ve conquered is what the universe allows us.” This quote from Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go At The Speed of Light perfectly captures the vibe and themes of this seven-story short collection. Translated from Korean…
Continue reading ➞ If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light – Seven Punches To The Heart
I’ve been on a bit of a journey lately with my own reading schedule, trying to develop different reading projects to make sense of “the genre,” along with the world that the “genre” exists within. That’s a very vague way of saying “god I need something to read that I can talk about positively.” And…
Continue reading ➞ Sister Svangerd and The Not Quite Dead – Pray Like Hell
If you passed through Iowa City in the mid-2010s, you might encounter a lanky, baseball-hatted kid in a tie-dye Hawkeyes sweatshirt (me) loping alongside his giant afroed friend Ryan, yapping about fantasy books and other nerdy potpourri. To be fair, that is a likely sighting on any liberal arts college campus, but it’s where today’s…
