This post originally ran on Tor.com. There’s a lot to be said about the intersection of fantasy and the insanely large pantheon of anime content, to put it mildly. Today, I’d like to focus on Death Note and its smart, if a bit on-the-nose, use of a hard magic system to tell its story. My anime sample size…
Continue reading ➞ Death Note Is The Perfect Beginner’s Guide To Hard Magic Systems
Every year The Witcher seems to increase in popularity because it’s a fantastic IP and because it has shown up in a multitude of forms and mediums. However, unlike the more centralized efforts like Sanderson’s Cosmere, or the MCU, these cross-medium takes on the property are mostly self-contained and have seemingly different objectives. This can…
So you want to run a Little Free Library! Great, excellent, amazing! I’m an LFL steward myself, and my bookworm friends often ask what it takes to get a Little Free Library installed at or near their home. I’d love to tell you it takes brains, moxie, and spunk. But in reality, all you need…
Continue reading ➞ A Beginner’s Guide To Little Free Libraries
Hi all, and welcome to part 3 of The Quill to Live and Orbit reread of Cibola Burn - the 4th book of one of the best space operas to grace the page, The Expanse. We will break this reread into three parts to discuss the various acts of the book, its themes, and the statements…
Continue reading ➞ Cibola Burn Re-Read Guide: Act 3 – Eye Of An Angry God
Hi all, and welcome to part 2 of The Quill to Live and Orbit reread of Cibola Burn - the 4th book of one of the best space operas to grace the page, The Expanse. We will break this reread into three parts to discuss the various acts of the book, its themes, and the statements…
Continue reading ➞ Cibola Burn Re-Read Guide: Act 2 – Playing With Corpses
Hi all, and welcome to The Quill to Live and Orbit reread of Cibola Burn - the 4th book of one of the best space operas to grace the page, The Expanse. We will break this reread into three parts to discuss the various acts of the book, its themes, and the statements it makes. We…
Continue reading ➞ Cibola Burn Re-Read Guide: Act 1 – Tragedy On New Terra
Earlier this year, my sister and I started a joint TikTok account: BookRush. Mostly, it features the Rush siblings ribbing each other for their poor taste in books and sharing new reads with the larger “BookTok” community. Occasionally, we’ll put out a poll asking BookTok folks to chime in on big bookish debates. To date,…
When I filled out Brandon Sanderson’s website contact form, I did it in the most bardic way I could: by unfurling a metaphorical scroll, standing in the town square, and shouting: “DO YOU HAVE A MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT BARDS?!” And while he may not have had time to spin a tale longer than a…
Continue reading ➞ We’re In The Middle Of A Bardic Revolution
If you know, you know. That’s the best way I can prepare any prospective reader for Jack Garbarino’s The Movement: How I Got This Body By Never Going To The Gym In My Life. If you don’t know, and you encounter this book in the wild, I can imagine your 150-page journey (if you make…
Continue reading ➞ The Movement: Nathan Fielder’s Crazy Contextual Concoction
Fantasy books do not have a good track record with blood parents. As I was trying to think of moms and dads of protagonists in fantasy for this piece, I was astounded by the number of orphans with adoptive mentors. Parents are hard to come by, and often they are either dead, shunted off stage,…
