Mark Flowers
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Galatea
Readers of this blog might be interested to know about a new short story by Madeline Miller called “Galatea.” Miller wrote one of our favorite books of last year, The Song of Achilles. With this story she returns to the world of Greek myth, this time to the story of Pygmalion, which many of us know [...]
Fighting for Their Lives
Earlier this year, on my personal blog, I talked about how I had been reading a lot about crime, and specifically about wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project. So when I saw the subtitle of Susannah Sheffer’s book, I assumed that there would be quite a bit about defense attorneys fighting to prove their clients’ [...]
Someday, Someday Maybe
I got into The Gilmore Girls a little late, and only because my wife was a fan. I see from imdb that the show ran from 2000 – 2007, and I met my wife in late 2003, so the most I could have seen is a little more than half of the show’s episodes (I [...]
Tudor Trilogies
It’s tough to tell, because some titles are duplicated, but the Library of Congress seems to list somewhere on the order of 200 novels under the subject headings “Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509-1547–Fiction” and “Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547–Fiction.” Hey, we even reviewed one of them earlier this year. And those 200 titles don’t include [...]
Damaged Young Women
I’m very excited to introduce today’s novels, all three centered on emotionally damaged young women, and two of which are debuts that earn starred reviews from us. I read the two debuts–Panopticon and Lotería–in short succession, about a month ago, and I’m hard pressed to say which I’m more excited about–both introduce readers to ferocious new talents [...]
Weekly Reviews: The Power of Words
Why do some words have more power than others? Today we look at two very different ways of looking at that crucial question. The first, Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit, is an earnest, well-researched history of the most powerful words in the English language: curse words. Some people (for example, me) have tried to claim that [...]
Weekly Reviews: Alex Winners Redux
And speaking of Alex Award winners, today we have two more reviews of novels by previous winners. Neil Gaiman is one of those magical writers who seems to be able to write for any age level, with a Newbery Award under his belt, popular graphic novels for teens and adults, and two Alex Award winning [...]
Linguistics and Teens
In just two weeks, Manchester, UK will be hosting the 11th annual International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), an international competition for high school students to show off their skills in linguistic puzzles. The puzzles require no knowledge of specific languages, and sometimes use invented languages. Instead, the teens use logic and their general linguistic knowledge. Here’s [...]
Alex Winners: Where Are They Now?
As I sat at home last weekend, not going to ALA and the Alex Awards Program, I started thinking about how many books by former Alex Award winners we’ve looked at this year. In my head, it seemed like a lot, but I thought I should actually crunch the numbers. So, here they are, for [...]
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