Books
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A Brightness Long Ago Says Magic isn’t Required for Fantasy. It May Be Right.
What makes a fantasy novel a fantasy novel? I know, and I apologize. What a stupid, pretentious question, right? We all know what makes a fantasy novel different from a work of historical fiction or science fiction or a standard coming-of-age tale/YA novel. We all read Harry Potter. It’s magic. Magic is what makes a fantasy novel truly a fantasy novel. Whether that magic is produced via wands and boarding schools like the aforementioned Harry Potter, or through color and light absorbed from the sun like the Lightbringer Series, or through the many complex rules of Brandon Sanderson’s various ‘hard-magic systems’, or through the strange mix of geothermal energy and…
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An Ode to Bookstores
I miss bookstores. Do you miss bookstores? Now, look, there are plenty of other admittedly more important problems arising from this quarantine; and plenty of other more visibly devastated mediums. One of the best things about a book after all, is that it can provide you with the same joy and escape and thought no matter where you bought it or where you’re reading it. A movie is objectively different when seen in a theater compared to your TV. Live music is how music is meant to be experienced. The loss of movie theaters and concerts right now is a tragedy and I desperately hope both of those industries can…
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Masterpieces in Some Other World: Mac Miller’s Circles and D.F.W.’s The Pale King
I finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. For those of you who don’t know, The Pale King is an unfinished novel. David Foster Wallace had been working on it off and on for about ten years, and while he had hundreds of thousands of polished and publish-ready words set aside in a neat stack, it remained incomplete when he succumbed to his depression and killed himself in September of 2008. His longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, was given the task of putting the book together using the stack of manuscript Wallace had set aside, other chapters and…
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How the Artemis Fowl Movie Really Came to Be
One of the first book series I can remember choosing for myself and absolutely falling in love with is Artemis Fowl. I was nine years old when I read the first book in the series and it blew my little fucking mind. I had never read a book with a character like Artemis, essentially an evil genius and yet he was the main character. Kids books didn’t do that before. It was “Die Hard with fairies” but the main character was a young Hans Gruber with a more marketable accent. What’s not to love? Then, a couple weeks ago, I saw the abomination of a trailer for the movie adaptation,…
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The Doors of Stone and Everything Else We Want
You heard it here first, folks! Patrick Rothfuss, acclaimed fantasy writer and full-grown garden gnome, has announced The Doors of Stone will be released in physical and eBook format tomorrow. Apparently, the long-awaited novel has been finished for years, with Rothfuss delaying publication to build up fan anticipation for his work. “Yeah, this book was finished by like 2014,” says Rothfuss, whose gnome beard is now longer than he is tall, in response to questions. “I just didn’t want to be one of those boring writers pushing out books every other year. Who wants that? I figured a nine year wait would be the perfect amount of time to stack…
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Avenue 5; or Something to Watch at the End of the World
I’ve been thinking a lot about panic lately. I doubt this will surprise people and I know for sure I am far from the only one. With everything that is going on right now, it feels like almost everyone is operating at this baseline of a low-level buzz of panic. Not enough to cause riots in the street or anything, just enough so everyone’s on edge, just enough that panic-buying toilet paper and hoarding food has become common. It does say something to me that so many American consumer’s response to a health crisis is to shop harder, but I can’t blame anyone for that. I shopped harder myself. I’ve…
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Mafia and Truth; The Irishman and Lies
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by: Charles Brandt is an enthralling work of True Crime writing. I read it during this past busy week for myself and sincerely regretted being forced to put the book down every time other work or obligations–this whole trying-to-start-a-writing-career-from-fucking-nothing thing does take work and time–would draw me away. Charles Brandt’s prose is better than adequate, it’s actually quite smooth and readable and is less afraid of real emotion than you are led to expect from the beginning of the book. Frank Sheeran is an endlessly fascinating character who–while clearly a criminal piece of shit…
