A Darker Shade of Magic is an extraordinarily fun book. V.E. Schwab crafts an exceedingly enjoyable, vivid world whose sheer concept feels pulled from the wishes of my younger, Victorian-lit-and-anime-loving-self.…
Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women gives us an amazing chance to discuss narrative distance, pacing, and authorial intent in writing. This is, in part, because it didn’t really…
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is an enjoyable, important read. Le Guin’s prose is, as always, a sort of poetry and music, and her worldbuilding shows us…
Any time I pick up a book by Neil Gaiman, I know I’m going to get something good. His prose sings, his stories are creative and magical, and his characters…
Toni Morrison’s Jazz is, simply put, a masterpiece. The prose is spectacular, with a rhythm and life that demands you slow down and listen. The characters are incredibly real, layered,…
Hello, all! This is the last blog post I’ll be writing before Halloween, so I decided to write about something spooky: Rosemary's Baby, the much beloved horror classic by Ira…
It can’t be stressed, enough: Terry Pratchett was ahead of his time. In Equal Rites (the third novel in the Discworld series), Terry Pratchett uses his wit, humor, and grand…
Literary fiction has a bad reputation for being low on the “entertain-o-meter,” a completely imaginary device that I pretend to use to measure how engaging a novel is. So, it…
(Quick heads-up before we start: this article contains some light spoilers for the endings to both The Light Fantastic and The Color of Magic.) The Light Fantastic is the second…