Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The first Dr. Seuss book published since his death 24 years ago hit stores on Tuesday, and initial reviews hint at a deeper political message within the story. It wouldn’t be his first time he has used his children’s books to serve up cultural critiques—far from it. Theodore Seuss Geisel has a long history of writing political allegories. Horton…
July of 2015 is officially the moment of both peak geek nostalgia and peak geek nostalgia criticism. In less than two weeks, we’ve seen the release of Ernest Cline’s book Armada and the Adam Sandler movie Pixels, two different pieces of fiction with the same weirdly specific premise: aliens are here to kill us all, and only…
Called away on family business, I was afraid I’d missed the sweet spot for commentary on the Harper Lee/“To Kill a Mockingbird”/“Go Set a Watchman” controversy — that moment right after “Watchman’s” release on July 14 when it was all anybody in literary circles could talk about. Then again, the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house HarperCollins…
She was the reigning queen of detective fiction’s Golden Age – but Agatha Christie’s most intriguing mystery remains her unsolved disappearance in 1926. On a chilly December evening, the 36-year-old Christie vanished from her English estate in Sunningdale, Berkshire. While the famed author reportedly left a note that claimed she had gone on vacation, the…
I am a freak for the American road trip. And I’m not alone, as some of this country’s best writers have taken a shot at describing that quintessentially American experience. “There is no such knowledge of the nation as comes of traveling in it, of seeing eye to eye its vast extent, its various and teeming…
The final tableau of To Kill A Mockingbird has always given me a sour feeling toward the book—it ends with the black man dead, the poor white man also dead, the law uninterested in prosecuting their murders. The white gentleman and his children are sadder and wiser, but the wisdom imparted is essentially about the…
This past Tuesday, Mic posted a story calculating how much it would cost to attend Hogwarts, using previous estimates based on the price of tuition for British schools. Afterward, several readers responded on social media, telling us that tuition at Hogwarts is free. We acknowledged this possibility in the original piece, saying “some insist tuition at Hogwarts is free,”…
One web comic that I particularly like is John’s Comic Crits. He picks up an interesting mix of books, but instead of putting pen to paper for a book review, he turns his review into a short comic. His latest one about Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, is an interesting one. He doesn’t always do reviews: several…
Illustration by Ethan Rilly Armada is a story about how gamers are the most important people in the world. This is not a new story; it’s served as the inspiration for countless video games over the past 40 years, not to mention the recent harassment campaigns that spawned out of gaming culture and the wounded,…
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