I used to sleep on my stomach, eyes and left ear buried in the crook of my left elbow, right palm pressing into my right ear. reducing my senses to touch, smell, and taste. We wouldn’t need those in sleep anyway. My momma told me, “Close your eyes and tell them to go away.” […]
The allure of the dance: A Poem
I never understood the allure of the dance until it was my only excuse to be close to you and then the sidestep came naturally. The weave, fallaway, reverse, pivot. Close enough to feel your breath on my temple and see your pulse in your neck and then arm-length away, distant enough to feel […]
Top 5 Contemporary YA Books
It’s been a while since I was an avid reader of Young Adult fiction, so this list is more or less based on books that have stuck in my memory or books I’ve reread more recently. And none of them are new releases. But there is something to be said about the fact that I’ve […]
Book Review: Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish
Well, I’m not disappointed. That’s the most important takeaway, I suppose. The novel is not nearly as good as The Weight of Ink, but I wasn’t expecting it to be, and I could still see the budding skill and voice that bloomed in her later book. In Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, you can definitely […]
Book Review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
To discuss this book, I feel like I have to separate my experience of reading the novel and the objective aesthetics of the novel. I get the impression from reading reviews and literary scholarship that fans of the book find their reading experience is influenced by the aesthetics of the novel—that the writing style and […]
Book Review: Entwined by Heather Dixon
Entwined by Heather Dixon is a YA retelling of the fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” This is another one that I read in middle school, but it has stuck with me since, so I wanted to read it again. And I wasn’t disappointed. I read it in two days. I love the twists on […]
Book Review: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
I might be finally adding a book to my favorite books of all time. I was absolutely enthralled with Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I didn’t want to put the book down. First of all, the writing was near perfection. It was a magnificent blend of descriptive and subtle. Immediately on the first page, you […]
McKAY’s Used Book Haul
So I know I’ve done a book haul recently, but that was a targeted book haul from ThriftBooks.com, and it is only a coincidence that it so closely coincided with my being in Greensboro over the weekend, where I visited McKAY’s used bookstore. The bookstore is wonderfully huge. I probably spent close to three hours […]
Literary Tropes I Hate
Welcome to another booktube trend! Today I’m listing book tropes that I really don’t like to see in books. When I was doing some research and watching Book Tropes I Hate videos on Youtube, I noticed a lot of them included things that boiled down to genuinely bad writing. I’m going to try to avoid […]
Book Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
The novel is rife with easily identifiable issues, but it only occasionally distracts from the general enjoyment of reading it. Before we get into the bad (is it just me that always finds the negative aspects more interesting and more fun to write?), let’s start with the good: The book has a Table of Contents […]