I’ve been thinking a lot about the comments made by Noah co-screenwriter Ari Handel that have been circulating recently. Asked about the extreme whiteness of the cast, Handel said that the “the race of the individual doesn’t matter.” Presumably this was meant to be a defense.
Sometimes we judge books by their covers. It’s true. We can’t avoid it unless we walk around book stores and libraries and second hand shops with our eyes closed, but really that would just be a disaster, so instead we must accept that sometimes it happens. We are drawn to the interesting, the colorful, the […]
This year’s Middlemarch Madness is already stacking up to be twice as intense as last year’s. Special thanks to all our brand newbies for jumping right in! The more nominations we collect, the more fun we’ll have on Friday when we narrow each category down to 16 contenders.
Other reviews will tell you that Hillary Jordan’s second novel When She Woke is a futuristic re-telling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with overtones of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. While that’s a good strategy for selling books, and a nice shorthand for giving potential readers an idea of the tone and feel of […]
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and Monday’s LTP got me thinking about the best banned books. In the grand tradition of fandom confession blogs, I thought I’d share my gut reaction for seven of my favorites. Below the jump, some covers and secrets, plus bonus excerpts.
A little over a week ago now, the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Teenage Wastelands,” in the “Way We Live Now” section of the weekend magazine, about young adult dystopian fiction. They lamented the commercialization of the genre, as the New York Times is wont to do, and generally hashed about their feelings […]
Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go was recently made into a feature film starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan, which no doubt contributed to the five-year-old book’s current three-month stint as a NYT Trade Paperback bestseller. I was dying to see the movie, but, alas, it wasn’t widely released and my local indie […]