Mama Likes Her Mysteries

Ariana Franklin, Mistress of the Art of Death Forget CSI:  Regency–CSI:  Ren Fair is the happening new subgenre!  Ahem.  Four small children go missing in Cambridge during the reign of Henry II; since one badly decomposed corpse was found near the house of a local Jewish man, the murders/disappearances are blamed on the local Jewish [...]

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Learning to Drive Ain’t Easy

Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive Well, this is certainly an ironic follow-up to How to Ditch Your Fairy.  Anyway, moving on.  Learning to Drive is a loose collection of autobiographical essays; the first few deal primarily with Pollitt’s breakup with a long-term boyfriend.  Pollitt got a lot of flack for Learning to Drive when it first [...]

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All YA, All the Time

Justine Larbalestier, How to Ditch Your Fairy Awww, man, this was just really adorable.  So the premise is this:  our Heroine, Charlie, lives in New Avalon, which is a bizarre mishmash of Australia and the US.  In Charlie’s world, almost everyone is born with a fairy (who is invisible, thankfully):  the most common is the [...]

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Some Books I DIDN’T Read

I’m not a particularly good Christian; in fact, according to people with views more hard-and-fast than my own, I’m probably a pretty bad Christian.  I’ve had premarital sex, I swear a lot, I don’t go to church, and I couldn’t quote the Bible even if you held a gun to my head to jog my [...]

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Sometimes, I Even Talk about Books

So I am like, the worst cat-mommy ever.  There has been much growling and slapping chez Mankiller, and although the Boyfriend has found an ingenious new form of discipline that actually seems to work on Oliver, it does not do much for Original Flavor Cat.  In fact, Original Flavor Cat bit the holy hell out [...]

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I Love You So Much, I Turned You into a Cyborg

An open letter to my cat.  Yes.  MY CAT. Hey Boo-bear, can we talk?   You know, the issue here isn’t how much I love you.  I love you bunches.  To begin with, I am a crazy cat lady, and I love all cats.   Also, I have had independent, disinterested parties confirm that you are quite [...]

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The Intertoobz Amuse Me

Some weird searches bring people here–don’t even get me started on how many pee fetishists were apparently attracted by the bathroom post–but I have to say that today’s offering fills me with an unholy glee I had heretofore never experienced: why does everyone hate hipster assholes? Short answer?  Because they’re–get this–hipster assholes.

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Dueling Banjos

Shannon and I both went to Watchmen–alas, not together, for we live several hundred miles apart.  However!  We saw it on the same weekend, so come Tuesday (what?  We’re slow on the uptake), we had fun telling each other why our views of the film were WRONG SO WRONG. The following is our conversation.  Spoilers [...]

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February Book Update, Part II

David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames Typical Sedaris; a collection of essays with the occasional short story thrown in.  Usually I hate Sedaris’ fiction–that’s why I handed off my copy of Holidays on Ice to my best friend–but this time?  That shit cracked me up.  Mostly just because it was about a Princeton [...]

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Re-Discovering Fantasy (or, Why Magical Weaponry of Any Kind is a Death Sentence)

A guest post from the lovely Shannon Roberts. The idea that there is a genre of novels called ‘fantasy’ is a lie. Every bookstore worth its salt has such a section, generally stuffed to overflowing with stereotypical swords and sorcery.  Those books and the genre they claim to reside in exist solely because somewhere along [...]

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