I found a new (to me) web-comic yesterday that is excellent! Worth adding to the VERY short list of web-comics I read (this makes 3) and worth telling my friends about. It's called Namesake. It is a truly novel approach to fairy tales and other stories, a sort of meta-crossover that works. Both the art and the storytelling are poignant and ( Read more... )

http://fiftydangerousthings.com/

ursuscelticus posted this in his LJ, and now I want one. Is it bad that I want to get it mostly to use as a check-list for what I've already done and what I need to go try? I know I've taken shoes_the_dog on many adventures and guided him through many experiements considered " ( Read more... )

This week's books, completely by coincidence, are two collections of classic short science-fiction stories. Neither author is usually catagorized as sci-fi, and one of them pre-dates the label, but most of the shorts in both books definitely fit that genre.

I picked the Borges audio book for the car out of curiosity, since I'd heard of him but ( Read more... )

One of my clients uses the word "gizzy" where I would say "thingamajig" or "watchamacallit." What amazes me is how immediately comprehensible this is. Do we have a word for words that are gibberish and stand in for other words that we can't summon up? I don't mean onomatopoeia or euphemisms, though both sort of glance off the edges of what I ( Read more... )

I just picked up The DaVinci Code to read this morning, and my (quirkily written in) used bookstore copy is missing the last page of the prologue. Can someone who has this book summarize what happens after the curator finds out that the three chatelaine have been killed ( Read more... )

I'm so weird. A well-put-together sentence, elegant grammar, exotic words used well...these things make me hot. Seriously. I get so excited when I read a word I don't know, or the rare sentence that makes me gasp and re-read three times in stunned ecstasy. Once, in a college class, we had to trade papers to give feedback. I was reading a paper ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I finally got tired of J.G. talking about the Disney Hercules. He had a seriously skewed picture of Hades! So I told him the story of Demeter and Persephone and Hades. He loved it, and asked intelligent questions, and spent the rest of the day playing Hades. He told me he wished he could have seen the first Winter, though he would ( Read more... )

I got a really cool story from the library this week for J.G., that I wanted to share with all the parents on my friends list, (and those who just like kid's stories.)

It's called Jackalope by Janet and Susan Stevens. Their version of how such a creature came to be is hilarious and well-written, with a cowboy armadillo narrator that speaks in ( Read more... )

If you like Firefly, or Orson Scott Card, or both, check this out!

(Thanks, animegothgrrl.)

(And by the way, for those who get upset about his clear Mormon/Christian themes, go read Hart's Hope. A classic Christian parable, but written in unmistakable pagan symbolism. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective, there isn't a lot of difference ( Read more... )

Mandala, by Pearl S.Buck
Best known for The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck is a very gifted writer. She brings other people and places to life, brings the reader into another mind, so you feel what her characters feel. A rare talent. Mandala is about India on the cusp of becoming a modern nation, one fictional story in the millions of real stories, ( Read more... )