I just found a shoujo manga about the Russian poet Pushkin!!! And his Amazing Love Story with Natalia. BY CHIHO FREAKIN' SAITO. I have always joked that Pushkin makes a great romantic subject, what with his genius, his numerous political exiles and even more numerous romantic dalliances, his marriage to the most beautiful woman in Moscow and his ( Read more... )

As though to tease me, the weather got briefly better today, only to turn cold again. But that is all right, because I still got a bike ride, a chat with a friend in a graveyard, and a dinner with said friend in cute local brewery inn, so that was a good day ( Read more... )

I'm back in New Jersey again, and intending to see some NY area folks this upcoming weekend please. I should go back to DC for more than two days though, so I can get some better visiting time in. I also need to come to Boston sometime soon. And back to Philly. Why is it that I have plenty of friends in all the major cities on the East Coast, ( Read more... )

I did say I was going to get around to this eventually.

Right, Mystery's charms aside, The Game is not a very good book as far as literary value (or even basic writing merit) goes. The author can tell fairly entertaining anecdotes, but is out of his depth completely when it comes to shaping story structure, or dealing with any of the issues of ( Read more... )

Recently I finished The Game by Neil Strauss, which had been on my back burner for a while. It was not what I expected ( Read more... )

Have been miserably sick for the last few days, but have also been reading things. Gaiman's Books of Magic made me think again of thegreatmissjj saying she was mostly jealous of him because he was allowed to write anything, and it would get published. Books of Magic definitely seems like something that might have been a hard sell if it were anyone else doing ( Read more... )

For some reason, I am very slow when reading comics. I know that others breeze through comic books at a lightning pace, considering them easy, disposable reading... but I cannot. I go through them slowly, because I cannot simply blow by the pages--I have to take in each panel, my eye gets caught by the details. I pause and consider the dialogue ( Read more... )

One particularly pleasant (for me) recent development has been thegreatmissjj's fiance moving to the Rutgers area, so that I now get to see JJ (she who is Neil Gaiman's magical niece) in my very own neighborhood as well as NY ( Read more... )

So I just ordered Neil Gaiman's Murder Mysteries as illustrated by P. Craig Russell, and while I'm quite looking forward to that, it has come to my attention that P. Craig Russell is also the artist who did the portrait of Wilde in my icon. And he did it because he also happened to do a comic book version of his fairy tales ( Read more... )

We read her in my Feminist Theology class back in college. I had been busy that week and didn't actually do the reading, so, catching a friend on the steps to class, I asked her to quickly tell me what I missed in the reading. She replied, "blood, blood, more blood, dripping blood, pouring blood, oh and, some more blood ( Read more... )