Tag / Books

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week – 1/20/17

It may be 2017, but the internet, including us, is not done talking about the Gilmore Girls revival:

McSweeney’s published a hilarious rejection letter of Rory’s memoir.

The Millions has an essay on how Rory’s changes reflected the changed political mood of the new millennium. It’s quite brilliant, even though it woefully misquotes a scene, attributing one of Lorelai’s funniest lines to the undeserving Rory.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Internet:

The NYT wrote about the books that got Obama through the presidency. Among them are Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which I liked a lot but perhaps didn’t love, and The Three-Body Problem, which Keets definitely loved.

In Bitch Magazine, there’s an insightful exploration of the vastness of Jane Eyre‘s influence on feminist and female literature.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week – 1/13/17

Because of library software that automates purging of unpopular books, these librarians created a fake patron to “save” the unpopular titles they believed were too valuable to be purged. Boing Boing writes, “The problem here isn’t the collection of data: it’s the blind adherence to data over human judgment, the use of data as a shackle rather than a tool.”

There’s a new full trailer for The Good Fight. The trailer is very, “See? Aren’t you glad it’s on CBS: All Access? It has bare butts! And the f-word!” And I’m embarrassed to say it worked on me.

Avid.ly, LARB’s fan blog, argues that Gilmore Girls’ obsession with Clinton was just papering over their Reagan-esque neoliberalism. Fascinating piece.

This little infographic about 11 Disney Princesses whose eyes are literally bigger than their stomachs reminds me of me and my sister’s first act of feminist activism: angry handwritten letters to Disney about their princesses’ unrealistic bodies.

 

 

by Nerdy Spice

Shelter in Place – Alexander Maksik

Joseph March, the hero of Alexander Maksik’s novel Shelter In Place, has two problems: tar, and a bird. The tar is the black, creeping heaviness of his depression, which comes along with periods of mania; the bird is the painful part, the part that pierces his chest. He has bipolar disorder (or rather has something unnamed that, with its cycles from up to down, resembles it), and he’s constantly haunted by his own, inexplicable, internal rhythms of pain and joy. Alexander Maksik has lit upon a perfect metaphor for severe depression.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 10/21/16

Braindead was officially cancelled this week, according to TVLine. It’s probably for the best since it was hard to imagine the storyline extending into another season, but we’ll miss seeing Johnny Rae Gill and Aaron Tveit every week next summer.

The Baffler wrote a thoughtful analysis of the state of realism in contemporary literature:

Nor do critics worry that the “social issues” presented in our novels rarely attain the complexity of cable television. Or that a novel genuinely concerned with social life (or even the social role of a single person) could itself, against this backdrop, be idiosyncratic. It’s sad, in other words, that the novels of Jonathan Franzen register to most as sociopolitical literature. Freedom isn’t a social novel on the level of Wharton. It’s a decelerated twenty-four-hour news channel.

The first Nashville season five teaser has been released!

People aren’t loving Ewan MacGregor’s directorial debut American Pastoral, which is sad because the book was great. The NYT mildly disliked it, and Rolling Stone haaaated it (and it’s always fun to read a pan).

The New Yorker says Westworld caters disproportionately to stereotypically male fantasies in the excellent piece “The Meta-Politics of Westworld.”

Joss Whedon says he’s a Spuffy shipper, because Spike is a “more evolved” character than Angel. We only agree with the latter statement.

This week, The Good Wife‘s Josh Charles got in costume as a lawyer one more time for an excellent cause:

Not to get TOO political, but you should also check out this collection of the best #TrumpBookReport tweets.

by Nerdy Spice

A Poetic Society

The wind is blowing, blowing over the grass.
It shakes the willow catkins; the leaves shine silver.
Where are you going, wind? Far, far away
Over the hills, over the edge of the world.
Take me with you, wind, high over the sky.
I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind.

–Richard Adams, Watership Down

I’m rereading one of my favorite books, Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits travel a great distance to found a new society. In the middle, they encounter a society full of strangely sad, yet remarkably well-fed, rabbits: and they encounter art for the first time. The melancholy poem above is the first poem the heroes have ever heard, and it both mystifies and unsettles them. As, perhaps, any good poem should.

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 9/30/16

 

Svetlana Mintcheva, writing for Salon, manages to tackle the Great Lionel Shriver Internet Meltdown without herself melting down, articulating a nuanced but still socially responsible take on the responsibilities of fiction writers:

Whether they succeed in communicating empathy and in creating a character that is complex and true, depends on the capacity of the writer as a writer and his or her creative integrity, not on the person’s skin color, sexuality or cultural background.

Do you follow Rabih Alameddine (author of one of my favorite-ever female fictional characters) on Twitter yet? The New Yorker wrote an interesting piece about his process.

Not technically a pop culture related piece, but by one of our favorite novelists: Michael Chabon wrote a devastatingly beautiful piece about his teenage son’s love for fashion, for GQ.

In case you missed it, the New York Times published an exquisitely mean review of a new Jane Jacobs biography, including jabs like this:

It often seems to be muttered as much as written, like one of those garbled subway announcements you cannot understand but suspect might matter.

 

by Nerdy Spice

An Aspiring Writer

If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten–if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though–and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you–but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice–by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go–even when she shuts her ears for ever to their plea.

–Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/19/16

Heather Havrilesky, who writes the fabulous “Ask Polly” columns at NYMag, interviews Winona Ryder and discusses the pathologization of female emotion.

Even if the phrase “fag hag” is so 1999, you won’t care while you’re reading this absurdist ranking of the Top 10 Fag Hags of Henry James. (via LA Review of Books)

As, it seems, always, McSweeney’s lit crit is killing it: Quiz: Are you an unlikable female narrator?

Idiocracy director tells The Daily Beast why his movie has become a documentary.

Freud has a field day as the “subtle” metaphors of the James Bond credits are revealed (via Slashfilm).

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/5/16

An in-depth analysis of Watchmen and the conundrum of “adapting the unadaptable”:

The Establishment has a comprehensive survey of the history and evolution of queer YA literature (by an eighteen-year-old who can already write circles around most of the older writers on the internet). Want to know exactly when people stopped killing off their LGBTQ queer love interests (or at least stopped doing it as often)? Read to find out!

THR‘s rare interview with on and off-screen couple Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, which includes interesting analysis on the flipping of gender roles in The Americans and Rhys joking that real-life Keri Russell “doesn’t have the ice of Elizabeth — though sometimes she does.”

The hilariously terrible Suicide Squad has yielded some amusing zingers, from Forbes calling it “an all-out attack on the whole idea of entertainment” to SFGate describing it as “two hours of soul-sickening torment.” But the harshest indictment of our current blockbuster season comes from Indiewire, who says that between Suicide Squad, Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence, X-Men: Apocalypse, Warcraft, and more, “this is what plays in the multiplex in Hell.”

by Nerdy Spice

A Little Life Isn’t the Great Gay Novel. It’s a Fetishistic Portrait of the Perfect Victim.

 

The cover of my edition of A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 Booker- and National Book Award-nominated novel, is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a man crying. It may be the most perfectly thematic cover ever designed, because this novel, falsely advertised as a novel about four college friends, is actually a close-up, nuance-averse portrait of one man’s relentless suffering.

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