I really need to remember that when I go home to my parents’ house for holidays or various and sundry other visits, I don’t need to bring extra books with me. It’s not just that they have a marvelous collection, but I find myself revisiting childhood books I haven’t looked at in years. This time out, I teared up happily re-reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, an inferior... 

I was feeling rather cranky about Charles Dickens and his influence after finishing Drood, but finally getting around to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday has kind of restored my faith in the age (and actually in retellings of Paradise Lost, too, seriously shaken after His Dark Materials). Thursday is one of those books that falls in a funny interstitial space: classic, but... 

If only to tide me over until A Dance With Dragons comes out: I’ll be very curious to see if this garners an audience outside hardcore fans of the books (having ripped through each of them three times since y’all talked me into reading them, I think I’m now in that camp). Certainly, the first teaser trailer didn’t hook me in. And I think it’ll be hard to advertise... 

Good evening! I’m happy to be back; thanks to Alyssa, as always, for inviting me, and to you all for reading. It seems that writing about fandom is becoming something of a theme for me here, and apparently this time will be no exception, as entertainment journalist Jace Lacob has a piece in The Daily Beast about showrunners and Twitter. He talks to Hart Hanson of Bones, Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s... 

As much as I found myself frustrated by Perdido Street Station, I did very much enjoy reading it around the same time that I got to watch Sherlock. In conjunction, and as I’ve been reading Drood, they were a reminder of one of the things I like best about both real and fictional London, its capacity for mystery, its resistance to complete mapping, discovery, and explanation. London may be a mess... 

I’ve been thinking a bit about horror and the role of fear in entertainment some lately (more to come later this week once I finish reading Drood and processing some insights left over from The Walking Dead) since bad nightmares have generally lead me to avoid art that viscerally frightens me. But one exception in the past couple of years, as I’ve tried to push my own boundaries, is... 

Spoilers below the jump for those who aren’t reading along or aren’t finished. On Monday, I’ll open up a discussion of what we should do next. The first time I read this final chapter, I almost tossed my Kindle across the room in disgust. We’ve come all this way, through all this mess, and it turns out that it all happened because one of our putative heroes is a rapist? I was... 

I don’t think I want to play: just don’t have the time to get immersed right now, and I feel like if I was going to play, I’d want to be more experienced so I can enjoy it, rather than feeling like it’s a frustrating learning experience. But I dipped into some very basic reading about the series since rumors of a movie are floating again, and I was wondering if any of y’all... 

But this post of Ta-Nehisi’s on Medal of Honor is well worth reading. I’ve always thought that part of the appeal of first-person shooters, certainly, and other games that involve fighting and adventurism, was the chance to feel more physically or societally powerful, but also more responsible, than one does in real life. Likewise, I found the Sims an extremely useful experiment in... 

There was an essay in the Sunday Book Review about adults reading young adult (teen) books: But big type and short, plot-driven chapters aside, the erosion of age-­determined book categories, initiated by Harry Potter, has been hastened along by an influx of crossover authors like Stephenie Meyer and interlopers like Sherman Alexie, James Patterson, Francine Prose, Carl Hiaasen and John Grisham, to...