Starting in 1953, Fleming published a Bond story every year until his death in 1964, and his last two books were published posthumously. If you are unfamiliar with Fleming’s oeuvre, or if you’re wanting to add a Bond adventure to your TBR, then you’ve come to the right place because we have a quiz that will give you a Fleming Bond book to read based on the men who have portrayed James Bond on the silver screen....
I know you feel a little bit like an outcast and you think the books are to blame. You always carry one with you, mostly in your backpack, to read between classes or during downtime at school. Most of the time, it’s a novel, and you think your classmates can’t understand why you’d rather live in a fictional world than socialize. The looks of confusion on their face catch your attention when you glance up to absorb a particularly thoughtful passage....
The Project Be Gay, Do Comics is a project launched by The Nib. Founded in 2013 by Pulitzer finalist Matt Bors, The Nib publishes political, nonfiction, and historical cartoons and comics on their website daily (their headliner at the time of writing this, for example, is the story of Jane Jacobs, the “patron saint of Urban Planning”). They have “worked hard to give platform to marginalized voices in our current dystopian hellscape....
In a February board meeting, the school board listened to LISD parents who complained about a wide range of titles on the list. The list, which contained 15 books from which students could choose, came under fire as some parents saw the options included to be inappropriate. Those titles were, of course, ones featuring queer relationships, stories of sexual assault and violence, mental health, and racial violence. At the initial meeting, one parent brought a sex toy to make a point about the content in Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, a memoir about queer domestic violence....
I had bought the book three years ago, and because hindsight is 2020 I knew this book would have had a much bigger impact on me if I had read it right away. I started to think that maybe if I could have gotten my act together sooner I would have had a better time reading the book. By letting it sit, was I being unfair to the book? Was I being a bad reader?...
Thousands responded, urging her to contact Goodreads directly, flagging the review themselves. Several authors jumped in to defend her instantly, among them behemoth author Philip Pullman, who termed the book “humane, warm, decent, generous, and welcoming.” The book is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, an analysis of the British school system. In it, Clanchy reminisces over her time as a teacher, campaigns against church and grammar schools, and proposes creative writing be taught in all schools....
So as this title was swirling around in my head I’d started thinking about book titles and covers that not only immediately draw a person in but also start a conversation. The books that left out on your coffee table, read in public, and/or sitting on your desk at work would have someone ask a question. Or tell a story. Or elicit a memory that led them to open up in some way....
Are you into comics? Do you like masturbating and/or having sex? Reading erotica or watching porn? I support you in all your consensual sexcapades. In an effort to encourage sex-positivity and reading what you like, I’ve come up with a list of seven sexy comics you may enjoy if you answered yes to any of the above questions. You see, these graphic novels are guaranteed to get you off....
First, there was “bussy,” a portmanteau of “boy” and “pussy”. It was added to Urban Dictionary in 2007, and that entry claims it’s been around in LGBTQ communities since the 90s. In 2022, though, the suffix became common in almost every conceivable context online. While there were some other words and phrases under consideration this year, including “quiet quitting” and “Slava Ukraini” — a solidarity slogan — “-ussy” won the vast majority of votes: more than four times the runner-up....
Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole I don’t think enough people go to weddings for the food. Every time I go to a wedding, I go in too hard on polite conversation and I completely neglect the snack table. Ignatius would be sure to get his wedding-gift-money’s-worth at the appetizer table and he would definitely make sure the conversation was not polite. I would steer clear of his valve after cake, however....
The book is described as: “about the true story of Dr. James Miranda Barry (1795–1865), a flamboyant, brilliant, nineteenth-century physician who rose to prominence in South Africa, eventually achieving the rank of Inspector General of military hospitals, where he was accused of a scandalous ‘homosexual’ romance with Lord Charles Somerset, only to be discovered on his deathbed to have been a woman all along.” There are three main categories of why this is so incredibly upsetting:...
Have we confused what monsters are for? Like most questions that cross Margaret Atwood’s lips, this one urgently pries open a part of your brain that normally remains unfingered. Because according to her, how we treat the bogeyman can mean everything. Atwood tossed this hand grenade of a question at an event at the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival. She curated a strand of the programme, which featured her shooting the breeze with Neil Gaiman, discussing weirdness with Ian Rankin, and reflecting upon possibly her finest achievement, The Blind Assassin....
Markus said he got the idea for a story about a boy named Clayton building a bridge when he was 20 years old, before he even published his first novel, The Underdog. After he wrote a version of the book way back then, he stepped back and thought, “This isn’t it.” After publishing The Book Thief in 2005 (2006 in the U.S.), Markus revisited the idea, and Clay’s story underwent 13 years of being reshaped and reformed....
The storytime was held upstairs at Better Read Than Dead in their event space. It’s not a large room, but it was a great size for a storytime with 50–60 children and adults in attendance. Mem and Judy read Goodnight Sleep Tight, and they followed that with their new book, Bonnie and Ben Rhyme Again, which is a sequel to that first book. They then read two of their other books, Ducks Away and Where is the Green Sheep?...
When I first read Toni Morrison in a seminar in college, she had 8 novels out (Love had just been released), and my professor concluded that we only had time to read 7 of them in the 14-week semester. Two weeks per book is about right, and I wish I had remembered that when I set out to try to read all NINE of her now-extant novels in just 12 weeks....
I like that they’re sturdier, easy to throw in a bag or wipe off, and less expensive than picture books. Picture books are wonderful, but much harder to bring with you if you’re going out and need some distractions for your child — and if your child is like mine and loves to wear their backpack places, they’re unwieldy for your kid to handle. But not so with board books!...
Germany has all but lost WWII. For Uwe, who has spent the war caring for his widowed mother, this is a relief. But for others in his village, the fight is not over yet. Inspired by talk of power and his village’s werewolf lore, Uwe joins a resistance unit preparing for the arrival of Allied soldiers. But when the men’s violent rampage takes a devastatingly personal turn, Uwe must grapple not only with his role in their evil acts but with his own humanity....
What’s Ekphrasis? According to the Poetry Foundation, the word “ekphrasis” (which WordPress keeps trying to autocorrect to “emphasis”) comes from the Greek word for “description.” An ekphrastic poem, they write, “is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.” The most famous example is probably John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But the Poetry Foundation also has a long listing of other poems inspired by art from around the world....
Bonus Books! There were so many great books out this week that I ran out of space to cover them all, but here are two more you should be aware of that are out this week: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, the author of Normal People, and Matrix by Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies. Seven years later, her gifts have manifested in different ways for Marimar, Rey, and Tatinelly’s daughter, Rhiannon, granting them unexpected blessings....
I had a particularly great reading month in October when it came to nonfiction crime: from an 1800s Harvard murder to one of the best memoirs I’ve read. I also read one of 2019’s top crime novels, a vigilante justice team I loved, and an is-my-ex-a-serial-killer (?!) novel. Hope you find your next favorite crime read on this list! Recent Releases Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha I want to start by saying that if you’re a fan of crime novels, I recommend picking this one up without knowing anything about it as I really love the way Cha unfolds everything—basically you’ll get maximum impact....
