“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery and invoking both happy and frightening emotions. But she could’ve been talking about any great poem, and not just...
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.” When I read that quotation, my first reaction was: A...
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and since it is doubtful anyone was tracking book sells statistics, I find this claim–at least in the literal meaning...
Frequent readers will know that I love my horror movies and that I’m constantly searching for new ones to enjoy. So you’ll understand why, back in 1987, when Hellraiser was released, I felt tempted to see it. Saw it I did. Since its tone was body horror rather than suspenseful horror, it wasn’t quite...
Earlier this year, to fulfill a goal to up my reading game, I devise what will no doubt go down as one of the greatest literary plans in history. I will read twenty novellas or short novels before April 30th. Since I developed this plan ten weeks from that date, it meant reading two...
Everyone, at least every book lover, has their favorite bookstore. Though mine is Auntie’s Books in Spokane, many others living in the Northwest tell me theirs is Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. All my life I’ve been hearing about Powell’s, but I never visited, until a few years ago, when I took...
Though The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, I wasn’t as unfamiliar with his work as I had believed when I read it. With Roger Avary he wrote the screenplay for Beowulf (2007), directed by Robert Zemeckis. He also wrote the novel Stardust...
When I travel, I take the train. A few days before Halloween, I found myself at an Amtrak Depot that offered a book exchange. Leave a book; take a book. They had a jar for donations to the staff’s holiday party. Though the selection wasn’t large, it included Gary Brandner’s The Howling. This werewolf...
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. Going through my news app, I spotted the headline, but I probably wouldn’t have read the article, because I’m...
The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek, when US Cavalry opened fire on a Lakota camp. The government called it a...
