Halfway through Stephen King’s It, I realized that I find neither clowns nor balloons scary, and since they’re the principle devices King use to suggest the supernatural, that aspect of the novel failed to scare me. But It isn’t about clowns or balloons. It is about childhood fears, both real and imagined, and how we...
Why read the book? Why, indeed, when you have the HBO series to watch? It’s a popular series, now in its 5th season, and it has a lot to recommend it. Well-written dialogue. Dramatic performances by Sean Bean, Lena Headey, Kit Harington, and too many others to name. Let’s face it, watching Peter Dinklage...
Confession: I like sex. Well, duh! More relevant to my blog, I enjoy erotic scenes in books. That is not to say that I enjoy erotic books. I enjoy erotic passages, the operative word being passages. I have learned to be wary of erotic novels, those novels where sex and sexual relationships define the...
Power brings a man many luxuries, Robert Harris’ Tiro writes, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them. Tiro, who invented shorthand, was the slave-secretary to the Roman senator Cicero, and in Harris’ novel Imperium, he is the narrator. In this novel, the first of a series about Cicero, Tiro, an aging...
In the study of fiction, we talk about “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It, along with imagination, is what the reader brings to the novel. It helps produce the trance we enter as we read, allows us to SEE the story rather than just READ it. Unfortunately, around the 75% mark, Everson took Siren...
