One of the main rules of writing a mystery, present in almost every how-to book you’ll come across, is this: the reader must feel that he could’ve solved the mystery along with the protagonist, if he were as smart as she is. Now, this is very similar to another potential…
But first: apparently, I have an Internet kindred spirit on Cracked! OK, so what do I mean by a “story about storytelling”? There are lots of stories in which characters tell stories to one another, from the trivial type like, “Let me fill you in on the entire plot up…
The “lies” part is that these are micro-reviews, because my ability to summarize has got sloppy: I may (gasp!) go into four sentences at times.
So, last Saturday, I had a bunch of people over to make gingerbread houses. After the decorating and the gorging (one for me, one for the house – on a totally unrelated note, in case you were wondering, eating nothing but candy, cookies, and icing for two days straight is…
Anyone who comments with “that’s what she said” gets a kick in the pants. So, Narnia. The series that started it all for me. I really didn’t want to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; at Brownies, another girl who was trying to bluff her way through her…
I don’t trust J. K. Rowling. Not, like, in the way where as I say so in the voiceover, we cut to a shot of her looking past the camera mysteriously and then turning to walk through the door of my enemies’ house/boardroom/hangout. For one thing, I don’t even have…
If your high school English class was similar to mine, you probably learned something about The Great Chain of Being. This, we were taught as we drummed impatiently on our copies of whatever Shakespeare play happened to be on the curriculum this year, was an Elizabethan concept of the order…
After I noticed my sister reading it (thanks, Deb), I picked up The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, two psychologists. While I thought the authors had many intriguing points, and of course it was worth the read to get…
Warning: I found something on the Internet that annoys me again! So I just finished Mockingjay, the third book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. If you haven’t read it, turn off your computer now and go do it. It is one of the very best series of YA books…