Guten Tag from Berlin! Thanks to my awesome cousins Deb and Seb for the Internet link-up to post this and to them and my cousin Emily for an all-round fantastic time :) When doublechecking my overall analogy for this blog entry, I was surprised to learn that many dictionaries define…
But first! I’m headed away for research for the next few weeks, so my blog posts may be sporadic. And some may be full of photos. End transmission. Although those of you who’ve read my other reviews (micro, macro, and in between) might wonder at it, I feel like I…
One of the reasons C. S. Lewis is such a delightful writer is that he’s good at making insightful studies of a topic often treated with saccharinity or cynicism: how people think and behave when they’re trying to be good. He paints excellent portraits of intelligent minds trying to come…
If you can tell me the actual works of fiction in which all of these appear, you win the Internet! No Google! This is old news, but apart from the seven books of the Harry Potter series, one can buy J. K. Rowling’s versions of certain among Harry’s textbooks and…
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.
Around this time last year, I made a list of 10 things I’d learned during 2009, and, at the end, I appended a list of 10 things I hoped to learn during 2010. Well, 2010’s been and gone, which means it’s time to see how I did. As a wise…
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…