Books

30 June 2024

Mistborn

Everybody loves Brandon Sanderson, don’t they? Well, as my enthusiasm for reading had been rejuvenated in the past year, I have been spending a lot of time on literature websites and other channels to find the right books for me to read. After some letdowns of overhyped books, I established a firm list of “must reads” and / or “classics” that I felt would be my thing. Reading what you want is so important, and probably why jumping on the hype train is always a disappointment. Anyway, everybody seems to love Brandon Sanderson, and while Stormlight Archive is praised to […]

2 April 2024

Lord of the Rings: 20 Years Wiser

Lord of the Rings is such a vast and epic topic, where to even begin? And what can I write about it that hasn’t been written about it yet? I’d just like to share my own personal experience with this work of art, as I do so often here in this blog. I first became fully aware of the Lord of the Rings around 2000 or 2001, as the marketing for the first movie was starting to gain momentum. I was but a naïve teenager back then and I had very little contact with these books aside from having seen […]

23 February 2024

Propaganda and polyamory: Revisiting the Hunger Games

Prompted by having read the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I recently decided to re-read the Hunger Games novels. First of all, I was curious about the prequel – how can a prequel about the villain of the series tie in? The prequel tells the (love) story of a teenage Coriolanus Snow, who later becomes president (dictator would be the more appropriate term) of Panem. What an odd book to read, because how can you make a novel about an entitled narcissist, who treats people like possessions, possibly compelling? While his rise to patriotism is sometimes interesting, […]

21 January 2024

History repeats itself, as seen in “Berlin: City of Light”

Last week on a whim, I bought the third book in the series of graphic novels Berlin by Jason Lutes. I read the first one in university 10 years ago, and bought the second one a couple of years later. I always had at the back of my mind that one day maybe I should read the third one, which back then wasn’t released. Acquiring the third book prompted me to re-read all of them, and I’m glad I did (but also a bit sad). This story as a whole gives us a glimpse into Berlin in the years 1928 […]

17 December 2023

Arc of a Scythe

In the city where I live, there are quite a few public bookshelves. Whenever I leave my apartment or just happen to pass by one of them, I check them. Some time in the winter of 2023, I did my usual round past the public bookshelf while going to the grocery store. Usually the books in there are literal trash, and it’s so rare to find a good book in good condition, let alone in English. Scythe by Neal Shusterman one was such a find, the cover art was striking, and after reading the description, my interest was piqued. Dystopian […]

18 November 2023

A novel development

It’s been a very long time since I read novels out of my own free will. Having been forced to read some pretty annoying stuff during my time studying literature made me lose interest in this medium. Even though some of the books I read for uni were undoubtedly good, I can’t say that they were really my style or my type of book. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant dystopian novel, just my kind of stuff, but some of the other things I read from her – nice, but not really my thing. So […]

9 February 2023

Unpopular Opinion: Harry Potter is not that great

Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion. As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book […]

23 September 2015

The Awful Birth of the Gothic Genre: The Castle of Otranto

Remember when I blogged about Penny Dreadful a while ago? In that blog post, I mentioned The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole as the novel that sparked the entire genre of Gothic fiction. Well, yesterday I actually got around to reading The Castle of Otranto for a project I’m working on – and wow, this is really one of the most terrible books I’ve ever read. It’s like a soap opera meets a B-movie, and the writing style is just indescribably awful. I’ve read better fanfiction. Apparently Horace Walpole must have been at least a little bit ashamed of […]

27 June 2013

The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminist Dystopia

In my recent post on apocalyptic fiction, I promised you a post on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and here it is! The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and is therefore the most recent of my reviewed books of Atwood (I have previously written reviews on The Edible Woman and Surfacing). However, it is actually the first book I read by Atwood – I read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for the first time because it kept appearing in connection with science fiction and dystopian literature. That sparked my interested and I was […]