Books

3 May 2024

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi and Jonathan Strange

Did you ever finish reading a book and then went straight back to the first page to read it again? This happened to me when I read Piranesi, a rather short novel by Susanna Clarke. Piranesi is a magical, mythical and mind-boggling mystery. Probably one of the most unique books I have ever read. I don’t really know what else to say about this book without spoiling it, except that it’s absolutely worth reading. It’s a short (~250 pages) and very captivating read with very brief chapters. It’s an introvert’s dream place. And will stick with you for a while. […]

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 was such a find, the cover art was striking, and after reading the description, my interest was piqued. Dystopian is […]

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 […]

31 March 2018

Y: The Last Man

I was very excited when I heard about the graphic novel Y: The Last Man – a dystopian world in which all men but one mysteriously die? But I was hugely disappointed, as this isn’t the feminist utopia I was looking for. It’s anything but, and the fact that this title was written by a man should have warned me. It’s very obviously a title written by men for men, as it’s pretty much every man’s fantasy to have a world of women at his disposal, isn’t it? Well, the comic cleverly tries to avoid such implications by making Yorick, […]

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 […]