All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is given from the perspective of the losing side, which is still rare when it comes to war literature, especially in translation and from this era.
Rusalka
Rusalka is a kitten!
This little ball of tortitude is the newest addition to our family. We’re still getting to know her, but we do know that she’s very talkative and doesn’t like to be alone. She was adopted at ten weeks old in September 2020 and is the youngest cat in our household.
Rusalka is a tortoiseshell kitten, with beautifully brindled fur.
Blood on Satan’s Claw
This book may have been published just last year, but the writer, Robert Wynne-Simmons, is actually the screenwriter for the 1971 British horror film of the same name. So this book is a novelization of a movie that is over fifty years old.
The Daylight Gate
This novel is really an intersection of two goliaths of classic film and classic literature, and therefore I decided to both read it and to review it, despite it being a bit more recent.
House of Leaves
When I purchased Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the clerk at our local independent bookstore clued me in to the presence it has in the horror reading community. And, oh, what a presence it is.
The Crackwalker
This drama is a great example of the power of monologue. If you come from a place of studying prose literature, your urge is to cringe when you turn the page in the play and come across a big block of text. But, actually, a monologue is a blessing rather than a curse.
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is a classic and compelling play centering around one poor Black family struggling to get ahead in 1950s Chicago.
Three Revenge Tragedies
According to Google, a revenge tragedy is: A style of drama, popular in England during the late 16th and 17th centuries, in which the basic plot was a quest for vengeance and which typically featured scenes of carnage and mutilation.
PTSD Radio
Nakayama Masaaki’s PTSD Radio is a horror series that has some very creepy writing combined with some fantastically creepy artwork.
Blood Meridian
I’ll leave it up for you to decide whether the novel lives up to its extensive praise. For my part, despite the book being outside my literary comfort zone, I did see what made it so ground-breaking and so influential. It was worth the read — as long as the graphic violence (including sexual violence) is something that you can tolerate as a reader.
Autobiography of a Face / Truth and Beauty
My summer of reading non-fiction continues with two selections — Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. The two books naturally go together and I’ve decided to review them together here because I feel like they end up completing each other.