Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Rusalka is a tortoiseshell cat, with beautifully brindled fur and a silly Groucho-Marx moustache. She’s bossy, chatty, and very, very lovey.
She was adopted at ten weeks old in September 2020 and is the youngest cat in our household. People warned us about ‘tortitude’ when we adopted her — and she does have attitude, but not nearly as much as we expected.
Rusalka hates to be picked up. Except when she wants onto your lap, then you have to pick her up. Any other time, and she will stick her legs and claws out and flail like you’re murdering her. She goes where she wants to go, and she might be a little bit spoiled.
But you are guaranteed to be Rusalka’s friend. This cat has always been friends with everyone. She is friends with the vet. After her shots, she will rub against the vet’s leg to remind them that they are still friends. She is friends with the service technicians who fix our furnace. And the plumber. And anyone who visits. And her sisters most of all. Rusalka even gets along with the famously anti-friends Jabberwocky.
She is very serious when she plays, whether that’s chasing a string or screaming before running after a felt bee thrown down the hallway. Her favourite toy is the bee on the string, but we don’t play that very often. When she catches the bee on the string, she bites down and growls and gets very, very serious about keeping what she has caught.
She’s the biggest, cuddliest Mama’s girl, and Hargrave rarely gets to lie down and read without Rusalka insisting on being put on her lap.
n many ways, the collection met my expectations. It includes a lot of interesting ephemera from literature, some traditional Christmas classics, as well as excerpts from letters, newspaper items, and a substantial amount of poetry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nakayama Masaaki’s PTSD Radio is a horror series that has some very creepy writing combined with some fantastically creepy artwork.
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.
