Nightmare Alley
I was first exposed to Nightmare Alley via TCM’s Noir Alley and the 1947 film starring Tyrone Power in one of his few villain roles. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, though it is a lot different from the novel.
Wesker
Wesker was a fluffy, long-haired black cat with yellow eyes. Aloof and rare, she did not particularly like snuggles — though she got soft in her old age. She was the oldest of the cats, and easily the most mature.
Wesker had always been independent. Hargrave’s first child, she was the least spoiled cat of the bunch. She was a black cat but she’d never brought anything but good luck to this house.
If you can throw a string, Wesker would chase it. The highest honour she could bestow was to climb on the sofa or the counter and groom your hair. And, if you were really lucky, sometimes she’d bring you a toy.
But only after she’d let you know that she was bringing it by meowing loudly from a distant room.
Wesker faded with the golden rod and passed away on October 22nd, 2026.
The Misanthrope, The Miser, and Other Plays
Molière was a seventeenth-century playwright and I have seen readers approach him with a comparable trepidation to which I’ve seen when high school students approach Shakespeare for the first time.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
The novel uses its single sentence in a way that makes it an accessible and compelling read. It goes to show that it’s important to see beyond the quirks and give even the weirdest sounding books a chance.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
In ‘8 Ball Bunny’, Bugs Bunny is trying to get a cute little Penguin back to the South Pole. At several points along the journey, a man I now recognize as Humphrey Bogart approaches Bugs and asks, “Can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” As an adult who has seen the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre several times, I laugh uproariously as this parody of the movie’s opening sequence.
A Very Easy Death
What constitutes an easy death? Or a difficult one? Though her mother’s death was considered ‘easy’ by doctors, it still involved pain, suffering, and turmoil.
Richard III
Richard III is not meant to be history; it’s meant to be thought-provoking entertainment that is indeed tailored to the audience that Shakespeare wrote for.
Hiroshima
Hiroshima follows the stories of six individuals who lived through the bomb — a clerk, a seamstress, a doctor, a minister, a surgeon, and a Catholic priest initially from Germany. There are five chapters each with six sections — one for each person.
Kokoro
he plot of Kokoro centers around two characters that are never named. The first two parts of the novel consist of a young student getting to know an older man whom he refers to only as ‘Sensei’.
The Lost Weekend
The original novel of The Lost Weekend is quite different from the film. The book is even more honest and ugly, portraying addiction as not only destructive for the addict but the entire world around them.
The Enchanted Isle
If you haven’t heard of James M. Cain, you’ve most certainly heard of the films based on his work. Cain is a master at creating a feeling of disgusted disillusionment in his many horrible and fractured characters.