Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been out for a week of public consumption now, and there have been reviews, a lot of them very positive. I’ve even written my own spoiler-free review, and I’m planning to write a more spoilery one after I see the movie again tomorrow. Incidentally, this review will likely contain spoilers and … [Read more…]
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is a story about a boy, Ged, and his experiences as he becomes a wizard. At one point during his education, Ged accidentally releases a shadow-spirit from the underworld and spends the rest of the novel alternately hiding from, running from, and chasing after it. It’s not until the end of … [Read more…]
So, I’m home from Mythmoot III, where yesterday I presented my paper on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Overall, I think it went pretty well. Twenty minutes always goes by fast. I spent a little too much time on the setup rather than my argument and examples, but I was at … [Read more…]
In the midseason finale of The Walking Dead, Beth dies after Rick and the gang had (they thought) successfully managed a hostage negotiation with Dawn. After hostages are traded – Beth and Carol for two of Dawn’s police officers – Dawn predictably and despotically demands that Noah, the ward whom Beth had replaced and who … [Read more…]
In my last post I noted that Ruth Graham’s argument distinguishing young adult fiction from more weighty stories is a perennial lamentation made by stalwarts of Literature. In a previous iteration last December, Terry Teachout descried the critical attention being given to “pop culture” over “high art,” and in my response I showed that such … [Read more…]
Everything new is old, as evinced by Ruth Graham’s recent Slate article admonishing adults who read “young adult” (YA) fiction. Her basic argument is that books like The Fault in Our Stars “could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers,” and that such replacements are inferior to … [Read more…]