It took me a year to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I started it last October and got really bored and then the season passed. This year, I finished it, but not without some pushing. Dracula is a classic of Gothic horror, an original in many senses and the bulwark of the vampire genre. I thought…
If you like easy, breezy reading in a specific genre that includes monster mash-ups and mysteries, then look no further than Christian Klaver and his The Classified Dossier series. Filled with characters from Victorian, gothic literature/classic horror stories, the novel is both a throw-back to old-style mysteries and a very modern style of storytelling that…
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline arced brilliantly over the book world when it was published in 2010, not long after Cline’s first screenplay, Fanboys, went to screen. Ready Player One was full of fresh and exciting concepts, was as close to home as sci-fi gets, and was saturated with geeky references to 1980s pop…
“…and now is the chance that we may live and learn.” -Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.” –Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
It’s that time of year again here on The Starving Artist and also in the writing world. Sure, I know plenty of writers don’t participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)—some of you even thumb your noses at the idea—but we are supportive of Nano, so there. And I know that Nano is in November,…
The truth is, I can’t always have a book in front of my face. Sometimes I do things like drive, and reading a physical novel while driving would be dangerous. I discourage it, for the record. So, in steps podcasts. While I am not the world’s biggest fan of audiobooks, I will listen to them…
A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a writing podcast (Write-Minded) and there was an interview with an author (Tzivia Gover) who uses dreams to write (and teaches classes on using your dreams to write). In the course of the interview, the interviewer and interviewee touched on the subject of writer’s block, a subject…
Go to a public place, like a coffee shop or a garden. Eavesdrop on people’s conversations. Takes notes or sketch and when you have an idea, write the person’s story (even if it’s just a snapshot moment). You can also do this around your own home if you live with any people or even pets.…
“…and it fell out with me, as it falls with so cast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep it.” -Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Did you know that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (technically Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is a short story? A novella, at best? The version I read (a trade paperback volume by Signet Classics containing an introduction by Stephen King and also Dracula and Frankenstein) runs to 75 pages. Which makes this…
I have started to do some regular posts in order to 1) beef up the posts on The Starving Artist and 2) be more clear about what The Starving Artist is. One of these regular posts is “The Artist Recommends,” which will be posted before seasons, holidays, sometimes months or new years… Just to give…
I do not prefer the epistolary form, and I am wary about having two authors on a book cover, as well, so The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows had two knocks against it from the beginning. But I had liked the movie. So one knock for.…
Finally, a Neil Gaiman book that really agrees with me. Everyone else seems to admire his work so assiduously, but me… it either wasn’t my flavor (American Gods) or I thought it was not very good (The Ocean at the End of the Lane). While I had no idea what was coming to me with…
This is a book for writers. I suppose it could also be a book for readers, especially those in the academic, literary criticism vein. At any rate, it had been zinging across my path like a ping pong ball, for something like a year, as every writer around me read it and talked about it…
I went into Shadow and Bone with very high expectations. Written after Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows series but meant to be a prequel of sorts (though including none of the same characters), I figured this would be at least as good as Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (the duology). I was a little…
YOU HURT MY FEELINGS I am quite behind on my posts, here, due to some major life changes. And the summer is always busier than one anticipates, isn’t it? But back in the early summer, my husband and I went to the theater to see a smaller movie titled You Hurt My Feelings. Since it…
Never Let Me Go is science fiction, British, and YA (even though it is frequently also read and enjoyed by grow-ups). It is also written by a widely lauded author (Kazuo Ishiguro) and seems to always be around, “your next read.” But while I expected to like this book as much as, say, The Perks…
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry was pretty popular, for a little time anyhow: another book floating down the stream of famous people memoir/exposes that rose to the top for one reason or another. Since Friends was one of the most popular TV series of all time and Perry’s battles with…
While catching up with reviews, I am surprised that this is still in queue; I feel like I wrote and posted it already. But from my notes and memory, I will let you know that while Colleen Hoover and It Ends with Us is gracing the window dressing of bookstores across America, I was not…
the starving artist 