Posts

I need to right this wrong, and with the final season just around the corner, now is the ideal time to read the series. A full review of the story could only enhance the Season 8 watching experience, right? But here’s the real question: Is reading all five books before the season premiere on April 14 even plausible? The books are massive, but I’ve crunched the numbers using www.howlongtoreadthis.com, and concluded that it is possible to finish all five before the mid-April deadline....

Join me as I delve into the true mystery: who was the real Sherlock Holmes? The Suspects The Author Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. In 1864 his family was scattered across Edinburgh amongst relatives and friends due to his father’s growing alcoholism, and in 1868 he was sent to a Jesuit preparatory school in Lancashire, followed by Stonyhurst College from 1870 to 1875....

We Can Save Us All is wonderfully unhinged. It follows a group of Princeton students as they’re inspired by a wealthy cult leader type to drop out of college, develop larger-than-life alter egos, and try to stave off an impending apocalypse that may or may not be real. Clearly, debut novelist Adam Nemett is juggling a lot of balls here. The book is a biting look at millennial masculinity, whose major cultural touchstones are superheroes, prescription drugs, and an absolute faith that a few smart young men (and they are mostly men) can change the world....

With full-color illustrations by The New Yorker’s Liza Donnelly, a humorous and heartfelt book that shows us that even when we’re at our worst, our dog thinks we’re the best! We have 10 copies of Be The Person Your Dog Thinks You Are by C. J. Frick with drawings by Liza Donnelly to give away to 10 Riot readers! Just complete the form below to enter. Entries are open to residents of the United States (excluding Puerto Rico and all other US territories) and will be accepted until 11:44:59 pm, November 2, 2018....

And of course, we want to talk about it with other readers who are just as passionate as we are. Here at Book Riot, we think that celebrating books and what they do in our lives is a worthy endeavor and one of the best parts of life in the literary community. So we’ve set aside today as the first Riot Reading Day in honor of Toni Morrison, an author we love, and her tenth novel, Home....

Fear not! ISBN doing some research, and I am about to explain to you exactly what those numbers on the back of your books mean. So buckle up, enjoy that pun – which, yes, I absolutely needed to make – and let me take you on a little ride down ISBN history lane. What Does ISBN Stand For And Why Do We Use It? Let’s begin at the root of the initialism: ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, and as its full name reveals, it was created with the intent to standardise the way we identify books across the world....

I wish I knew the answer. At least, knew the answer for sure. But we can look at our literature for an idea, both fiction and nonfiction. There’s the book series that was regularly compared to the current pandemic: Feed, by Seanan McGuire as Mira Grant. It was regularly heralded as being the most accurate to the real world, following beat for beat exactly how everyone responded. Seanan McGuire does her research....

The Backstory In the mid 1990s, Marvel Comics were in dire financial straits. The ‘80s had been a golden age in comic book fandom (not in comic books, that was the 1940s): older Gen X and younger Boomers were discovering that their parents had largely thrown away their comics collections, and rare comics were selling for hundreds of dollars to nostalgia-fueled buyers; old and new comics fans alike were buying comics in numbers that hadn’t been seen since the actual Golden Age of comics....

TV Adaptations That Are Better Than the Movie Brideshead Revisited It takes 659 minutes to get through this classic BBC adaptation of Brideshead, but it’s 659 minutes well spent. I love the actors in the 2009 movie (Emma Thompson!), but the plot moves at kind of a weird pace. Jeremy Irons is Charles Ryder in my mind, and that’s that. Jane Eyre This is another adaptation the BBC got absolutely right....

I understand these points of view; I just think they’re wrong. The disconnect for me comes here: preventing kids from learning about bad things doesn’t prevent them from experiencing or participating in bad things. It just leaves them defenseless to face those bad things when they happen. It leaves them without the vocabulary necessary to go to an adult and say, “A bad thing happened. I need help.” When I was in elementary and middle school, I had access to many books that I’m sure would have seemed inappropriate for my age....

Books have the power to impact us even if we don’t remember the title, author, and other details, but as my reading list has grown longer, I’ve wanted to keep those delicate scenes and magical characters closer to my heart. To do so, I’ve ended up taking notes in the notes app on my phone. It helps me process the books better and get all my feelings out, but I’ll be honest, these notes could really use an upgrade....

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors....

Here’s a reminder of why this day is so important. 📚📚📚 pic.twitter.com/NlineYZAa2 — Publishers Association (@PublishersAssoc) March 3, 2022 — Laura Lyall (@laura_pidgeon) March 3, 2022 Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

And those lists are great! Typically they consist of origin stories or one-and-done storylines that don’t intersect with their larger superhero universes very much. They don’t require prior reading or checking some wiki somewhere to understand what’s going on. They’re a great way to dip your toe into the infinitely weird superhero waters. But when you finish everything on that list…Then what? This is the reason that so many people have read one or two graphic novels featuring a superhero they enjoyed on a TV show or in a movie, and then stopped: there are beginner comics, and then there is Everything Else....

Domestic horror takes a look at suburban life, domesticity, and the family unit, and it deconstructs them. Why is that so scary? Because popular culture has idealized the nuclear family unit and the home as not only a safe space, but a place of comfort, joy, and the ultimate goal for anyone who wants to live a fulfilling life. For most people, the reality of family life is a little — okay, a lot — more complicated....

Gothic Horror We can’t begin without starting out with this cornerstone of horror fiction. The 18th century saw the rise of romanticism and with it emerged the gothic horror genre. This genre evolved into what modern literature now recognizes as horror fiction in the 19th century. Gothic horror usually combines fiction, horror, death and at times, romance. Edgar Allen Poe is credited as producing some of the most seminal works of gothic horror....

Princess Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill This graphic novel introduces the story of two princesses. One is trapped in a tower prison while the other princess is there to rescue her. Accompany them in this journey of self-discovery and to find out what happily ever after really means. Katie O’Neill’s art is truly beautiful, so this is must if you enjoy graphic novels and a very good story! Shuri, Vol....

The country was invaded by Omani Arabs in the 17th century, who then established a slave trade with Portuguese colonialists. In the 1880s, Germany established Kenya as a protectorate (a deeply colonialist word), calling the whole country the “East Africa Protectorate,” which was transferred to the British in 1890. It was renamed Kenya in 1920; from 1952 to 1959, the Mau Mau people in Kenya fought a rebellion to release the country from British rule....

Then the last few years happened, and, feeling lost, hopeless and powerless, and like the activist work I was doing meant nothing in the face of the rise of bigotry on local and global scales, I turned back to magic (I know that some witches spell it magick, but I’ve never liked that particular spelling — just personal preference). And I wasn’t alone. Helped along by Instagram and TikTok, a new wave of modern witchcraft has taken hold, with witches casting spells for everything from social justice to self care....