Posts

10 Thriller Books Like The Da Vinci Code The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Julia is a young art scholar who’s hired to restore a 15th century painting. She discovers that this painting, which depicts a chess game between the Duke of Flanders and his knight, has a small inscription in its corner: “Who killed the knight?” Although Julia never expected her career to delve into Renaissance mysteries, she finds herself searching for the murderer who killed the knight 500 years ago....

Back in another lifetime, I was a student of Latin American modern history, namely the history of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, focusing on Cuba and the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile). My undergraduate thesis was on La Firme, a Chilean Socialist Comic Book Propaganda that was trying to teach Chileans how to become good socialists. There’s an entire issue on agrarian reform. It was clever and funny. In graduate school, I explored Cuban Poster Propaganda, which is astonishingly beautiful....

What is Myers-Briggs? If you’re reading this, you probably already have a general idea of what the Myers-Briggs framework is, but just in case you don’t, here’s a quick overview: The Myers-Briggs framework consists of 16 different personality types. Each type consists of four letters: I (Introvert) or E (Extrovert), S (Sensor) or N (iNtuitive), T (Thinker) or F (Feeler), and J (Judger) or P (Perceiver). The letters describe an individual’s way of seeing and relating to the world....

The Best Christmas Poems 1. Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Remembrance of Christmas Past by Judith Viorst 3. Christmas Comes Again by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard 4. Why I Dread Christmas by Marena Koenka Let me be merry now, ’tis time; The season is at hand For Christmas rhyme and Christmas chime, Close up, and form the band. 5. For the Neighbor at Christmas by Maria Catherino 6. Singing Christmas Carols by Jack Prelutsky Excerpt: On Christmas day you show me how to seed a pomegranate...

D.C., of course, is not just the seat of power. It’s steeped in American history, of course. It’s a nexus for political protest. It’s home to a sizable African American population, increasingly pushed to the edges by gentrification. It’s also a place where people go about their lives, fall in love, have kids, study, and work in all kinds of fields. But the extensive presence of highly educated, highly ambitious, highly idealistic people seeps into every aspect of D....

There’s a reason queer people so often find a sense of connection in horror. With villains often queer-coded historically and LGBTQ people themselves demonized, it’s no wonder we can relate. And it’s no wonder we can — and do — reclaim these stories as our own. Just take Carmen Maria Machado’s recent edition of Carmilla from Lanternfish Press, full of marginalia that made the original queer subtext explicit. That’s not even to mention the wave of queer horror we’ve seen published in recent years....

Gift-giving is a love language for me. Personally, I love receiving and giving when it comes to gifts. And if I know you love reading, you bet I’m buying a book I know you will enjoy! Each month, as you know, thousands of new books get published in the world, and it’s no different in December. If you’re looking for romance books to get this December, this list is perfect for you....

It’s normal if sometimes you aren’t ready or don’t have the time to read 300- or 400-page books. (This is totally me!) But if you want to read a complete story before going to bed, short stories—explosive stories that just take some minutes of your time—are the perfect option. For whenever you have a break in your daily life, you can choose to read one of these holiday-themed short stories....

It was an interesting practice, figuring out which books should go on this list of gothy comics. Depending on who you’re talking to, there’s a certain mystique attributed to the goth subculture, and I well remember the days of Twilight when a chunk of fans in search of that vampy life flooded the clubs, did not quite find what they were looking for, and trickled out, leaving a handful of the converted (probably people who had never felt like they fit in anywhere, and who had not been particularly popular in high school) behind....

You can either find a book that has the full myth retold, or a book that is loosely inspired by those myths you know from childhood. These books showcase some of that and some of the other, but it’s a fact that they will give you nostalgic emotions, reminding you of when someone told you about the story, about the legends told from mouth to mouth, of creatures that were so fantastic you thought them unreal....

Nonfiction Comics on Hoopla Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Phoebe Kobabe (Colorist) If you only read one of these comics, please make it Gender Queer. Maia Kobabe shares eir story as it relates to gender, from taking eir shirt off at the beach to enduring the trauma of a pap smear. E battles with figuring out eir gender and how to identify with one or the other when e realizes: Nonbinary is indeed an option!...

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews This fiction title written to emulate a travel writing memoir follows a young British woman dedicated to changing the stereotype of “The Great Male Explorer.” It sets out to cross an ocean and continent to Alaska as both a personal journey and a documentary project. Defined as a feminist Into the Wild, Andrews creates a story so captivating that you lose any sense of fiction around the story....

To coax the Very Hungry Caterpillar into tasting the unfamiliar, we might want to read him a few stories featuring delectable dishes from around the world. (This might work with any picky eaters at home too!) These 10 books will definitely get him drooling and ready to eat: Hot, Hot Roti for Dada-ji by F. Zia Aneel’s dada-ji (grandfather) is full of wild and fantastical tales, and in one of them, he describes eating fluffy puffy roti....

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire “Jacqueline was her mother’s perfect daughter—polite and quiet, always dressed as a princess. If her mother was sometimes a little strict, it’s because crafting the perfect daughter takes discipline. Jillian was her father’s perfect daughter—adventurous, thrill-seeking, and a bit of a tom-boy. He really would have preferred a son, but you work with what you’ve got. They were five when they learned that grown-ups can’t be trusted....

The City Inside, a near-future epic by the internationally celebrated Samit Basu, pulls no punches as it comes for your anxieties about society, government, the environment, and our world at large—yet never loses sight of the hopeful potential of the future.A highly anticipated 2022 release for Polygon | The Nerd Daily | BookBub | The Portalist“They’d known the end times were coming but hadn’t known they’d be multiple choice.” A long time ago, I was a paranormal romance reader....

1. There Are Actually 3 Men Named Alexandre Dumas 2. He Has A Google Doodle On the anniversary of the original publication of the first installment of The Count of Monte Cristo, Google’s home page featured a lovely Doodle celebrating Dumas! The art and design are by Google Art Director Matt Cruickshank. 3. He Had Four Illegitimate Children (That We Know Of) Dumas married actress Ida Ferrier in 1840 and they remained married until her death in 1849....

10 things you should know about the Codex Gigas, or The Devil’s Bible The Devil’s Bible is 36 inches tall, 20 inches wide, and 8.7 inches thick. The Devil’s Bible contains 310 pages made from vellum from 160 donkeys. Originally, The Devil’s Bible contained 320 pages, but at some point in time the last ten pages were cut out and removed from the book. The Devil’s Bible weighs 165 lbs....

Pleasing Persephone by Mimi Milan (July 2) Mimi Milan has a treat for us this summer. Pleasing Persephone takes the Hades and Persephone myth and gives it to us in an original way. Desi Sagona has accidentally discover a lost scroll and because of that discovery, she is now traveling to Persephone Island. When the excavation site collapses, Desi finds herself buried inside. But the scroll does magical things and she will find many things inside that place....

at Bitch: BitchReads: 7 YA Books Feminists Should Read in March at Brightly: 21 Woof-tastic Children’s Books About Dogs at Bustle: 12 Genre-Bending Books To Read After Watching Behind Her Eyes at BuzzFeed: 27 Spring Books We Couldn’t Put Down at Crime Reads: 6 Deliciously Duplicitous Female Characters in Thrillers at Electric Lit: 7 Books That Show the Full Breadth of the Adoption Experience at Epic Reads: 26 Books That Are Fantastic Conclusions to Series… If You Want to Look Ahead at Inc: 12 New Books That Will Make You Smarter, According to Adam Grant at Independent: 12 Best Indian Novels That Everyone Needs to Read at Lit Hub: Unrequited Love and Unmet Obsession: A Reading List at POPSUGAR: From The Kiss Quotient to The Ex Talk, Here Are 11 Asian-American Love Stories to Read at Riveted Lit: 6 Amazing Books That Feature Prom at Sierra Club: 14 Fabulous Contemporary Lady Nature Writers at Variety: From Lupita Nyong’o to Lil Nas X: Must-Read Children’s Books Written by Celebrities

But what started me on my quest was my experience last autumn. For a month, I experienced steadily worsening symptoms of chest pain, headache, blurriness of vision, difficulty concentrating, heart pounding that got worse when I tried to sleep, and weariness. I was told that it was lack of exercise, allergies, anxiety, my anxiety medication. It took my psychiatrist intervening and sending me to a cardiologist to finally discover my problem: pericarditis, a condition of the sac that surrounds the heart, and one that has potentially dangerous complications....