I really need to read that. I keep picking it up and getting so invested in reading a novel about baking that I'm disappointed when the vampires show up. Basically, the beginning is so great that I just reread it over and over again.

I love that Skal book. I need to get a copy of it. He does a really good job giving both a general overview and some very specific and memorable anecdotes.

His short stories (especially The Martian Chronicles) were very popular with me and my friends in early high school, and the ones that were assigned in class also met with widespread approval: this would have been in 2002-2004 or so.

"The Small Assassin" is so great: in a genre crowded with fairly good examples of stories about parents (rightfully or not) being afraid of their children, it's my favorite, and it's the one that rings truest, because surely everything, from the non-stop crying on, feels a little like personal vitriol on the part of…

SPOILERS FOR THE HISTORIAN

After an awesome reading month in September, I've been having a kind of lackluster October. However, that is not the fault of the two extraordinary horror novellas I read for the Halloween season: Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall and Stephen Volk's Leytonstone. Wylding Hall is an eerie faux-oral history of a British…

Yeah, the news is fair, I just think the potshots aren't necessary. Cronenberg didn't eviscerate it, he just didn't like it, and this article seems to have been posted not to say he could have done it but to revel in a shared dislike.

(For anyone else's reference, I edited the King/Mad Men bit out.) While it's certainly uncomfortable to want someone to direct your work and have them reject it—and while, yeah, the producers of Mad Men were probably in no way beating down King's door asking them for a script, although that would be an entertainingly…

I'm scratching my head a little over why "artist considers doing project, doesn't like it, doesn't do it" is producing an Newswire this darkly gleeful when there's essentially no media project that doesn't involve differing opinions of artistic merit and someone backing out. We can be better than this! Even if you…

Awesome! I hope you like them. I'm really hoping there's a sixties/seventies set in the future.

I always liked Eilonwy (also, this is a casual reminder to my family that the complete Prydain set is still on my wish list) and I think she's a good way of handling this. As you say, she craves adventure and chafes at the artificial limitations she's given, but she's dismissive of any useful skill. Actually, the…

I should get to Where'd You Go, Bernadette this weekend, and I'm really excited about it. And that's really unpleasant about Queen of the Tearlings: I'm really not a fan of books that aren't so much "girl power" as "girls can have power as long as they don't like anything traditionally girly." Come on, YA authors,…

Everything I've heard about A Little Life sounds so excellent. And there's no better compliment than "long, but absolutely earns its length."

We Believe the Children sounds fascinating, and this is the final mention of it that's pushing me to put it on my library list for once and for all.

I'm currently deeply immersed in Margaret Millar's brilliant Beast in View as part of Sarah Weinman's new Library of America Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, a collection so awesome and essential, I've been reading it without pause and should finish the seventh novel (the Millar)…

LONESOME DOVE SPOILERS

Ooh, I loved that Paul Chaat Smith book. One of the best uses I've ever made of interlibrary loan.

There's a really great narrative poem about the Mau Mau uprising: The Broken Word, by Adam Foulds. It's about a college-aged British student who finds himself involved in the brutal violence of suppression on his summer break, and it has a lot of punch.

Currently in the middle of the first volume of Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: I've read volumes six, seven, and eight and am now ducking backwards. So far this one is amazing, especially Ellen Klages's warm, lovely "In the House of the Seven Librarians."

I reread the first one for a children's librarianship class and while I didn't really notice the lack of supervision, the lines, "Mr. Alden liked boys. He liked watching them run and jump" have… not aged well.