Back to Blog
Faithful place dublin7/2/2023 ![]() ![]() Then there was the compelling atmosphere. Overall, despite his flaws, I was mostly cheering for him. ![]() So some of his jerkdom is just really a hard outer shell that he has cultivated over the years. He’s the narrator and regularly claims not to care about certain things but then acts in ways that show that he really does, in fact, care. On the flip side, he’s a good father to his young daughter, clearly loved Rosie in a very unselfish way, and demonstrates flashes of tenderness, charm and remorse. Examples of jerkiness – he intimidates a woman with threatened violence, manipulates a rookie cop into committing a big ethics violation, and ignores one of his brothers when he obviously needs help. He’s 2/3 jerk and 1/3 likable and relatable. This is probably one of the most complex characters I’ve seen in recent memory. As he delves into this 22-year-old cold case, the facts take him very close to home.įirst let me talk about Frank. This isn’t Frank’s case to solve, but he launches his own investigation, anyway. That’s confirmed when they find Rosie’s remains buried in the basement of the abandoned house. Upon examining the suitcase, it becomes apparent that Rosie didn’t leave town that long ago night. He’s quickly reminded of why he’s been estranged for two decades. Reluctantly, Frank returns home and quickly gets drawn back into toxic family dynamics. Now, 22 years later, Rosie’s packed suitcase is found in one of the neighborhood’s abandoned houses. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Back to Blog
The Book of Songs by Stephen Owen7/2/2023 ![]() This book contains Arthur Waley's translation of the bulk of the songs along with his comments. I imagine reading a song like Greensleeves in translation and without the music. Add to this the difficulty of translating lyrics, where it is almost impossible to preserve rhythm, rhyme, sound, and it doesn't surprise me that I found the English renditions rather flat. Although they arose from songs, the music has been lost. Now classed as poetry, the original versions derived from songs: folk songs, songs from rituals, ceremonial songs - some of them perhaps courtship songs with men and women singing in call and response, some of them perhaps accompanied by dance as well as music. ![]() I knew little about this prior to reading the book, and I apologize for any mistakes I've made in my comments. They are presented in the order they appeared in the classic edition known as the Mao version. These songs/poems held a huge importance in Confucianism and in Chinese literature. ![]() "The Book of Songs" is the oldest of the Chinese classics, a collection of 305 songs that date back over two thousand years to the Zhou kingdom. ![]()
Back to Blog
It Gets Better by Dan Savage7/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Therefore, I will examine other approaches that I find more suitable I will look into Weingarten’s human Interconnectedness views about hope and ‘doing hope’, as a key to understand the emergence of the It Gets Better movement and its role in mobilizing the LGBTQ+ community to help the young generation to vision hope, future, life. ![]() It should be linked into a broader context of family, community, and nation. I believe that in order to understand these tragic fatalities of suicide, it is not enough to examine hope on the individual level. I will question Snyder’s (and group) Hope Theory in relation to the social negative conditions experienced by LGBTQ+ youth at that time and today. I will analyze Seligman’s learned helplessness and aversive stimuli concepts (Maier & Seligman, 1976) in regard to the community in concern. In this paper, I will briefly tell the story of the It Gets Better movement and their hope campaign as a response to the eleven teen suicides in the Fall of 2010. The It Gets Better movement – led by Dan Savage, an author, columnist, and a journalist – emerged in the United States in late 2010 as an attempt to bring the LGBTQ+ adolescents’ suicide ‘epidemic’ taking place in the social media to an immediate halt. ![]()
Back to Blog
The goblin emperor book7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Crowned Emperor mostly because he’s smart enough to realize that if he’s not before someone objects then he’s likely to become a loose end, Maia proceeds to deal with all of the issues of running a government despite the fact that he was never properly educated on how. ![]() The premise is that the Emperor of Elfland has been killed alongside all but one of his heirs: Maia, the half-goblin Prince that was banished to the outskirts of the Empire from the day he was born. The two races may be elves and goblins but they are wholly unlike their traditional depictions in fantasy. It is a little steampunk, a little Netflix’s THE CROWN, and a bit of GAME OF THRONES on top but remarkably nonviolent or falling on traditional fantasy tropes. I am regretful of this because this is a book that reads easily, was consistently entertaining, and is wholly unlike the vast majority of fantasy that I have read. THE GOBLIN EMPEROR by Katherine Addison is a book that I’ve had on my TBR list for some time but never quite got around to actually reading. ![]()
Back to Blog
Bridge of souls city of ghosts 37/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Bridge of Souls (City of Ghosts, #3) by Victoria Schwab And the city's biggest surprise is a foe Cass never expected to face: a servant of Death itself.Cass takes on her most dangerous challenge yet. ![]() In a city of ghost tours and tombs, raucous music and all kinds of magic, Cass could get lost in all the colourful, grisly local legends. After all, she and her ghost best friend, Jacob, have survived two haunted cities while travelling for her parents' TV show.But nothing can prepare Cass for New Orleans, which wears all of its hauntings on its sleeve. unless it's the other way around?Cass thinks she might have this ghost-hunting thing down. Where there are ghosts, Cassidy Blake follows. Read Online and Download Bridge of Souls (City of Ghosts, #3). ![]()
Back to Blog
Just One Day by Gayle Forman7/1/2023 ![]() Except Allyson and friend Mel, in an uncharacteristic act of rebellion, decide to give Hamlet a miss (seen it before) and head off to a free performance of Twelfth Night by alternative company, Guerrilla Will, over by the canal basin. That one day begins in Stratford-on-Avon where earnest, hard-working Allyson Healey, just graduated from High School, is completing a ‘Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza’ whistle-stop trip around Europe, a reward from Mom and Dad for her good grades. All that’s left is the opening of just one year, the sequel and three pages of Acknowledgements which are so fulsome and personal you’d prefer not to know. ![]() Finally, from p293 onwards, we return with her to Paris and thence to the Netherlands to sort out the impact of that single day. Then, from pp143 – 292, we join her in her freshman college year, where the day’s events hang over her. ![]() The title tells only half the story, for our American heroine records a momentous 24 hours in England and Paris which finishes painfully on p142. ![]()
Back to Blog
Pandemic sonia shah review7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Written by the award winning investigative science journalist, Sonia Shah and first published in the United States by Sarah Crichton Books in 2016 (yes, well before the COVID 19 catastrophe hit us), the book went on to garner glowing reviews and is even recommended as ‘required reading’ by The New York Review of Books. ![]() “But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”Īlbert Camus’ matter-of-fact quote describing the hellish episode in history is found below a clinical definition of the word pandemic, on the opening page of this tome, aptly setting the bleak tone of an exhaustive narrative on the global crisis that our world is still reeling under. ![]() |