![]() ![]() Without being overly sentimental, Winterson’s stories ride a line that embodies the optimism of the season contrasted with the deeper, pagan roots of the winter solstice. Regardless, Christmas Days-a collection of 12 shorts with accompanying recipes-embodies compelling aspects of the holiday. I’m closer to the unreformed Charlie Brown who didn’t fall for Linus’s speech. I don’t take to Winterson’s optimism as tightly as I would like. In pagan and Roman times it was a celebration of the power of light and the co-operation of nature in human life.Īgain, I’m a sucker for the season, but I hold to my own conflicted outlook. It is a joining together, a putting aside of differences. Christmas is celebrated across the world by people of all religions and none. I know Christmas has become a cynical retail hijack bit it is up to us all, individually and collectively, to object to that. As she writes in the first entry of Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days, she still holds onto the nobler aspects of the occasion despite the sinister motivations of corporate overlords: Jeanette Winterson is equally susceptible to the tug of yuletide. Despite all of this, there still are the usual Christmas trappings of family, food, and that nonsense about peace on Earth and good will towards all. Or, perhaps, the elongated break I get between fall and spring semesters as an educator. It largely has to do with the winter weather. ![]() Like many people, I am a huge sucker for this time of year. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ‘It gives me a real kick watching every male head turn when you walk by.’ ‘Most men stare at beautiful women…and you are exquisitely beautiful, my love,’ Paul murmured in a low, intimate tone, reaching for her slender-boned hand. ‘That man in the corner is staring at me!’ Leah bent her silver-blonde head, her face flushed and taut. You’re on the wrong side of town to be seen.’ ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get away.’ Short of breath, Leah dropped down on to a seat and couldn’t help spinning another glance around in fearful search of a familiar face. He stood up as she approached, tall, sophisticated and very attractive, and her heart swelled with pride. It was a relief to espy Paul’s golden head in a far corner. She was so terrified of being seen, recognised. A nervous tremor shot through her as she burrowed through the male clusters. ![]() She wasn’t tall enough to see past the clumps of business-suited men standing around. It was dark and crowded with lunchtime drinkers. WITH A FLEETING glance over her shoulder, Leah hurried down the steps and into the wine bar. ![]() ![]() ![]() Or, as in Heaven’s River, a billion miles. After all, for any given diameter, a length of ten miles isn’t any more of an engineering challenge that one mile. Think of a topopolis as an O’Neill cylinder stretched to a ridiculous length. But with a single cylinder, you can enter and exit through the ends, preferably along the axis where there’s no pseudo-gravity. In order to keep the outer shell and the inner cylinder from touching, we place magnetic bearings in the gap. We make it non-rotating and separate from the cylinder so that it doesn’t place a load on the cylinder. So stick a non-rotating shell around the cylinder, made of rock or other friable material, to absorb meteor impacts. And like Johanssen said in The Martian, we need air to not die. ![]() ![]() One good meteor punch and all the air drains out of the cylinder. That’s great, but possibly a little exposed. There are different designs for introducing light into the cylinder, but the one used in Heaven’s River is a fusion-powered light source on a structure that runs down the center of the cylinder. An O’Neill cylinder, at its most basic, is just a large drum, rotating around its axis to create centrifugal pseudo-gravity on the inside surface. ![]() I’ve seen a few comments that Heaven’s River is not sufficiently well described in the book, so I’ve put together this post to describe it in more detail.įirst, let’s start with an O’Neill cylinder, something most people are far more familiar with. If you haven’t read the book yet, best stop now. ![]() ![]() Nell Zink writes like this, and so do Helen DeWitt and Alexandra Kleeman and Tony Tulathimutte. But they’re knitted so airily throughout that they also feel like advertisements. Moshfegh’s stories end with heavy clangs, which makes them feel like fables. ![]() But it is a very postmodern thing to do, because no body is blank and healthy and symbolically normal in real life. ![]() This is not a very modern thing to do, because it is cheap and sadistic. Moshfegh repeatedly subjects the human body to extreme experiences: miscarried pregnancies, intellectual disability, eating disorders. The overall effect is of an ancient fairytale performed by bad television actors, the kind who seem to be makeup all the way through. Like her peers-Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Alexandra Kleeman-Moshfegh writes characters who shrink big feelings into flat utterances, the kind of disaffected tone that feels born of the internet and its mechanisms for emotional distance. her stories exploit the fun, singsong qualities of storytelling while peddling a manic savagery that doesn’t fit the medium. ![]() ![]() ![]() She then tries to sell Cinderella to get her far away from the kingdom. In this version, Lady Tremaine keeps Cinderella from trying on the shoe, and no talking mice save her. What I Loved: The premise of this Cinderella retelling is what would happen if Cinderella had never tried on the glass slipper when the duke was sent to find the mysterious girl from the ball? The answer to the question is that a much better story happens! What I continue to enjoy in all these twisted tales is the chance for the characters to actually have some meaningful interactions before true love is declared and it ends in a wedding. ![]() ![]() before it’s too late.įor more twisted adventures, try the other books in the A TWISTED TALE series: Faced with questions of love and loyalty to the kingdom, Cinderella must find a way to stop the villains of past and present. ![]() But when the Grand Duke appoints her to serve under the king’s visiting sister, Cinderella becomes witness to a grand conspiracy to take the king―and the prince―out of power, as well as a longstanding prejudice against fairies, including Cinderella’s own Fairy Godmother. Unable to prove that she’s the missing princess, and unable to bear life under Lady Tremaine any longer, Cinderella attempts a fresh start, looking for work at the palace as a seamstress. The 9th installment in the New York Times best-selling A TWISTED TALE series asks: What if Cinderella never tried on the glass slipper? ![]() ![]() But the biggest problem with the story was the pacing. ![]() The concept and execution in this book are so divorced as to bear no relation to one another. The utter wrongness of it, the way it won’t fit in my head, keeps coming back to me again and again, as if I’ve only just read it. Honestly, there has to be some fundamental law of the universe against sequels that don’t live up to their prequels, and if there isn't, I want it written somewhere that I am conscientiously objecting. I loved Warcross, and it floored me to read this book and experience such a sudden shift-I feel as though a script had been shuffled and I’d been handed the wrong pages. It’s just…the kind of book you read, and it fills you with the wrong things: you use a lot of energy to get through each chapter, and in the end, you feel emptier than ever before. ![]() Finishing this book was a personal achievement but you can’t really brag about that at dinner parties. ![]() ![]() Can they trust this Rian who claims to have enough Moonflower to trade with them for Kandala steel. + With the new characters come a new set of problems and political intrigue/suspicions for Harristan and Corrick. ![]() I was like, move aside Corrick…Rian is confident, he is a leader, and patient, which I love. + The story picks up right after events in book one but I love that we have new characters, and one very intriguing Captain Blackmore/Rian. It doesn’t matter because I think there was enough new elements to make this feel like the story was moving – I was hooked! The writing is tight and flows well, it moves quickly even though parts of the book feel more like a filler. + I didn’t mean to finish this book in one night, but I did. ![]() I have to say this series is addictive! I loved book one and getting to know Corrick and Tessa – there was so much political intrigue in that one. ![]() ![]() In this summary of The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Learn about the different parts and functions of your child’s brain and pick up lots of useful advice on how to make them work together. This very process is what this book summary are about. So, it’s your task as a parent to help your child explore the newer functions of her brain – such as its reasoning ability – and show her how to use these capabilities along with more familiar properties of the brain. ![]() Of course, children don’t choose to eschew important functions of their brain the problem is that brain functions develop at different speeds, and, as a result, your child isn’t always entirely familiar with each one. ![]() Few of us would choose to stand on just one leg if we can use both.īut strangely, many of us – especially children – use only some of our brain’s capacity to deal with life’s challenges. ![]() ![]() Will the truths her father has been hiding save the people Pao loves, or destroy them? ![]() Pao's search for her father will send her far from home, where she will encounter new monsters and ghosts, a devastating betrayal, and finally, the forest of her nightmares. And when Dante's abuela falls mysteriously ill, it seems that the dad Pao never knew just might be the key to healing the eccentric old woman. Even more troubling? At their center is her estranged father, an enigma of a man she barely remembers. Pao has no one to tell that she's having nightmares again, this time set in a terrifying forest. Even with her chupacabra puppy, Bruto, around, Pao can't escape the feeling that she's all alone in the world. She is barely speaking to her best friends, Dante and Emma, and what's worse, her mom has a totally annoying boyfriend. Six months after Paola Santiago confronted the legendary La Llorona, life is nothing like she'd expected it to be. ![]() "Paola is a brilliant, furious girl who often trusts her brain but trips over her heart."-Sarah Gailey, Hugo and Locus award-winning author of River of Teeth Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents the sequel to Tehlor Kay Mejia's critically acclaimed own-voices novel about science-obsessed Paola Santiago. ![]() ![]() But the thought of another man putting his hands on Riley is more than Sam can handle, and soon he’s agreeing to one night with New York’s resident sexpot. Sam shouldn’t even consider her proposition: to have a one-night stand in the name of research. But as his best friend’s little sister, she’s also completely off-limits. Now Riley is about to call in the favor of a lifetime from the one man who’s always held her heart.Sam Compton knows two things about Riley McKenna: She’s the only woman for him. But when Stiletto’s fiftieth anniversary issue requires her column to get a lot more personal, Riley is forced to confront a long-hidden secret: Her own sexual experience is limited to one awkward college encounter. Her articles in Stiletto magazine are the publication’s most scandalous-and the most read. ![]() ![]() all night long.Riley McKenna knows sex-good sex, bad sex, kinky sex. ![]() In Lauren Layne’s sizzling Sex, Love & Stiletto series, New York’s hottest “sexpert” has been living a lie-and it’s up to one man to keep her honest. ![]() |