Get Lost in Literature

“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.” ― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale The above painting was discovered in the Lascaux cave in France. It portrays two bulls, a handful of tiny red deer at the bottom, and in the center, a horse. This painting is estimated to be about 17,000 years old. Which confirms what I already suspected: We've been obsessed with horses for a very long time. (I certainly have been.) And maybe they haven't been appearing in books for as long as we've been painting them, but they've been appearing in books for quite a while. They're portrayal in literature is unsurprisingly memorable. Some books were written to convey major themes, like Black Beauty by Anna Sewell meant to remind us of animal welfare, or War Horse by Michael Morpurgo which has long been hailed as anti-war propaganda important enough to have been made into b...

 “We are the universe watching itself, watching and learning.” ― Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Today's bookish topic is galactic... More specifically, our desire to be amongst the stars.  It's a desire on everybody's mind, more often than we care to admit. It was why Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a feat that seemed too fantastic, so people called it a hoax. It's why when we imagine the apocalypse, be it zombies or global warming, we imagine a space station or alien planet capable of supporting life after earth. It's why private space companies emerged after NASA, with billionaire entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson building their own spacecrafts, one of which looked comically like a male body part. And it's absolutely why the concepts of space-tourism and privatized space flight are so popular, even if the 'common people' probably won't be able to afford it. And although this is a book blog, I would be remiss if I...

  “It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us.” - N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season Let's talk about favorites today. via GIPHY I'm sorry if the giant Mamoa-making-heart-sign-gif is too much, I got excited thinking about my favorites. ( To be fair, I did try to shrink it, but resizing wouldn't stick. ) If you asked fifty people off the street what their favorite book is, they'll more likely than not, give you different answers. That doesn't make a single one of them wrong, not even if your answer to the same question is different from theirs. And the question, what makes a favorite a favorite, is equally subjective both to the individual being asked and the circumstances around the book. The first thing that stands out to me in any book, are the characters. They're the ones telling the story, regardless of setting or plot, so they better be good. The second thing that stands out to me is the setting... If I'm going to go on a proper...

"Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind." Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife  E is for Encyclopedia. An Encyclopedia is a collection of knowledge - history, science, art, people, whatever you want to know - hard bound, organized by alphabet and number, sitting shiny on a bookshelf. The dictionary, predates them, inspired them. A dictionary tells you what a word or topic is, but an encyclopedia explains it. Encyclopedias used to be a staple in most households and remain so in libraries. They're great for research, dependably true and easily citable.  If this sounds a lot like Wikipedia, it is and it isn't. They were the inspiration for Wikipedia, and for many 'modern' digital encyclopedias, but they are unalterable after publication, facts embedded in ink on paper. Wikipedia is open source, meaning anyone can publish an entry or alter one. The internet offers us all the knowledge we could ever want, but at a price: Everything you read on the inter...

Happy Sunday! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your weekend. The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer . I'm also linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz . I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. That super ridiculous amount of snow we got hit with last month is already gone. We had a heat wave, the temperature spiking from 30 to 70 almost overnight paired with a couple rainy days, and 30-something inches of snow just vanished. But the week of warmth gave way to cold weather again, just as quickly as it came...But Spring is here and the warm weather won't be far behind. My blog is finally getting a little more action; that is to say I've been posting again and gone back to responding to comments. The A-Z Challenge has finally begun, and while I enjoy blog hopping, I'm a little wowed to think of how much prep-work I put in for it to all be over in a month. The idea for this year's challenge...

 “There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.” Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card Dystopia - an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic. Science fiction often likes to bring us visions of the future. Flying among the stars, robots, cloning, utopias... But dystopia has really taken off in recent years, providing us with visions of the future where humanity is struggling to survive or the government has taken away our rights and imposed cruel and sometimes unusual laws upon us. Sometime there are monsters, sometimes there's disease. It's become so popular there is now an end of the world scenario for almost everyone. For young adults there's Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, where the government has created a superficial world where teens are forced to undergo plastic surgery, and the wildly popular The Hunger Games by ...