Making the Implicit Explicit in Literature
I was reading How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom, and in this book he states that literary critics practice their art in order to make what is implicit…
Why I Track My Reading (and What It’s Actually For)
I track every book I read. Religiously. Compulsively. Joyfully. I use Goodreads to log titles and dates. I keep an Excel spreadsheet that catalogs my entire personal library, sortable by…
Brilliant Nonfiction Books You Should Read
I hold a certain sort of reverence for nonfiction books that can manage to be engaging in the same way fiction can be … books that can strike that balance…
War and Identity in Heinlein, Haldeman, Scalzi, and Steakley
There is no shortage of war stories in science fiction. Real-world conflicts are allegorized and translated into grandiose space operas where human bodies are broken or rebuilt or reshaped or…
Why Are We Drawn to Dark Futures?
Y’know, reading the Earthseed Saga really got me thinking. There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a bookstore or scroll through Goodreads, hoping to stumble upon something interesting…
The Genre Divide
I recently read Good Morning, Midnight—a book whose journey I loved, but whose destination I found to be sorely underwhelming—and it, along with an ongoing argument with a friend, got…