Book #133 of 2021: Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher (William Shakespeare’s Star Wars #4) This book is built around a cute idea, but once you get past that basic gimmick of retelling the first Star Wars movie in iambic pentameter — “In time so long ago begins our play / In …
Continue reading “Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher”
Book #220 of 2020: Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley Any new rendition of Beowulf is an achievement, but this modernized and feminist approach to the Old English epic is particularly exciting. Author Maria Dahvana Headley has retained the poetic structures of the original, with its internal rhymes, alliterations, and kennings, but she …
Continue reading “Book Review: Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley”
Book #231 of 2019: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate I have a newfound appreciation for actress Jenny Slate’s command of figurative language, but I confess that this collection of her writing is too disjointed for me. I think I was expecting either essays or short stories from the book, when in fact most of its …
Continue reading “Book Review: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate”
Book #129 of 2017: The Dark Man by Stephen King This illustrated poem is more atmospheric than substantive, an early character sketch of the figure who would eventually grow to be Stephen King’s recurring villain Randall Flagg. King wrote the poem when he was in college – well before Flagg would first pop up in …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Dark Man by Stephen King”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more