Kevin Singer's Blog, page 6
August 25, 2018
Classic Lit Challenge 4: Pride and Prejudice
After this post I’m expecting hordes of furious Jane Austen fans at my door. So when I was at the used book sale I spied Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice. Of course I’m familiar with Austen. She’s one of the biggies. She basically invented the romance genre. And who doesn’t love the movie Clueless […]
August 7, 2018
Classic Lit Challenge 3: All Quiet on the Western Front
A few months after my father was killed, my mother purged a ton of his books, so when I was at her house searching for something to read, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the bookshelves were as bare as a Venezuelan supermarket. All I found were a few religious books, some non-fiction war […]
August 3, 2018
Classic Lit Challenge, Episode 2: Ethan Frome
Ethan Who?? As I write this I’m listening to Nine Inch Nails — The Day The World Went Away. It fits the mood I was in when I picked up Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, and the song’s constrained brutality fits the mood of the book. I was in a “whole world went away” kind […]
July 28, 2018
Classic Lit Challenge, Episode 1: The Left Hand of Darkness
It’s been a rough couple of months in my world. To deal with the turbulence I’ve turned inside myself. I pulled back from the real world, mainly because I can’t take the triviality, the overload. That might not make sense, but there’s not much else to explain. I need some other focus. Television and movies […]
July 9, 2017
Watch This Movie: The Girl With All The Gifts
You think every zombie story has been told? Well then you haven’t seen The Girl With All The Gifts. First off, HUGE DISCLAIMER, this started out as an acclaimed book by M. R. Carey, one that I haven’t read. Instead I took the lazy way out and saw the movie. No excuse, but there it […]
February 4, 2017
Rogue One: The Second-Best Star Wars Movie
If you’re a Star Wars fan, then you’ve seen Rogue One, the latest film in the franchise and a sort of standalone movie. (If you’re a Star Wars fan and have NOT seen Rogue One, then you’re not a fan — sorry.) I went into the viewing with low expectations. Why the hell would they […]
August 17, 2016
Wuthering Heights? Vampires? Of Course!
I read Emily Bronte’s one and only novel Wuthering Heights back in high school, and it’s a book that stuck with me all these years. Why? I’m not into romance, or English period dramas, so those weren’t the draws. Instead, it was the strangeness of it all. There was something weird about the book, something […]
Wuthering Heights and Vampires
I read Emily Bronte’s one and only novel Wuthering Heights back in high school, and it’s a book that stuck with me all these years. Why? I’m not into romance, or English period dramas, so those weren’t the draws. Instead, it was the strangeness of it all. There was something weird about the book, something […]
August 3, 2016
Sensuality, Shakespeare and Stranger Things
Where the hell has Winona Ryder been? Like half my friends, I just finished binge-watching Netflix’s Stranger Things, an eight-part sci-fi/horror series that’s partly a homage to the 1980s. Overall it was very good, both addicting and entertaining, once I was able to slide into the story. A lot has been made of the fact […]
May 12, 2016
Friday’s Top Five
Here’s the countdown: 5. Say Hello to the Aliens! Thanks to a fantastical machine that would leave its namesake believing in witchcraft, NASA’s Kepler space telescope has pinpointed more than 1,200 new planets in the universe. It’s been estimated there are BILLIONS of planets (I think it was Carl Sagan who said that). So far we’ve […]
