Hello!

-
Hello and welcome to blog!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Annihilation and Anxiety

-
Jeff VanderMeers' novel, Annihilation, does an excellent job in depicting what anxiety feels like and dealing with human-kinds fear of the unknown. It does an especially good job at making you feel perpetual uneasiness by never identifying any of the characters by name, making it even easier for you to project yourself onto them and their fear. Throughout a large portion of the story, the main character, the biologist, takes note on how it feels as though she's being watched even though no one is there and how everything feels "off" or "wrong" but she can't ever really explain why. This is a good representation of what it's like to live with anxiety. Sure, most people experience anxiety in the way that one would before giving a very big important speech to a huge crowd of people, but having an anxiety order is another thing entirely. You experience anxiety over everything. Over nothing, really. You make things up in your head or you just get the sens...
Read more

Escapism in Coraline

-
This week I read Neil Gaiman's children's novel, Coraline.  I had previously seen and loved the movie but never sat down to read the book. The thing that struck me about this novel is the same thing that struck me in the film; not the fact that it's pretty scary for a children's book, something Gaiman is now known for, but the sadness of how ignored by her parents Coraline feels. It's incredibly relevant to many people and it just hits you in such a way that you can't shake it. The entire novel then turns into a form of escapism. Coraline uses this alternate world or dimension as a form of escapism from her seemingly uncaring parents. Why else would she just blindly accept another mother and father with buttons for eyes if not for the fact that they are everything she wishes her parents and world to be like? I certainly can't chalk it up to her being a child as Coraline seems to be pretty smart. Despite all of the adventure and horror in this novel, it's...
Read more

'The Distance of the Moon' Was a Weird Read

-
I chose to read Italo Calvino's short story, The Distance of the Moon', for our Literary Speculation section and it was....bizarre. Surely not the weirdest thing I've ever read but it certainly turned into something I wasn't expecting. It starts with someone older telling one of those "back in my day" sorts of stories about how the moon used to be right upon them and starts to go into the finer details of exactly how that worked. This lore is what hooked me in. It started to get a bit weird when they went into this "milk" that the moon apparently produces and how they would harvest it. That didn't throw me off completely, though, as it was still giving part into the lore of the moon and these people's relationship with it. This is also when the story started to shift more into a weird love triangle revolving around the narrator, his deaf cousin, and a married woman, and this is where it lost me. What began as a story about a people and their ...
Read more