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5 Best Series

5 Best Books to Take on Vacation

While it’s coming to the end of summer and most people are probably headed back to work or school now, I am getting my first (and last) proper vacation for this summer and gearing off for a road trip to the South of France tomorrow and you best believe that I am so excited to be getting some much deserved R&R. And while that will definitely include my favourite road trip tunes, part of that for me definitely includes time to delve into a good book. The art of choosing a book for vacation is just a important and special…

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Books

Book Review: “Warlight” by Michael Ondaatje

The Trauma of the Post-War Generation In the second review from the Man Booker longlist, Warlight by Michael Ondaatje proved a much more intense read than the crime-thriller Snap by Linda Bauer. A Canadian writer born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje is an author of high regard, having won the Man Booker prize once before for his internationally acclaimed novel, The English Patient, and similarly winning the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018 (the prize conceived to celebrate 50 years of the Man Booker which awards one book per decade a prize) for the same novel. To all those who know…

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Academic

Understanding Tragic Romance

There have been many times where I hear a person – or an institution – say that tragic plays like Romeo and Juliet or novels like Wuthering Heights are ‘romantic’. I’ve always had somewhat of a problem with this ideology – and that’s not to say that I think those people are wrong. Because the fact of the matter is, works like these are set up and have long been advertised as romances. Not only that, but they have been set up to epitomize romance. However, there are so many more layers as to what kind of romance is portrayed…

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Books

Snap by Belinda Bauer – Book Review

Snap by Belinda Bauer (Penguin Random House, Bantam Press) “On a stifling summer’s day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack’s in charge, she’d said. I won’t be long. But she doesn’t come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed forever.” While a very popular genre, crime novels have never been at the top of my reading lists. Not for lack of interest! I went through a phase in high school when I bought and burnt through every Kathy…

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Books

Waking Gods (Themis Files Book 2) – Book Review

Following from Sylvain Neuvel’s debut novel, Sleeping Giants, I took the first chance I could to go buy the next in the series of the Themis Files. Waking Gods was as much an excitement to read as the first book was (read my review of Sleeping Giants, here). So, of course, after tearing through it, I knew I had to write another review for it. Though in all honesty, I struggled with writing this review, mainly because the story is so engaging and complex simultaneously that I find it hard to describe it without including spoilers. With that said, Here…

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Reflections

Batwoman: Challenging Traditional Gender Norms

In lieu of the exciting news that DC Comics character Batwoman will be made into a TV series (starring Ruby Rose), I hearken back to a time when I studied Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams’ graphic novel, Batwoman: Elegy (2009-2010), in university. This Batwoman edition is part of the modernized Batwoman canon (starting in 2005), in which Kate Kane (formerly Kathy) is written as a Jewish lesbian woman. Now, this depiction is incredibly important because it takes major leaps for the LGBTQIA+ community, as queer main characters are not often found, particularly in the superhero genre. Archaic gendered notions of macho…

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