AvidBards
Books

2018 Man Booker Prize Winner

Giving up the standards of literary prizes At the end of 2018, on October 16th, the 2018 Man Booker Prize was announced, and by a unanimous vote was awarded to Anna Burns for Milkman. Now you might be thinking that the end of February might be slightly late to talk about the award winner. And to be perfectly honest, I have been putting off this post. Simply because, while the novel received many praises, I could not and did not finish it. The experimental novel tells the story of an unnamed middle sister who is harassed by an older married…

View Post
Reflections

One Year Anniversary

Happy Sunday, readers! Today marks a very special occasion here at AvidBards – our one year anniversary! So much has happened in a year’s time, but one thing has not changed: our gratitude to you, our readers. You have helped us thrive, inspired us, and made our jobs as writers so incredibly fulfilling. In celebration of this special day, we’ve put together some of our highlights from the past year. From our most popular posts to the review requests we’ve received, we’ve had a more productive year than we could have ever imagined. Here’s to many more! In a year’s…

View Post
Reflections

5 Best Christmas Movies

As the holiday season quickly approaches, I can’t wait to cuddle up on the couch, drink some festive tea, and watch some of my favourite Christmas movies. Today I’m giving you a list of my top 5: some are massive Christmas classics and some a little less so. Of course, there are so many Christmas movies out there, and I won’t just be revisiting these five – ultimately, the lovely thing about Christmas and holiday movies is that they aim to instill cozy, loving, family and relationship-oriented feelings within the viewers. It’s a time where being a little more on…

View Post
Books

Why Re-Reading is a Good Thing

Finding yourself in a funk? Six months into the year and forgetting all your New Year’s Resolutions? You and me both! We are officially half way through the year, and as it tends to be, most of us have fallen off our resolutions. Typical. Whether it be going to the gym, reading, eating, or creativity related, by this point in the year life just catches up to us and keeping up with those pesky resolutions seems impossible. Worse than that, trying to find the motivation for them can sometimes be even more difficult. And that’s where I am finding myself…

View Post
5 Best Series

5 Best Series: Understanding Other Cultures

As a child, I never really noticed the lack of cultural diversity in the shows or films I watched. Since I was growing up in a fairly diverse city, race wasn’t something I was very conscious of – until I started to get older. That’s the thing about systemic racism; you don’t necessarily notice it until you actively start analyzing and questioning the societal “norms” we were taught. People may not have been calling me names or making fun of my culture in obvious ways, but racist ideologies and cultural ignorance were (and are) embedded into institutions and every day…

View Post
Reflections

“Black Mirror”: U.K. vs U.S.

If any of you have watched the show Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, you know it’s not a show to watch when you want something light-hearted. That’s not to say it’s not incredible: in fact, I find it to be one of the most pertinent and poignant television series of our time. The concept and structure is not entirely revolutionary; in fact, it is often described as a modern day twist on The Twilight Zone, utilizing both its anthology structure and suspenseful nature. Black Mirror maintains its consistency by having one key concept at its core: it looks at…

View Post