by Steven Martin I think I’m far too impressionable, and arguably for the wrong reasons. I mean, if I was picking up good habits and useful knowledge it’d be one thing, but it was only in the midst searching up opium pipes on eBay that I really had to stop and think about what I…
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by P. G. Wodehouse In Something Fresh, the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle unintentionally walks off with the prized scarab from the collection of the American billionaire, J. Preston Peters. Though Peters wants it back, he doesn’t want to cause a scandal by accusing Emsworth of theft. For, not only did Emsworth, finding the…
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by Aldous Huxley In the future, everybody’s happy except Bernard Marx. Despite the selective breeding and the constant conditioning throughout his entire life, he doesn’t seem to fit in. (He prefers solitude to company, and he’s hardly promiscuous, so he’s quite a weirdo in this “ideal” society. People gossip that his problems stem from alcohol…
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by Micah Pawluk While Pawluk covers a range of topics in his debut poetry collection, A Boy from the Woods, the vast majority of the book concerns his thoughts on love. The author often groups poems with similar ideas and themes together, occasionally growing and building off of the previous ones in a narrative fashion,…
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by Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut was a man who loved to skirt the line between science fiction and fantasy with at least a few of his books, and Galápagos isn’t an exception here, in this case marrying evolutionary theory with a ghost narrator. The story concerns a small group of people who find themselves marooned on…
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by William S. Burroughs That Jack Black’s You Can’t Win influenced Junky in a significant way, it becomes an interesting exercise to read both for comparison’s sake. You catch hints of similarity between the two, although Burroughs’ book doesn’t necessarily compare favourably to Black’s. Both concern an individual navigating the American underworld, with stronger storytelling…
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by Denise Chong An unforgettable photo of a child––running naked, crying, and badly burned by a napalm strike––was not only influential in turning public opinion during the Vietnam war, but kept an enduring legacy as the embodiment of the senselessness and cruelty of war. Kim Phuc was the child, and The Girl in the Picture…
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by Omar El Akkad In a story like American War, you can see how an author’s experience comes out in the narrative, adding a sense of legitimacy to the whole thing. And who could be better than El Akkad, an award-winning journalist reporting on war, terror, and civil unrest, to tell the story of the…
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by Charles Bukowski There’s something almost inexplicable about Bukowski’s writing that hits you when you read it. It’s probably something to do with how natural his prose is, but I think there’s more to it than that. Bukowski knew things, man. He did things that I’d probably work hard to excise from my own writing,…
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Hope to see anyone who can make it at CommuniTea and Coffee this evening! It’s sure to be an interesting talk.