Author: Shannon Turlington
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Why read horror?
I’ve been reading a lot of horror this year. More than I usually do, which was already a large amount. I’ve been feeling the need for extreme escapism. And despite the truism that good horror reflects current societal fears, I still find it very escapist. Recently, I shared this article from Tor about women characters in…
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Recommended reading: Universal Harvester
If you are of a certain age, you likely remember the video store as a regular stop on the errands run. And if you grew up in a small American town, you may remember the locally owned video store as a peculiar confluence of people and culture in a place where there wasn’t a whole…
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Cooking again: Classic Southern slaw
I used to cook quite avidly, but interests wax and wane, and lately cooking has seemed like more of a chore than a joy. Or perhaps with the coming of spring, I feel myself coming to life again, and that has rejuvenated an interest in the basic pleasures of life. Whatever the reason, last night…
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Recommended Reading: Ill Will
“Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination — that, in fact, we were only peeping through…
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Recommended Reading: Underground Airlines
I highly enjoyed and appreciated Ben H. Winters’s gripping new novel, Underground Airlines, on three levels. First, it presents a fascinating what-if scenario. In this alternate America, instead of having a civil war, the states came to a compromise that essentially made slavery constitutional into perpetuity. In the present day, slavery continues to be legal in…
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Recommended Reading: Crooked Heart
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans — Ten-year-old Noel Bostock is an odd boy, smart, a reader, independent. He lives with his godmother until she goes senile and then dies. Left bereft, Noel is evacuated with other London children at the start of the Blitz, when Vee takes him in on impulse. Vee lives hand-to-mouth, always with some…
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Recommended Reading: Generation Loss
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand — Cass Neary was once a young photographer on the burgeoning punk scene who made a name for herself with a ground-breaking book, but a couple of decades later, she’s burnt out, damaged, and still working in the storeroom at the Strand bookstore. A friend gives her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview…
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Very useful words: Cavil
I’m starting a new occasional feature where I highlight words I’ve recently spotted in the wild that are useful to know. Today’s word is cavil. Cavil (caviling, caviler), a verb, means “to complain about things that are not important” or “to raise trivial and frivolous objections.” Synonyms: carp, quibble, fuss, niggle, nitpick. Cavil is a very useful word because…
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Information overload and the loss of meaning…
One drawback I see in our ability to communicate faster than ever before is that we have become lazy about our language. A word or phrase will suddenly pop up everywhere, and we tend to pick it up and repeat it without really questioning what it means or how it’s being used. See, for example, the term…
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Retreating into reading: The refuge of older books
Lately, I have been turning to older novels for my reading, as a means of escape from the stresses of being alive, here, in 2017. Older books offer a unique form of immersion in another time and place, as actually lived by the writer, rather than as imagined by a writer conjuring up a historical time…
Shannon Turlington 