book
Wants to read The Stolen: Two Short Stories
Rated Classical Philosophy 10/10
Rated The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia 6/10
A good read, but not without its flaws. Stefaniak makes it clear that some people are born as legends, but I wish that had not come at the expense of some of the other characters.<br><br>(My full review can be found on <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2011/11/cailiffs-of-baghdad-georgia-by-mary.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.)
Wants to read On Immunity: An Inoculation
Wants to read Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury
Rated Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings 7/10
<div>I enjoyed the wild swings, even if I didn't always enjoy the stories/essays themselves —but I did enjoy a lot of them. I'd never read Borges before, and some of the work contained within was a Bluesky book club pick, so I'm glad it made me finally get around to it.</div>
Rated Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping 10/10
<div>I want to shove this into the hands of every writer and teacher of writing that I know. So much good stuff in here — inventive, smart ways of thinking about both craft and revision methods. I will be using a lot of this in my own work.</div>
Rated The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories 4/10
A resounding "This is fine, I guess."<br><br>Her speech/essay at the beginning of the book is more or less a very good commencement speech. You'd be pleased to have it at your graduation. As an "amazing" essay? It's nothing extraordinary, though the idea of "The Opposite of Loneliness" is very lovely.<br><br>Keegan has a preoccupation with mentioning people's weight (fat is rarely portrayed as positive), or pressing her/her characters' foreheads/faces against each other (AKA... a writer-tic that one might not notice until all the pieces are presented as a whole), and maybe I'm just too far away from college to be excited by someone who, as the introduction says, "writes like she's 20." The ideas of her being jealous of others, while completely natural, kind of made me laugh a bit because Oh okay, you who has an internship at The New Yorker, lived on Cape Cod, and otherwise had all these interesting opportunities in life, you're somehow lacking? Sure. Okay. Fine. <br><br>I'm sure Keegan was a lovely person, with a lot of potential to do amazing things down the line. Her story is indeed tragic, but I remember being more moved by the essay about her from a friend on Buzzfeed Books, when this came out.<br><br>So, this is book is fine, but like Keegan said herself, there's always a better thing.
Rated Doctor Who: The Wave of Destruction 7/10
<div>This was fine. The tone was very much like one of the just okay Classic serials of the era, but maybe different elements reminded me of too many other Doctor Who stories. 1960s London, weird signals transmitted through popular entertainment devices, etc. etc. Always enjoy hearing Romana II though, and K-9 gets some jokes in.</div>
Rated The Master and Margarita 10/10
Really enjoyed this and now sorta want a black cat named Behemoth.
Rated The Confessions of Dorian Gray: Frostbite 6/10
This was way more of a setup to a story than an actual story. I had hoped for a little more, but as a freebie, it's perfectly fine.
Rated Doctor Who: The Auntie Matter 8/10
<div>Fun one with the first Romana.</div>