Archives for Fantasy

An Oxford Spring (April 18 – May 17, 2024)

An Oxford Spring (April 18 – May 17, 2024)

16 April, 2024 | No Comments

From April 18 to May 17, 2024, I will be posting from the City of Dreaming Spires, Oxford, UK. Friends have asked my husband and me, why Oxford? Why a whole month in one smallish English city when we would have the whole of Britain and even Europe on our doorstep? For one thing, we’ve done the whole if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium sort of traveling before, and it’s a young person’s game. At this point in our lives, we decided it was better to go to one fascinating place and stay as long as we could afford. Dig deep rather than skim the
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Quick Take: Stephen King’s FAIRY TALE

Quick Take: Stephen King’s FAIRY TALE

22 November, 2022 | 2 Comments

I was a teenager when I first read Stephen King. The book was Salem’s Lot and the damn thing scared me so badly I didn’t pick up King again for two decades. Then came The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower series, pressed upon me by friends whose opinions I trusted. I fell in love. See, I’m not a straight-out horror fan. I can’t bear slasher stories and maniacal clowns, but I do enjoy fantasies that grapple with the (to me, obvious) darkness in the world. Any world. So it was inevitable, I suppose, that I should give King’s latest, Fairy
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ANDOR, Random Thoughts: Politics and Character Arcs

ANDOR, Random Thoughts: Politics and Character Arcs

14 November, 2022 | 4 Comments

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. ON WAR, by General Carl von Clausewitz To be honest, Disney's Star Wars spinoff Andor was initially a bit of a slow burn for me. I was, however, deeply impressed from the first by the seriousness and sophistication of the writing, acting, directing, and production values.
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In Defense of Woundedness, of Failure, and of Frodo: A Personal Reflection with Tolkien’s Letters

In Defense of Woundedness, of Failure, and of Frodo: A Personal Reflection with Tolkien’s Letters

25 March, 2022 | No Comments

[ALERT: If you are not familiar with the end of The Lord of the Rings, do not continue…] I originally published this post on my now-too-Dickensian site around Hobbit Day, 2021, and thought that our #TolkienReadingDay would be a good opportunity to republish it at its new home. At the time, I was reflecting on the nature of friendships near and far, including once-inseparable friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and on friendship in general, of the beauty hidden in human (and hobbit) failure, and of Frodo. His image was haunting me then, particularly on a Sunday when
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