![]() ![]() “You’re always leaving some shit,” says my friend, who’s with me in the back of the Uber.Īlways is a stretch. I’d had it on the nightstand for sure but had picked it up in the middle of a phone conversation to relay something I’d read earlier that day. Left it behind, abandoned on the floor, shunted beneath the fringe of the bedspread for housekeeping to find and do God-knows-what with. ![]() My copy of The View from the Cheap Seats. (I had remarked to the clerk that they were selling a nice edition of another Gaiman book for far cheaper than I would’ve expected.)Īnd now I’ve lost it. ![]() I remember buying it at The Little Apple Bookshop in York on a chilly, late November evening. I’d taken it to work and to casual outings, squeezing bits of reading into the in-between parts of life. I’d underlined and bracketed things that stood out: wisdom on mythology and layering and what makes stories work. I’d been thoroughly enjoying every essay, speech, and feverish opinion or note of praise. ![]() The book is Neil Gaiman’s View from the Cheap Seats -over 500 pages long, 280-something of which I’d been making my way through while traveling by plane and train to and around southern France. That feeling is accompanied by uncharacteristically vivid recall: me slipping into sleep, exhausted from three days of vacationing, the book in my hand sliding onto the floor. I’m in the back of an Uber to the airport when dread sweeps over me. ![]()
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![]() From her early days she developed an eternal love for three things: nature, books, and animation. Follow him on Twitter at Magruder is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles, California. ![]() He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife and two sons. Rick is also the publisher of an imprint at Disney-Hyperion, Rick Riordan Presents, dedicated to finding other authors of highly entertaining fiction based on world cultures and mythologies. Rick collaborated with illustrator John Rocco on two #1 New York Times best-selling collections of Greek myths for the whole family: Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods and Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes. Rick Riordan, dubbed “storyteller of the gods” by Publishers Weekly, is the author of five #1 New York Times best-selling middle grade series with millions of copies sold throughout the world: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, and the Trials of Apollo, based on Greek and Roman mythology the Kane Chronicles, based on Ancient Egyptian mythology and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, based on Norse mythology. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing. Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. "Engaging.a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Timesīehold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller. PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year New York Public Library Book for the Teenager ![]() ![]() When Leek moved to America, she became an astrologer, describing astrology as her "first love". Her landlord eventually refused to renew her lease, prompting Leek to move away from the area and emigrate to the United States of America. According to a contemporary, "People either thought she was a bit of a joke or a fraud." Although the village itself benefited from the extra tourism and visitors, some were unhappy with the extra traffic and noise. Media interest grew, and Sybil became tired of the attention from news reporters and tourists. Her eccentric habits as a self-described witch soon resulted in problems. ![]() She soon moved to Burley herself, into a house behind the shop Lawfords of Burley. She opened three antique shops one in Ringwood, one in Somerset, and one in the New Forest village of Burley. ![]() ![]() When she was 20, Sybil returned to her family, who had now moved to the edge of the New Forest. She later stayed with an acquaintance in Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, and claimed to have spent some of the following years living amongst the New Forest gypsies. At the age of 16 she married her music teacher, though he died two years later, whereupon Leek returned to live with her grandmother,quitting the Witchcraft research association. She claimed to have been descended from the historical Molly Leigh, who had been accused during the witch hunts. ![]() Sybil Leek was born on 22 February 1917 in the village of Normacot in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England to a comfortable, middle-class family. ![]() ![]() ![]() An Arctic expedition offers Jack a chance to change his life. ![]() He is poor, desperate, and longs for another life, where he can use his intelligence. Jack Miller, whose journal forms the narrative, is a loner, a misfit, a middle-class boy with a chip on his shoulder, too well-educated to have anything in common with his peers, and doomed by circumstances to a dead-end job. ![]() This may well be his best audio performance to date. Jeremy?s intelligent and subtle yet incredibly powerful performances make him the ideal reader of ?Dark Matter?. James, I find, chills me most when read aloud, and I recommend the audio version of ?Dark Matter?, read by Jeremy Northam, for the same reason. Many have favourably likened the novel to the classic ghost stories of M.R. Set firmly in the class-ridden society of the inter-War years, when exploring the mysterious Polar regions had the allure that space travel has for us today, Ms Paver?s book is nonetheless crisp, modern and accessible in style. ?Dark Matter?, Michelle Paver?s hotly anticipated adult novel, describes itself as a ghost story, and that it most definitely is, but it is also a poignant love story. ![]() ![]() ![]() And maybe the way I’m starting to feel about the guy I’ve been anonymously chatting with online should concern me. Okay, maybe meeting up with my hot contractor weekly is a little more than occasional. All I need are my bees and the occasional hookup to scratch the itch. The last thing I want is another relationship or another broken heart. Lucky for him, the smoking hot contractor he hired has just the tool for the job. more Ren is in desperate need of a rebound fling. ![]() ![]() Ren is in desperate need of a rebound fling. ![]() ![]() ![]() (The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) is secretly in touch with demonic entities who plan to assume control of the Earth. A scientific think tank called the N.I.C.E. That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth.Ransom journeys to an unspoiled Venus (Perelandra), where he participates in a good vs. While there, he meets the planet's various inhabitants and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the Solar System. Elwin Ransom is kidnapped and transported to Mars. ![]()
![]() ![]() ![]() And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. He died at the age of thirty-two, and in his lifetime he never had a pop hit. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson. ![]() "This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” ―QUESTLOVEĮqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, Sydney’s embedded as a junior reporter for a teen lifestyle site as she follows the daughter of a British billionaire on tour with the biggest act on her father’s music label to uncover what links both the band and the billionaire have to a recent threat from an old Soviet missile base.įrom a daring break-in at one of London’s most exclusive homes to a dangerous undercover mission to a desperate search and rescue operation on the streets of Beijing, the City Spies have their work cut out for them on their most dangerous mission yet. ![]() The sinister Umbra has their sights set on recruiting a North Korean nuclear physicist by any means necessary, and the City Spies plan to keep an eye on his son by sending Paris to the chess prodigy’s tournaments in Moscow and Beijing. ![]() Smith’s Spy School for Girls.Īfter taking down a mole within their organization, the City Spies are ready for their next mission-once again using their unique skills and ability to infiltrate places adults can’t. In this third installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies help a fellow agent in another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. ![]() ![]() Not that the film plumbs any sort of psychological depth, although it does toggle a bit with Ben’s backstory, but the two actors easily incarnate a pair of clever, extremely likeable characters who both deserve to survive and deserve each other. ![]() No raw bison liver in these woods!īut what really helps Mountain overcome its far-fetched scenario is the pairing of Winslet and Elba, who know how to turn up the charm tenfold yet make Alex and Ben seem (mostly) like real people. And when the two eat it for dinner, it actually looks delicious. ![]() ![]() With another cast or another director this would all be pure fluff - which the film is during its more calculated moments - but Abu-Assad has both a lightness of touch and a visceral sense of place, grounding his romance in the rough splendors of the great outdoors while inserting enough humor to keep things cheerful: Even when Alex is attacked by a cougar, she offs it with a flare gun like Annie Oakley. ![]() |