The Book Bubble

A book for theater nerds everywhere. I first started following the pre-production, so to speak, of this book on Tumblr, where the author posts under the username http://dukeofbookingham.tumblr.com/, and by the time the pub date dropped, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy. Now, while my own experience starts and stops at three years of middle school plays, I really enjoyed this book. It plays on the obsessive, cut-throat culture of college theater centered around seven students, who make up the core of the department. By the end of Act 1, one of these seven will be murdered. The narrator, Oliver, weaves a tale with all the dramatic flair of Shakespeare himself; flashing between present day, and ten years ago, when the crime takes place. Oliver, accused of the murder of one of his theater-mates, unravels the events from nearly a decade prior to the cop who originally put him away, still not 100% convinced he's hearing the entire  story.  And are we? Are we, the...

   This week, I'd like to review a novella I had to read for one of my classes. It's called Passing written by Nella Larsen. This was absolutely a novella I would not have read by choice, but since I was forced to read it 3 times this semester, I figured why not give it a review. Personally, I thought it was just okay. It wasn't as magnificent as I thought it would be, but again, it's just my opinion.    Before I was allowed to read the actual novella, I was required to read the reviews and literary criticism, so I already knew how the story ended. Knowing how the story ended definitely ruined the flow of the book for me, but I had to trudge through the disappointment and read it anyway.    Written in 1929 during the Harlem Renaissance, this is a story of Race, Sexual Tension, and Jealousy.    This is a story of two women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Both women are light-skinned enough to "Pass" for white women, however, they are both...

                                        Warning - Adult Themes and Strong Language    Wow! Just, Wow! I am at a complete loss of words with this one. I just finished House of Sand: A Dark Psychological Thriller Written by Michael J Sanford. Just when I thought I knew what was going on, it threw a very hard knife right in the middle of the road - Not a fork, but a knife. The entire story, I thought I had the plot line pegged as just another psycho book about mental illness, and boy was I wrong!    It went from simple story to complete mind fuckery in just a few pages, and it just spiraled on from the very beginning right up until the very last page. This was not just another story of deception and lies... No way, this was something else entirely! I literally walked around ...

This week on my commute to work, I have been wrapping up the Audible version of Middlsex, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, and narrated by Kristoffer Tabori. The narrator's voice is going to be hit or miss with some listeners; Imagine if  Harvey Fierstein, the actor who plays Robin Williams brother in Mrs. Doubtfire, was reading to you. If it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, just pick up a hard copy of the book. The narrator of the actual story is Cal Stephanides. The twist to Cal's identity (revealed roughly three pages if that into the book so not actually a spoiler) is that Cal, born Calliope, is an inter-sex man born with  5-alpha reductase deficiency, a recessive  condition, that caused Cal to be born with female characteristics. Throughout the narrative, Cal recounts the histories of himself, his parents and his grandparents, mixing in true events from history such as the Balkan Wars and the Detroit race-riots.  Middlesex is a contemporary fa...