On his birthday, I tell my father about toting my Global knife — a present from him — to my boyfriend’s house in order to slice vegetables for dinner. I wrapped it in a napkin my mother made in the ’70s, though I left this detail out during the phone call, and carried it and [...]
Author Archive > molly
Read ALL the Things: Revisiting Ellen Gilchrist
Forgive me, internet, for I have slipped. It had been … at least a month since I last bought a book. Yesterday I bought two. Does anyone remember Nick Hornby’s delightful Believer column in which he documented what he read vs. what he bought? This project definitely threatens to slip into that territory. For the [...]
Fish, Barrel: YA vs. WSJ
Not for the first time, I feel a little like I’ve been trolled by a major newspaper. Just recently, we had The New York Times‘ inane Game of Thrones review (it’s for boys and the “sexy” bits were added to lure women); the NYT again with a review declaring that YA fiction’s purpose is to [...]
Read ALL the Things: The prequel
It’s a prequel for a very simple reason: My mind likes to make up complicated rules, and one of those, for this game, is that books that I’ve picked up in the last few weeks that never made it to the Shelf of Doom, well, they don’t count. (And books I borrow from elsewhere don’t [...]
Read ALL the Things!
I might identify a little much with Hyperbole and a Half’s brilliantly funny “This is Why I’ll Never Be an Adult.” Oddly enough, most everyone I know feels similarly, and that crowd includes some honest-to-goodness talented adults. But maybe some part of each of them is always screaming, “INTERNET! FOREVER…” Internet Forever is not exactly [...]
Awards don’t mean anything
That’s what everyone says, and when I say everyone, I include myself. But all the same, it’s nice to get a dollop of recognition — especially for reviews of books I absolutely loved. Last weekend, the Society of Professional Journalists, Oregon and Southwest Washington chapter, handed out its annual awards, and the Eugene Weekly swept the arts [...]
Selected Shorts and the stories we tell ourselves
At Symphony Space, when you finally get to the front of the slow-moving concessions line and order a beer, it might be handed to you in a red plastic Solo cup. (It might not; I saw a great exchange take place when a man accidentally pinged an older gent with his beer cap.) There’s something [...]
Lots of Love for Willy Vlautin
The news that Willy Vlautin won not one but two Oregon Book Awards last night made me raise my fists in delight — while sitting on the sofa in my empty living room. Vlautin’s books are among those I rant enthusiastically about to any friend who will listen, going on and on about the honesty, [...]
Insert motivational slogan here.
What’s the thing that little green guy with the froggy says? Just get it started already? No, that’s not it. But it’ll work. The point of having a blog is to use it, not to act like writing some words and publishing them on the internet is this thing you have to obsess over for [...]
