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The Old Guard
Two days ago, I went to the bookstore at our local mall. I headed right past the Tik-Tok books section right to the clearance. Usually, there’s nothing that I’m interested in: just printed webtoons, weirdly translated Epics, and random beach reads. But what I found that day was absolute gold. The first volume of the Old Guard comic just for five bucks. The amazon price is listed at $14. Needless to say, I bought it. I mean, the comics section of my shelf is seriously lagging behind the history, science, fiction, and classics sections. The comics, both volumes, for the Old Guard are really good. Also, there’s just something so…
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Trust
I randomly decided to pick this book by Hernan Diaz up after seeing on the display of bookstores multiple times. I had no idea what it was about before reading other than the fact that that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And honestly? I don’t think I really get the book. I followed the book when it was talking about the lives of the characters; reading about their personalities, interests, and romances was actually pretty interesting. But then the book would start yapping about economics, or have the strange unrelated but actually related lines, and I would lose track of what I was reading. I’m sure it won…
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The Wild Robot
I am not really the type of person to cry during movies and books. Sure I sometimes get sad, but I never usually react visibly. However, when it came to the Wild Robot, not only was I crying at the end of the movie, but also at the halfway point. I didn’t know a movie had the capability to affect me this much until the Wild Robot. The music was one of the most memorable parts. The notes have been engrained in my head like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, which surprised me so much, because this is a kids movie. Like who spent this much time perfecting the theme to…
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The Sorcerer of the North
Comics are a new form of books I have been to really get into. And because of that, I have tried my hand at cartooning. This is a full comic I drew for an English assignment. The idea for the project eluded me for a couple weeks, but once I got it, I had the script for dialogue done in two hours. I would attribute my ENTIRE view of storytelling to two books: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. The idea of stories about stories is something I am absolutely fascinated by because these books have infiltrated the fundamental way I think, so while…
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Mr. Robot
This was such a goofy show. Computer science is not an area of interest for me, so I never expected I would be this entertained by a show about cybersecurity and hacking. I just finished watching the first season of Mr. Robot on Netflix, and even though it was really technical and computer science heavy, I found it so entertaining. I feel like the show makes really good use of an unreliable narrator; that’s a really good technique to keep the viewer guessing at all times. I don’t even want to reveal some of the plot twists at the end, because it’s something you have to watch for your self. The…
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Uzumaki
Horror is not a genre that I usually read, but Junji Ito’s graphic novels never disappoint. This time, I randomly picked up Uzumaki from the library, and it was certainly a peculiar read. Each chapter is set in the same town with the same characters, but with a different horrific twist on the same motif: a spiral. The town and its residents undergo a slow descent into madness over the course of the volume. The part I personally found scary was the very beginning. Something about the ceramics dude becoming obsessed with spirals and then becoming one was so unsettling, especially because this was the first strange thing to happen…
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Divine Order and Devotion: Egyptian Maat and Roman Pietas in Ovid’s Byblis and Iphis
This is a paper that I wrote for my class, Ancient World Religions and Philosophy. I chose the option to choose my own topic, and having read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there was a question I had that I really wanted to answer. Why did Ovid, a religious Roman poet, write a story about devotion towards the Egyptian gods? Here is my answer.
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Babel
This book by R.F. Kuang was a wild ride. I know that most of the internet loved Babel, but I definitely had some problems with it. This was not my first book by R.F. Kuang; I have read Yellowface, and I thought that was great! It was the perfect amount of uncomfortable truth and funny. But Babel was something else entirely. First, let me talk about the good things. I love reading about translating. Translation is an art: bringing the original meaning across the barrier of language without polluting it with your own biases. Unfortunately, humans are inherently biased, and every translation is bound to have it’s meaning influenced by the translator. When…
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Arcane
My number one show on Netflix has always been The Umbrella Academy. For so long, no other series has come close to topping it. However, after watching Arcane, I refuse to believe that anything on this planet could surpass the absolute genius this show is. I watched the first season of Arcane on my iPad during a road trip; I thought it was fine, and left it at that. But when the new season came out, I watched the first season again and I appreciated so much more about it. The music, the color choices, the animation; it was all perfect, and I couldn’t look away. Somehow, the second season…
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The Way of Kings
It has been a long time since I have started a fantasy series. I decided to pick up Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings because I heard from a Youtube book review that it was unlike anything written before. I read it, and thought it was a mostly alright read. Kaladin’s story was by far the most interesting out of the three different characters the story follows. It took some time to perceive him as an interesting character, because there were so many changing perspectives at the beginning that were difficult to follow. But once I understood who Kaladin was, I was invested in his struggles and goal to keep his…