Category Archives: Reading

The Woman in Black – My Unstructured Rant about Unnecessary Change (spoilers)

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The Woman In Black cover by Jamie Clark

I was in the middle of reading The Woman in Black when my girlfriend suggested that we could watch the film adaptation with Daniel Radcliffe playing the leading role of Arthur Kipps as long as I didn’t mind getting spoiled. I didn’t mind the idea and so we watched it. I was bothered when I saw that the adaptation was a very different story right from the start. What the film ended up being was a Hollywoodised jumpscare fest.

Needless to say, there will be significant spoilers from here on out.

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Deathless – Communist Fairytale Creatures

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It’s been a while since I read Deathless, a few months at this point. I really thought that I should still write up something on it, because the book was something rather interesting, as was the book I read after it, Lost Boy by Christina Henry, but that’s another story entirely. For now, let’s look at Deathless by Catherynne Valente.

Deathless by Catherynne Valente

The cover for Deathless

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The Bear and the Nightingale – Life in the Rus’ of 14th century

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I finally finished The Witcher Saga a few months ago, after a decade of waiting for translations. On top of that, I found and started running a Pathfinder adventure path (a long term pre-written campaign) called Reign of Winter (don’t read the book summaries unless you’re willing to be spoiled) because of it seeming utterly insane story wise and being heavily influenced by Slavic folklore, and concerning one of the most well known of the characters in it: Baba Yaga. All of these things just falling upon my lap has lead me into just becoming fascinated by fairy tales, particularly those of Slavic origin. To feed this new fascination, I decided that I wanted to both read into the original fairy tales, and the history and culture of various Slavic cultures. For the time being, I’ve ended up focusing on Russia. So much so that I’ve even started studying Russian – something for which I’ve been looking for an excuse for a while. But before I started doing that, I bought three books inspired by said folklore: The Bear and the Nightingale, Uprooted, and Deathless. I decided to start with the first one on that list.

It’s got a very striking cover.

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