April 2016 • Quel Disaster!

An imperfect mashup by Katinka

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April 2016

Books in my Bedsheets
The Unfinished World  by Amber Sparks

in Books/Books in my Bedsheets
The Unfinished World

Ahh, to fall in love with the short story again. It’s a wonderful feeling. I got Sparks’ more recent The Unfinished World because her earlier work was briefly unavailable online and I was impatient after reading an excerpt. This was serendipitous, because her stories here are some weird and wonderful treasures. Cinematic, magical, anachronistic, and a little bit gothic, Sparks doesn’t hesitate to reach out to fantasy, science fiction and history for inspiration. Because of this, daydreamers and nerdy birds can all feel welcomed in by her deep wells of reference. Here they can feel let in to a secret…

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Books in my Bedsheets
The Tusk that did the Damage  by Tania James

in Books/Books in my Bedsheets
The Tusk that did the Damage

The Tusk that did the Damage is a story of the ivory trade told through three points of view. The most captivating of these points of view is almost certainly that of the escaped bull elephant known as The Gravedigger. Telling part of the story directly from the perspective of the elephant was a daring move because it could’ve so easily been a heavy-handed effort to drum up sympathy for only the tormented animal, painting the other perspectives as ill-meaning and cruel. Instead, the perspective of the elephant is well balanced with that of a documentary filmmaker, and a young…

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Quel désastre!

in Other Disasters/Uncategorized

Please don’t tell my current French instructor that I butchered the language for the purpose of a website! Taking after a different French teacher who consistently blurted “Quel désastre!” or “What a disaster!” when she made mistakes, I started to say it and now blurt it out in exasperation over projects that are full of little disasters… or when I skate a poor program… or as I bump my knees and slip down the last few stairs in my apartment.  But it takes a lot of little disasters (and sometimes big ones) to create anything great, be it a hobby project, a professional piece of…

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