Our Blog

Stranger Things 3 is sending us into a Netflix spiral that we’ll happily never crawl out of – at least until we’ve finished the season. But what happens after this season’s Demogorgon makes their final exit? How will we process the quintessential '80s teenage experience that Will, Dustin, Lucas, Mike, Max and Eleven suddenly find themselves in? With '80s pop culture, of course.

It’s World UFO Day and while we’re counting down the hours until starlit skies and fast-moving lights that could be airplanes – but also could be something else, something unidentified! – we’re sating our UFO appetite with some of our favorite unidentified flying objects in literature. Join us as we dive into this delicious, mind blowing science fiction subgenre.

Photo by Picography from Pexels

*Warning: Spoilers abound, especially for Avengers: Endgame*

Photo by emy on Unsplash

Bookworms may sometimes find that they spend so much time indoors with a good book (or twelve) that pop-culture passes them by. But even those who have had to have their noses surgically removed from the inside of their favorite novels have heard of Ariana Grande. The Grammy award-winning singer has come a long way since she first appeared as an actress on Nickelodeon. She's racked up awards and is now lauded for her attitude, social media posts, charity work, and for speaking out about feminism and other issues.

While many of her songs focus on all the possible permutations of love (and the lack of love), Grande also sings about everything from work and money to her fabulous female friends. Just like a good book, her songs capture attention and tell a great story, so we’ve decided to match some of her biggest hits with these book pairs.

(Beacon Press)

So you love Octavia E. Butler. We get it. We love her too.

But now what?

You’ve read Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), and you loved the time travel plot that wove seamlessly with slave narratives of the pre-Civil War South. You’ve read Fledgling (2005) too, or maybe you enjoyed Butler’s other shorter fiction like “Bloodchild,” her novelette which won the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 1985. Perhaps the current political climate had you racing towards her dystopian novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), which presented a view of the future that includes environmental horrors, walls erected around the middle class, and a terrifying fundamentalist leader whose rally cry is “Help Us to Make America Great Again.”

If you’ve enjoyed reading Butler’s fiction, we have some other writers whose work you should add to your reading list.

When Bachelor in Paradise premieres next month, we’ll be waiting with baited breath to see what kind of massive drama is going to pop up this time. Will John Paul Jones get stuck in a loop saying his name over and over again? (John Paul Jones. John Paul Jones.) Will Cam make us want to throw our remotes at the television. (Again?) Will Demi try to suss out who exactly is there for the right reasons?

One thing’s for sure, they’ll be on reality TV vacation in Mexico, not diving into the worlds of some of literature’s most incredible settings. But what if they were? Would it affect the outcome of the show? Would it change who arrived to film the show in the first place? There’s only one way to find out.