Our Blog

Screenshot from Cyberpunk 2077

As the world has been watching, Keanu Reeves has been quietly turning 2019 into the year of the Reeves. Between the third installment of the massively popular John Wick franchise, a hilarious role in Always Be My Maybe (that has fast become the stuff of meme-legend), a voice role in Toy Story 4, and then his appearance at E3 promoting Cyberpunk 2077, Keanu has been all over entertainment this year. It’s more than that, however. Reeves has been announced as the Internet’s Boyfriend because he’s just so darn lovely. In a world of constant negativity, Reeves’s unalloyed happiness and straightforward kindness is so refreshing that it’s no wonder the world has gone a little nuts about him.

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.