Your body’s sense of balance relies on several complex systems. Most of these systems, like your inner ear and the nerves in your core, are reflexive, requiring no active thought. The main exception (for most) is visual stimulus. Our eyes are often the first to detect and decipher a loss of balance in a conscious…
The first time I became aware of John Green, I was choking back loud, messy sobs in my room at two in the morning. I was eighteen, it was 2012, and I’d just stayed up engrossed in his breakout hit The Fault in Our Stars. I don’t remember how a copy ended up in my…
When I first created the Book of the Month Club, I only had two rules: No books I’d read before and no classics. Since I started the blog to expand my reading horizons, the first rule was easy enough to follow. The second rule, though, became more difficult to adhere to as time went on.…
For me, October is a month of contradictions. On the one hand, I bask in the cooler weather and return of the rain, enjoying how each day my afternoon walks offer a changing tableau of color. On the other, even as I collect fallen leaves in my coat pockets and drink hot chocolate at the…
Literary categories are famously hard to define. I’ve gone on before about who decides what’s considered “literary fiction” vs. “genre fiction”, and whether the distinction is important. Plenty of books we’ve read in our Book of the Month Club straddle the lines between sci-fi, fantasy, and “speculative fiction”, with none falling easily into one bracket…
In this month’s book, All About Love: New Visions, author bell hooks writes, “Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to…
Over thousands of years of human evolution and technological innovation, there are a few pieces of humanity that persevere through the ages: the love of a good meal, the appreciation of beauty, and the need to tell stories. Stories in particular are interesting in the way they’ve evolved alongside us. From ancient oral traditions to…
54 years ago, a gay bar in Lower Manhattan was raided by the police. Tempers flared. Handcuffs were pulled out. People were beaten. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but what happened when the police wagons were late was unique. Bystanders intervened and fought back. Police…
A confession: There is nothing I dislike more than not understanding something. Last April for National Poetry Month, I took on Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead. I hadn’t had any exposure to poetry since I’d left college and found myself floundering within the first few pages of the collection. Sticky notes were everywhere. Too many tabs were…
“Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.”N.K. Jemisin I’ve lived within train distance of Chicago my whole life. None of the towns qualified as suburbs (the people who live in the suburbs would have my head if I’d claimed that). Most don’t even qualify…
Tea Reads 