Tea Leaves and Dog Ears

Books and shit.

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All Men Are Sociopaths: Chapter 1 of "The Mister"

All Men Are Sociopaths: Chapter 1 of “The Mister”

My last recaps were of Grey, which — if you hadn’t heard — had the fantastically original idea of retelling the whole first book of the 50 Shades trilogy, but from Christian’s point of view.

And in theory, getting inside of the head of a 27 year old self-made billionaire orphan crack baby with Mommy issues who loves BDSM should’ve been interesting. But instead, it revealed some uncomfortable…

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Webster's Dictionary Defines Heavy-Handed As...: "Prologue" of The Mister

Webster’s Dictionary Defines Heavy-Handed As…: “Prologue” of The Mister

Well. My resolution to go easy on EL James didn’t even make it to the first page. Because The Mister opens with one of the laziest prologue chapters I’ve ever read, and it immediately brought me right back to all of my least favorite things about 50 Shades — Christian’s tortured, poverty-stricken childhood flashbacks. For the uninitiated, just know that these sections were told in a breathless…

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Fine, Let's Do This: Yes, I'm Recapping EL James's "The Mister"

Fine, Let’s Do This: Yes, I’m Recapping EL James’s “The Mister”

In the years since I wrote my Grey recaps, I had a slight change of heart where EL James was concerned.

Not because I suddenly felt that hers’ was a work of staggering genius, but rather that it is curious that the two most hated works of fiction in the last 10-ish years were Twilight and its imitator, 50 Shades.

It’s interesting to reflect that we probably wouldn’t jump on this weird, seething…

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Finished BBC’s Strike? Here’s what to read next

Finished BBC’s Strike? Here’s what to read next

Whether you caught all seven (slightly rushed) episodes of the BBC’s recent detective show, or read the original books by JK Rowling (The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm), you may feel stuck finding something similar that scratches a similar itch until the show returns sometime next year. What made Strike a more enjoyable piece of detective fiction was the way that it spent less time fussing over…

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Top 3 Books for January 2017

Top 3 Books for January 2017

I’m catching up on all of the reading I’ve done so far this year, so I wanted to do a quick series of monthly recaps with my most-recommended books. Let’s start, as one does, with January: 1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami’s autobiographical reflections on his life as a runner quickly becomes a book more about writing, habit forming, and ageing than the initial…

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Review: We should all be equalists by Gary Snow

Review: We should all be equalists by Gary Snow

I originally bought Gary’s 43-page book(? essay? novella?) out of a desire to hear the other side of the argument on feminism. Nobody should be stuck in an echo chamber, right? Particularly if that argument comes in longer format than the average Reddit post or blog article where, theoretically, the author would have spent more time and care crafting his arguments and marshaling his evidence.…

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Anyone else watching Westworld through a lens of miserable apathy? Bit of a sensational headline, but for those of you who are watching, 1: I do want to discuss spoilers so — SPOILER WARNING — but 2: I more want to discuss why this is being heralded as some kind of instant classic when it’s...

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I really wish I liked Eileen

I really wish I liked Eileen

Writer Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen has been something of a minor blockbuster in the book world over the past year, with reviewers hailing her book as “satisfyingly unsettling,” or “perverse, squalid, and sinister.” This left me hoping for a psychological thriller, or at least a gripping read. What I got instead was a banal melodrama. The plot is given to us through a frame narrative of a much-older…

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Review: Feminist Fight Club, or Jessica Bennett's Lean In for Millennials

Review: Feminist Fight Club, or Jessica Bennett’s Lean In for Millennials

To start, I only recently discovered publishers catalogues, the literal Scholastic Book Fair for adults. Why it never occurred to me that these would exist — just catalogues of upcoming titles from publishing houses — I have no idea. But now I do know, and that knowledge is glorious. So. While browsing Penguin’s list of titles released in September, this book from former Tumblr Executive Editor…

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8 month catch-up with 7 book recommendations

8 month catch-up with 7 book recommendations

Wrapping up the past 8 months of reading by sharing my 7 favorite books — including a play, 2 audio books, 1 Australian author, and a small rant about women in sports. Books mentioned: Shrill – Lindy West Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare Eat Sweat Play – Anna Kessel Why God is a Woman – Nin Andrews And Then There Were…

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Winter by Marissa Meyer | This Year in Reviews

Winter by Marissa Meyer | This Year in Reviews

I’ll keep my usualy apologetic pre-amble short: I don’t post enough, and now that I have a YouTube channel, it’s tempting to ignore my blog and stick to video. But I feel like certain things, like individual reviews, are still much better suited to blog form… as long as I can keep them short. So my aim is to be able to provide short, clear reviews on all of the books I read this year. And I might…

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What I've Learned After a Month on Booktube, and Why I Need Your Help

What I’ve Learned After a Month on Booktube, and Why I Need Your Help

  At the beginning of January I started a YouTube channel to talk about books, and full disclosure: after publishing three videos I’m figuring out what isn’t working a lot faster than what is. But before I let this get bogged down with negativity, let me say why I wanted to switch to video in the first place: Even though I’m more…

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Canada Reads 2016 Book Haul

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The Magician's Land Reaffirms Everything I Don't Like About Grossman's Trilogy, but It's Pretty Solid

The Magician’s Land Reaffirms Everything I Don’t Like About Grossman’s Trilogy, but It’s Pretty Solid

I’m back! It took a few months to recover enough of a sense of what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” book following Grey since pretty much everything in comparison was amazing as long as it didn’t contain a) glorified rape, b) glorified eating disorders, and c) DJs. But I’m back with another one of the mainstays of my blog, which is Lev Grossman’s fanfic-y Magicians trilogy (recently turned into a…

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An iPad is Forever: Chapter 25 of EL James's "Grey"

An iPad is Forever: Chapter 25 of EL James’s “Grey”

Previous Post. This is it, everyone. This is the final chapter of Grey. For those who’ve asked, yes, EL James is planning to re-write all three books from the original series so there are two more to go. Yes, she probably will call them Greyer and Greyest because she’s awful. And yes, I probably will recap them when/if they come out. Maybe. No promises. But… probably. I don’t want to weigh…

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Christian Grey Hates Condoms, Loves Condiments: Chapter 24 of EL James's "Grey"

Christian Grey Hates Condoms, Loves Condiments: Chapter 24 of EL James’s “Grey”

So. We now have two chapters and 12 pages left to go, but this next chapter is 11 pages and the final chapter is one. I feel that you’ll be okay with me splitting the page count right down the middle and ending somewhere around the six-page mark. Because I promise you the very last chapter is absolute garbage anyway and not worth its own post. Anyway, let’s wrap this up. We open with Christian…

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Schlock Therapy and Liquid Dreams: Chapter 23 of EL James's "Grey"

Schlock Therapy and Liquid Dreams: Chapter 23 of EL James’s “Grey”

22 pages to go. Let’s do this. This chapter opens with Christian having a dream about fucking Ana against a door: We’re fucking. Fucking hard. Against the bathroom door. I avoided covering a lot of the sex scenes in this book because they were repetitive, boring, and nearly identical to the descriptions from the original story. But as this is his fantasy dream and not a sex scene that EL James…

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