Book Recommendations – Page 3 – Modcast — Accessibility, Literature, and Mustachios

On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 6

I must admit that I’m a slow reader as it is, but it took me ten days to read The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. I decided to challenge myself and read one hundred books this year, so this was a misstep if I had to readContinue reading “On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 6”

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins Review

Cover of "The Wife Upstairs: A Novel" by Rachel Hawkins. New York Times Bestselling author. Background depicts a blue wallpaper with white flowers. A white stair banister diagonally bisects the lower left corner. The text is large and black.

Will I ever stop talking about Jane Eyre? The world will never know. Just kidding, the answer is no because here I am talking about it here again on the blog. Now I swear to you I did not go looking for this book, this book came on to me. All I did was lookContinue reading “The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins Review”

The [Book] Case for ThriftBooks

Do you use Amazon to purchase books? We get it. It’s cheap and easy, and generally has a fast delivery. We use it, too! There’s lots of reasons to use Amazon, and plenty of reasons to not use Amazon. But consider this: instead of helping Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy win Monopoly, try the Modcasters’Continue reading “The [Book] Case for ThriftBooks”

Hypocriticisms: Double Standards in Literature No. 1

Clipart depicting two women. Left, a woman is bent double and struggling under a huge stack of books. Right, a woman stands on her tiptoes to add another book to the top of the stack.

If you’ve ever read a book, you might have noticed that sometimes there are some double standards. All kinds. It’s not limited to gender roles or sexuality. Just like in real life, you see discrimination for aspects like age, religion, justice/law, race/nationality, nepotism, and so on. In this series, we’re going to point out some double standards in some of our favoriteContinue reading “Hypocriticisms: Double Standards in Literature No. 1”

Leigh Ann’s Recs No. 4 – Song for a Whale

Book cover for Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly. At the top of the cover is the sentence, Be loud about something. Beneath that is the silhouette of a girl standing on a pier, her arms stretched wide. The moon is large and setting behind her, and the yellow treeline is reflected on the water such that it resembles a sound wave. At the bottom of the cover is a whale swimming, and bubbles rising towards the surface. Most prominent colors are blue, purple, green, and yellow.

“Can you imagine that?” Ms. Alamilla asked. “Swimming around for all those years, unable to communicate with anyone?”

Yes.

She said something else about frequencies, but I wasn’t paying attention anymore. I looked through Mr. Charles, as if I could still see that whale on the screen. Blue 55 didn’t have a pod of friends or a family who spoke his language. But he still sang. He was calling and calling, and no one heard him.

POC Writers & Award Winners

The two pieces that I chose to do my analysis on were the first paragraphs from two different POC novels. I choose to use these pieces because they set the scene for the two novels Paradise, by Toni Morrison, and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Coincidentally, before I decided to use theseContinue reading “POC Writers & Award Winners”

On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 5

Book cover featuring a smiling brown woman with brown curly hair. She is wearing a red swimsuit and posing with her head tilted back, her elbow resting on a bent knee. Title: Rolling the R's. A novel by R. Zamora Linmark.

This book is very significant and important to our modern culture. An anthology of writings I read at the University of Hawaii is called Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark. It is also in anthology style that follows the same plot with different chapters written in different ways. Some chapters are poems, some are dialogue, andContinue reading “On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 5”

Leigh Ann’s Recs No. 3 – Efrén Divided

Book cover. The top half of the book depicts a boy wearing an orange shirt walking past a white fence, glancing down. The lower half of the book shows the shadows of the fence, but it becomes a barbed-wire laced border fence. Upside down is the boy, reaching his hands through the slats of the fence to hold the hands of his mother, who is on the other side.

This book is dedicated to all immigrant families who continue to be cruelly separated and, especially, all the brave children who are forced to live this story.

On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 4

A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein In A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein gives us a portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s unique life from her early college years, to Yale Law School where she meets and falls in love with Bill Clinton, to her life in Arkansas, to her role as First Lady, intoContinue reading “On My Bookshelf: Community Recs No. 4”

Lane’s Recs 2

Book cover for "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin. The image shows a lone figure (right) standing on a barren stretch of land, looking towards a rising or setting planet in the background, which has a glint of light peeking around its edge, presumably the sun behind it. At the top, text reads, "Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, The World Fantasy Award, and the National Book Award." At the bottom of the cover white text reads, "An astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia."

I don’t always read science fiction (or even particularly enjoy the genre), but I will say that I enjoy The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is incidentally my first experience with Le Guin. I thought the novel would be incredibly daunting, yet it’s proven to be an incredibly interesting and fun read, andContinue reading “Lane’s Recs 2”