Sherlock Holmes Officially Public Domain

Yay! One of the best-known characters worldwide is now officially in the public domain. (I’m not trying to “steal” property from literary heirs, but I do think that a character that first appeared 126 years ago has had plenty of time under ownership.) A judge has ruled, “stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty, and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works that Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered […]

Read more

How to Fight, Lie, and Cry Your Way to Popularity (And a Prom Date)

It’s a listicle in a book! So why buy it? Because you can’t take the internet into the bathtub, which is the kind of environment perfect for this type of pick-up-and-put-down flip-through reading, which I found great light entertainment. The subtitle of How to Fight, Lie, and Cry Your Way to Popularity (And a Prom Date), “Lousy Life Lessons From 50 Teen Movies”, is accurate. Each of the 50 movies included gets two pages with a snarky plot summary, a […]

Read more

Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

Agatha Christie fans will be pleased to know that HarperCollins has made available as an ebook this oddity, an early draft story that later became the novel Dead Man’s Folly. According to the publisher, the genesis of Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly was an attempt by Christie to raise money for stained glass windows in her local church. She was going to write a story called “The Greenshore Folly” and give the rights to a fund for that purpose. […]

Read more

Love Waltzes In

Just in time for the finals of Dancing With the Stars, airing this week, I read Love Waltzes In, a romance novel featuring the reunion of a professional ballroom dancer and a Marine. Selena and Bret were teen partners and dance champions, but their relationship broke up when he joined the military. Now, he’s returned to compete against her on Dancing Under the Stars to raise money to benefit the family of a deceased colleague. Will their first love be […]

Read more

The Snacking Dead

When I think zombies, I think the opposite of “yummy snacks”, but I suppose “eating brains” does suggest the munchies in some ways. The Snacking Dead by D.B. Walker is both a cookbook, focused on finger food and sandwiches (the kind of stuff I think of as “football food”), and a parody story of the zombie apocalypse. The recipes alternate with incidents in the life of Pam, a divorced woman trying to feed her two kids as the world collapses […]

Read more

Mastering Manga 2: Level Up With Mark Crilley

Mark Crilley, dubbed “YouTube’s most popular art instructor“, is following up last year’s successful Mastering Manga With Mark Crilley with another set of lessons on how to create manga-styled comics. Mastering Manga 2: Level Up With Mark Crilley provides models for drawing basic body parts, such as eyes and other facial features, hands and gestures, and feet proportions and perspective on head shots, front, side, and three-quarter, female and male, using geometrically based guidelines the same for the entire body […]

Read more

The Naturals

If you’re looking for CSI meets X-Men: First Class, the young adult thriller mystery The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes is right up your alley. Cassie has an innate ability to read people, one honed by her time on the road with her faux-psychic mother. But mom’s been dead for five years, murdered by someone unknown and the body missing. When an FBI agent comes calling, Cassie joins his special project, a group of teens with similar abilities to hers […]

Read more

The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics

I was a bit snarky about this title when it was announced, mentioning how there were previous books in this line covering the individual aspects of corporate comic book production (as well as a book on creating digitally). However, I realized that some of those books are more than a decade old, so it’s probably a good idea to bring out a more current volume. Then I read The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics, and I realized that what […]

Read more
1 31 32 33 34 35 43