A Few Ideas About Reading and Writing

Adele, by Leila Slimani: Vapid and Lacking

February 20, 2021 3 minutes

Adele by Leila Slimani is one of those books that I so desperately wanted to like based on the reviews, and ended up absolutely loathing based on the actual content. It's a book-length bit of New Yorker fiction, you know the type: contemporary, moody, and pointless. meaningful plot. If a story is what happened, and a plot is why it happened, then Slimani has written a story that goes nowhere.

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Sequels must be in a different genre to work

February 17, 2021 4 minutes

So, the subject of Alien and Aliens came up again, and I want to circle back to something I wrote awhile ago., in which I excoriated a writing teacher for completely missing the point of Ripley’s character. Because if you miss the point of Ripley's character, you completely fail to understand why the sequel worked so well.

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