untranslatable words

Oddly enough, a link from Anne Rice on Facebook lead me to this article, 11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures. It sounded fascinating. It is. Just read it, it’s great. I loved the Hawaiian ‘Pana Po’o’ which describes “The act of scratching your head in order to help you remember something you have forgotten”. Also, … Continue reading →

you’re on a deserted island…

And you have to choose 5 books to keep your sanity intact until help arrives. It’s something we’ve all thought about at some point, and as much as we’d all love to take a shopping trolley or a truck full of books with us to that lonely spit of land, we can’t. Them’s the rules. My … Continue reading →

Happy Birthday Bram!

As you might have noticed from the Google homepage, today is Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday. My first experience with Dracula was a kind of abridged version I found in my primary school library. It wasn’t the whole story, but there were all sorts of interesting facts about vampires and Mr. Stoker dotted throughout. I thought … Continue reading →

Bad Sex in Fiction – there’s a prize for that.

My immediate reaction upon reading this article about the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize was to link and copy/paste sections to my boyfriend and laugh about it. The prize has been held by British magazine Literary Review since 1993, awarding the worst sex scenes in novels. I found hardly anything about this year’s nominees (which leads … Continue reading →