Reviews the length of an irritating splinter

I’ve been having fun condensing reactions to books and movies into 140 characters—sort of a Twitter diary of reading and watching. I don’t include works I didn’t find interesting or the five million books of lit crit and theory I’ve been reading for a current writing project. As I get older and more impatient, I become more convinced the latter should be either 1) quickly, clearly informative or 2) genuinely fun to read, and SO little of it is. Reviews should meet the same criteria, actually. Not sure if mine do but hey, you can’t get any briefer! Here are some from June and July. No attitude about my pathetic film choices: I live in rural Virginia, people, and I have a twelve-year-old son and I’m married to this guy, so if it’s big, noisy, and PG-13, I basically go to it.

Poetry:

The way Carson uses slash marks to frame dialogue in Red Doc>: anyone seen that before? Technically ingenious.

Reading Tim Seibles’ Fast Animal means receiving urgent dispatches from the edge of the known universe

Revenge served warm: in Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds makes her ex look like an ass by loving him so well.

Novels (with two for the new Neil Gaiman):

Ghosh’s future in ‘95 Calcutta Chromosome: the tech’s wrong but he nailed how it isolates. Best not to tweet about the silence.

Found myself arguing over dinner that Mrs Hempstock is way cooler than Galactus. #OceanLane

Middleaged profs with portals in hearts endorse OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE by @neilhimself. I speak for all of ’em.

Movies:

On Krypton it’s fake Brit vs evil New Yawk, but they’re all humorless. Must be those uncomfortable metal clothes

The scene with the carnivorous bunnies almost makes Lone Ranger worth sitting through.

Forthcoming @LesleyMWheeler: I am LOVING Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I have a lot of poetry in the pile. And I sense the giant machines of Pacific Rim looming in my future. What the hell. Samuel Delaney liked them.