All tagged New Mexico

Stream It Saturday: Manhattan (TV)

Stream It Saturday: Manhattan (TV)

Sarah Moon
Television

In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.

Check out all my previous recommendations over here. 

Manhattan is the little show no one heard of when it debuted last year on WGN. The drama is set in 1940s Los Alamos, New Mexico and focuses on both family life in this weird little outpost and the professional drama among the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. 

I Love... Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume

I Love... Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume

Sarah Moon
I Love

Everyone has a first love.

Book love, that is. 

You know what I mean. It's that book that you had to buy a second copy of because you wore out your original. The one with passages you can still recite by heart. The one that makes you squeal like a crazy person when you find someone else who loves it just as much as you do. It's the one that shatters your soul when you see anything but rave reviews for it on Goodreads.

For me, that first book love was Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes.

Tiger Eyes is the single most influential book of my life. I first picked up a raged copy for--and I remember this as clearly as if it were yesterday--50 cents at Powell's Books at the old Beaverton location. It was the summer between by freshman and sophomore years of high school.

I'd read most of the typical Judy Blume books a few years previously, but not this one, which I managed to overlook at my public library. (It's possible that my conservative hometown's library didn't even have this oft-banned book, or that it was shelved in the adult fiction so sixth-grade Sarah didn't have a chance to discover it along with Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.)

Tiger Eyes set the stage for my lifelong love affair with quiet, character-driven contemporary fiction.

{review} Split by Swati Avasthi

Laura
Books

So… domestic violence. 

We are all peripherally aware of its unfortunate existence.     

Especially when we read truly horrifying news reports like this.

Then we smile and celebrate the triumphs of stories like this.

But when it comes to repeated, cyclical abuse, we tend to,

  1. Educate ourselves for two hours via the latest Lifetime Original Movie; or 
  2. Be cynical and blame the victim with thoughts such as, “Sure, the abuser is wrong for abusing and all, but the victim should have just left after the first time it happened, right? At least after the second time, for goodness sakes! Just follow the directions here!”

The realities of this ongoing societal plague are oh-so-much-more complex than either of the above sheltered attitudes, which author Swati Avasthi demonstrates in her absorbing debut novel, Split.