MadMania

Faith, Books, and Stuff

Tag: books

Review: A Death in the Venetian Quarter

Alan Gordon’s is one of a series of mysteries set around 1200 AD and based on characters from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The main characters are jesters who belong to the Fool’s Guild, who in this particular novel attempt to solve a murder and prevent the fall of Constantinople. Judging the book by its cover like […]

Movies better than their books

People usually say that books are always better than the movies made from them. I can think of a few exceptions, whose movies are markedly better than their source material. I don’t intend to provide any justification for my view; it’s just a list: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by […]

Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox (movie)

I really can’t say enough good things about this movie. I love the story, direction, music, animation, and acting. I went into this movie with no preconceived notions (I barely knew a thing about it, not even that it was based on a Roald Dahl book), and it was awesome. George Clooney is hilarious as […]

Review: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (movie)

I saw this movie before I had read the book. In fact, I had barely even heard of the book. So I had no expectations going into it, either good or bad. It wasn’t very good. The very first conversation in the movie already seems out of place–stating a situation that already seems to defy […]

I made pie

I made my first two pies this weekend. I’ve been re-reading Pascale LeDraolec’s American Pie (nothing to do with movie of the same name). It chronicle’s the author’s drive across America looking for pie, and it includes a bunch of pie recipes. My first two attempts were marriage pies (pies containing two different but complementary […]

Hardwood, books & movies

I love books, and have for a long time. I think a lot of it stems from when I was a kid, when we would go to the mall. Mom and my brother would go somewhere, and dad and I would go to the bookstore. I don’t know what dad was looking at, but I […]

Review: the Case of the Hard-Boiled Dicks

  John Blumenthal’s The Case of the Hard-Boiled Dicks is supposed to be a spoof of hard-boiled detective novels. The cover has a number of visual puns (hard-boiled eggs, a stiff wearing shoes with gum on the bottom), and the humor inside doesn’t get much better. A really good spoof understands the material being mocked; […]