Tag Archives: books + libraries

Goodreads Review: Your Robot Dog Will Die

Your Robot Dog Will Die

Your Robot Dog Will Die by Arin Greenwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I had the great fortune of hearing Arin Greenwood read from Your Robot Dog Will Die a few years ago at ICFA (the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) and the even greater fortune to scoop up an ARC. If there’s a reading equivalent of swallowing a work whole, I did that. I can’t believe I never wrote a review.

Well, I recently bought myself an actual published copy while also buying a gift copy for a friend, and I’m here to say that it’s just as good as I remembered.

I’m not sure how to summarize the book without giving anything away, but it’s the weird, wonderful, heartbreaking, funny story of how humanity copes when they suddenly lose all of their dogs, and the lengths we’ll go to fill this unfillable emotional and social void in our lives.

I want to note that this volume is absolutely unrelated in any way to Isle of Dogs, the Wes Anderson feature film infused with exacting artistry and fussy racism but no robot dogs.



View all my reviews

Horrorstör ruined my laundry rack

Grady Hendrix: Horrorstör

Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör is clever in all the right ways, but it’s also quite creepy. You can’t ask for much more from a high-concept horror novel.

It’s a little too creepy and clever, honestly.

I used to love our IKEA clothes drying rack. It folds flat and stores neatly in a nook in the laundry room, but it’s quick and easy to set it up and it holds several loads of laundry at once.

“Love” might be over-stating my relationship to any of our household accoutrements, but it’s safe to say I liked this thing a lot. Liked. Past tense.

Horrorstör ruined my laundry rack for me.

IKEA Mulig drying rack

Ever since I finished the book I’ve been utterly and completely creeped out by the laundry rack. I’m not kidding. I have such a visceral reaction to the thing that I avoid doing laundry until Husband can set the rack up for me.

This is ridiculous, not least of which because there isn’t a drying rack in the book.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the TV series, particularly since it’s being developed by Gail Berman, who was responsible for developing both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for television.

Berman did, however, Executive Produce a couple episodes of Dig, which was truly abysmal in ways that even the narcotics and other assorted drugs I was on while recovering from a long and serious illness couldn’t improve. Seriously, even for television, that was some seriously ridiculous pop culture archaeology. Let’s just hope she learned her lesson from that debacle, because damn. Just…damn.

Grimmer than Grimm

Conference going (and organizing) and such haven’t slowed down my movie-watching much but they’ve slowed down my blogging. While I get caught up, and while my Grimm post is still hanging around on the front page, I thought I’d bring two related items to your attention.

First up, Neely Tucker has an intriguing review of The Annotated Brothers Grimm, which is edited by Harvard scholar Maria Tatar:

Once upon a time, fairy tales were not as nice as they are now.

Mother and Daddy dear — not an evil stepmom — take Hansel and Gretel out in the woods and leave them to starve. Little Red Riding Hood does a striptease for the Big Bad Wolf. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to force the mangled stumps into the glass slipper.

Ah, childhood. Ah, the Brothers Grimm.

It has been 200 years since the German siblings and folklorists published their landmark first volume of “Children’s Stories and Household Tales,” and it becomes clear in scholar Maria Tatar’s “The Annotated Brothers Grimm,” published this week for the bicentennial, that the modern tellings of fairy tales have gone soft.

[read the rest of the review at WashingtonPost.com]

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, the fantastic Mutter Museum has a new exhibit, “Grimms’ Anatomy: Magic and Medicine: 1812-2012”.

Which reminds me that I never got around to seeing Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm. I put it in the Netflix queue. I think it has witches and wolves in it, so that should put things back on track here….

Among the Ghosts

To purge some of the crap I’ve been reading from the top of my brain, I read Amber Benson’s charming new book, Among the Ghosts.

AMBER BENSON co-wrote and directed the animated web-series, Ghosts of Albion, (with Christopher Golden) for the BBC. The duo then novelized the series in two books for Random House. [edit]
As an actress, Benson spent three seasons as Tara Maclay on the cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She has also written, produced, and directed three feature films, including her latest, Drones, which she co-directed with Adam Busch and will be released later this year.

I included this bio in case you didn’t know who I meant. I liked this book a lot. If I hung out with any kids, I’d recommend it to them.