Like practically every other woman in the country under 40, I grew up reading Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. Well finally, Hollywood has stopped ignoring this mostly-untapped cultural resource. That’s right, a Ramona movie is in the works! It’s called Ramona and Beezus, the Beezus being Ramona’s sister Beatrice. It is set to come out on [...]

Since Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors and The Sirens of Titan is one of my favorite books of his, I have to say something about this new movie The Time Traveler’s Wife. When I saw the TV ad for the film, it said it was based on a book, so I figured [...]

Douglas Coupland’s latest effort, The Gum Thief (out in paperback October 2nd), is another addition to his collection of novels exploring the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining a satisfying sense of self in today’s fractured world. His novels tend to focus primarily on the postmodern struggle that is finding one’s place in this [...]

In case you hadn’t noticed, one thing Liz and Laura are not is timely. We don’t usually get around to reading, viewing or eating something until it’s somewhat old news. But we like to argue that our readers are just as lazy as, if not lazier than, Liz and Laura themselves, and probably haven’t gotten [...]

Pattern Recognition, by geek favorite William Gibson, is an airplane read, the type of book you can finish on a weekend.  It’s light stuff, the literary equivalent of a pop song, but like pop songs, the book has an infuriating tendency to get stuck in the brain.  Like Stephen King, a fellow author famed for working [...]