Growing up I wasn’t like other kids. I didn’t want to play tag at recess, or go over to the neighbor’s house and play their video games. I barely even wanted to run around with the family dog. No, nobody really understood me, but that’s okay because books are my best friends. My best friends.
Mindy Hung's previous work for The Toast can be found here. When a woman is famous, the focus is often on her body—her butt, her post-baby body, if and with whom she’s doing it. Recent romance novels provide an interesting space to explore women, fame, and notoriety, not only because of how often the arcs of these books play out over headlines, but also because they offer a way for these narratives to be critiqued or…
Previously by this author: 7 Essential Modernist Literary Life Hacks. A metaphor is a word or phrase in a foreign language that poets choose to include simply because they are pretentious. The title of William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” provides an example of delusion. When reviewing literature related to your essay topic, you should avoid sources that come from a country with which the United States has recently engaged…
I hear your objections already. "But Mallory, I have seventeen mortgages and my job was murdered in the Recession Tornado of Aught-Six." "Mallory, I had to sell my parents in order to pay off my student loans." "Mallory, I'm being chased by jewel thieves." [gesticulates wildly] Pshshshspspshshpsh. Hush. LeVar Burton wants our money, and frankly he deserves it more than we do. Do you remember the episode of Parks and Recreation where Ben asks Pawnee's chief of…
Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite last wrote for The Toast about Bend it Like Beckham. Despite liking both books and Canada, I’m not really a CanLit fan. I was never drawn to the genre outside of required reading for school, and I can’t pinpoint where exactly my immersion in my national literary culture went awry. But even though I have fallen down on my CanLit reading as an adult, it was one of my favourites as a…
The feature “Read This With That” pairs old and new, complementary pieces from the Internet like so much fine cheese and wine. In today’s installment: “In The Name of Love” and “Why is Generation Y So Unhappy?” (Previous installment: On Mortality with Ariel Levy and Aleksandar Hemon.) “I don’t want to alarm you,” whispers the New York Times Style Section, “but the interns are going gray.” Apparently, the youngs—roughly defined as anyone who…
In 2013, I made a small but very personal resolution – that I would spend the year reading only books written by women. 12 months and 40 books later, I published a piece on Flavorwire.com about the project and how it had affected my life. I merely hoped that a couple of people would be touched by the story and also decide to actively read more books by female authors, thus making small strides…
The feature “Read This With That” pairs old and new, complementary pieces from the Internet like so much fine cheese and wine. In today’s installment: New Yorker writers Ariel Levy and Aleksandar Hemon. (Previous installment: Taffy and Sugar.) In our culture, even serious people do not like to think about death. There are some exceptions: the fictional Harry Burns (“I spend hours. I spend days”), the semi-fictional Woody Allen (“I was suicidal…
"Trophy" is never a word people use to describe something that someone loves. Trophies are about possession and pride and objectification. Above all, trophies are seen and not heard. It’s for these reasons, and many others, that so many people chafe when they’re categorized as one. I should know. I’ve been the trophy of many for longer than I’d care to mention. I don’t think that it’s overreaching to say that we live in an…
"I never watched horror movies as a little kid. Once my wife and I started dating, I found out that she had LOVED horror movies from pretty much the moment she saw her first one. After we moved moved in together, we often did all-day movie marathons. There was a cheap, crummy non-chain video store nearby, and you could get old movies for about a dollar. So we'd go through the horror section, her excitedly…
Jaya Saxena: "Oooh, I love romance novels, always on planes or while traveling. And most of the time halfway through I'll just start skipping to the sex scenes. I also often leave them on planes/in hotels for other people to find and enjoy, because I do not need those taking up space. I am also one of those people who reads the last sentence in a book first. No idea why. I never remember them by the time…
