S.B. Howell

Author: sbhowell

  • Is Lady Bird Plagiarized?

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    sbhowell
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    Last week, my sister-in-law posted an article by one of her creative writing teachers alleging that the hot indie movie Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Saoirse Ronan, is “a white-lady Real Women Have Curves”. Michelle Cruz Gonzales says that it steals the plot, some scenes, and its cinematography style from the 2002 film…

  • A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

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    sbhowell
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    Rating: 3/5, average “Many histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a case of the…

  • The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

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    Rating: 3/5 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a novella of about 40,000 words written by Lovecraft in 1927. It’s one of his later stories, and it incorporates a lot of the monsters he created in earlier works. Even though it has the usual Lovecraftian horror suspects like Nyarlathotep, the night-gaunts, and the gibbering Outer…

  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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    sbhowell
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    Rating: 4/5 I tried to read The Bell Jar in high school, but didn’t get very far. I had just finished reading (and loved) Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, and so I thought I would like The Bell Jar, but I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t understand what made a person like Esther Greenwood…

  • March Writing Fail

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    So… writing in March didn’t exactly go as planned. I kinda got busy and completely forgot about it. I did do some other writing for ExploreLivermore and I managed to finish my So Rich, So Poor review, but fiction writing kinda didn’t happen. Happy distractions abounded, from Daniel’s birthday, my mom coming to visit, and…

  • So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman

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    sbhowell
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    Rating: 4 So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical,…

  • Rainy Love

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    Life is like a point-and-click adventure game. Today I went to the police station next to the library (because the library opens at 10) and I saw a monument with a rock split in two, joined around with a rope.

  • Dawn by Octavia Butler

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    sbhowell
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    Rating: 4 Warning: this review contains spoilers! The other characters withhold a lot of information from the main character, so discussing the themes of this book is really difficult to do without spoiling it. I’m just not going to bother here, and assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care about spoilers. Octavia Butler’s…

  • January Writing Progress

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    sbhowell
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    So here’s my daily wordcounts for January using the method I talked about here! I missed a couple days when I went to a convention, the Women’s March, didn’t feel like writing on the weekend, or was working on a blog post, but I did hit 10k by the end of the month, so I’m…

  • Ikea Ivar Bookshelves

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    sbhowell
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    This blog post is a little late (since I finished the shelves in October) but I thought I should post it for anyone who’s looking for a cheap way to make a custom bookshelf wall.