Paul’s Movie Reviews

“I’m a psychiatrist, Miss Taylor. Normally, when people hit things with their car, there are skidmarks on the pavement. A brick wall is a pretty good reason to use the brakes, turn the wheel. You didn’t do that.” — Jude Law as Dr. Jonathan Banks in Side Effects Side Effects (2013, USA) A subtle mystery […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Nonfiction, Fantasy, SF

I went outside and smoked a cigarette, looking this way and that, the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers. They had looked all right on the old man from Dallas but they made me feel like a clown. They were hot and sticky, too, made of […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

“I told Agustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.) It was, we were told, incurable.” — The Fault in Our Stars, John […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king’s hand on his shoulder, Henry’s face earnest as he talks […]

Paul’s Movie Reviews

“When daddy kill me I won’t be forgotten. I’m recording my story for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.” — Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Science Fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Anthology

“Francie and Neeley went down into the cellar each evening and emptied the dumbwaiter shelves of the day’s accumulated trash. They owned this privilege because Francie’s mother was the janitress. They looted the shelves of paper, rags and deposit bottles. Paper wasn’t worth much. They got only a penny for ten pounds. Rags brought two […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science Fiction, One I Didn’t Finish Reading

“In Paris, the evenings of September are sometimes warm, excessively gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistibly seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafes, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, […]