The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/book/)
Former five-term congressman and current local resident Robert J. Mrazek ’67, now an award-winning author, released his 12th novel this week: “The Dark Circle.” The triller, set in a fictional version of Ithaca, weaves in factual details about Upstate New York.
Forbes’ 2019 America’s Most Innovative Leaders named only one woman on the entire 100-person list. Cornell’s Society of Women Engineers saw this lack of representation as an opportunity to showcase female leaders in STEM within the Cornell community. The result was Wall of Wonder: Cornell Women Leading the Way in Science, Technology, and Engineering, a book of short biographies of 27 inspiring alumnae, written by SWE co-presidents Madeline Dubelier ’20 and Catherine Gurecky ’20, alongside member Abigail Macaluso ’20. The three also worked with David Ross Jansen ’22, a performing and media arts student who illustrated portraits of each of the women. Proceeds from the book will go to K-12 outreach programs organized by the Cornell SWE chapter.
Chosen Ones is the story of what happens after Katniss fires the arrow and Voldemort falls; it begins at the end, launching into woefully underexplored territory.
Perhaps no greater medium captures the tensions between scales than narrative, which necessitates the intricate minutiae of human happenings at the same time as it makes a bid for the universal.
A little bit of nuance would go a long way.
Michener began her lecture by describing the “health policy roller coaster” that American citizens have recently climbed aboard, revealing that in 2010, the Affordable Care Act appeared to offer a “new set of possibilities on the horizon” to some — an optimism that tapered off soon after politics became interwoven with the policy.
John Crowley, it seems, has no more based the movie off the novel than cut up its nine-hundred-and-something pages and randomly selected just enough chapters to fit into a two-and-a-half hour feature film.
To see the magic fade out of the things we once cherished and held beloved is sad.
Heidi Heilig’s new book, For a Muse of Fire pulls the reader into a vibrant, lush world inspired by Asian cultures and French colonialism. The story follows Jetta Chantray, a young Chakran shadow player of the Ros Nai troupe, as she and her family strive to win passage to Aquitan, the home of the Aquitan emperor and a spring rumored to cure madness. But Jetta’s malheur, her madness, is only one of the secrets she keeps. Jetta has the ability to slip souls into new skins, and in a world still haunted by the brutality of the mad nécromancien Le Trépas, the old ways have been abolished, punishable by death or worse. Heilig weaves a complex tale, balancing the powers of colonization, rebellion and a family caught in between.
A few weeks ago, former Arts editor Troy Sherman ‘18 and I decided to ruin our February break. Instead of going on a trip with friends, catching up on sleep and work or just spending time thinking and relaxing, we chose to spend a good portion of the break in close quarters, reading pages and pages of near-nonsense. When others asked us what we planned to do over break, we’d respond, with a mix of self-conscious amusement and embarrassment, “We’re going to read Finnegans Wake aloud.”
Why? I’m not entirely sure, looking back, how the seed of this idea was first planted. I’m an avid fan of the Irish writer James Joyce, and I think at some point last semester I realized that if I didn’t read Finnegans Wake — his final and by far most difficult work — now, while I’m in college and have friends like Troy that will do ridiculous, simultaneously self-flagellating and self-indulgent things like this with me, then I might never read it.