Little Talks

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book  takes the ideas of The Jungle Book  and relocates them to a modern English graveyard. Like Rudyard Kipling's classic, the story centers on a young boy whose family is killed when he is only a baby, and he is rescued and adopted by an unusual group of beings - but instead of wolves, Gaiman's young Bod (short for Nobody) is taken in by the ghosts in the graveyard. Each chapter then recounts an incident from a moment in the boy's life, as he gradually gets older and learns what it means to be a man while growing up outside of the human realm. Neil Gaiman interestingly seems to have tapped into an theme which Andy Serkis' Mowgli  movie also finds in the story of The Jungle Book : the dangers of the human world. The greatest danger to young Bod throughout his childhood is the human world that exists outside the graveyard and occasionally invades his home. His family was murdered by a man who continues to be a threat to his existence,...

The first thing you need to know about Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency  is that it doesn't really make sense unless you're familiar with the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That may seem odd, but I promise you that knowing this famous Romantic writer is crucial to the mystery being investigated by the title character, and the author includes many other more subtle nods to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . The next thing you need to know is that Douglas Adams' writing style is nothing short of bizarre. However, he uses science fiction, mystery, and horror elements in the most uniquely comedic ways. His narrative voice is fantastically whimsical, and he somehow manages to approach all topics--from the mundane to downright gruesome--from a whole new perspective. Never could I have imagined what it would be like to see this world without having prior contextual knowledge upon which to build my understandings, yet somehow Douglas Adams manages to do exactly th...