"The horror, the horror..."

 "The recently published horror novel Night Film by Marisha Pessl has this to say about being scared: 'Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are.'
     This is exactly why I write horror. Fear is crucial to my life. It always has been. My list of fears is long and legendary: leeches, ghosts, the Apocalypse, Skeksis, aliens, the coyotes I see skulking down my street at night, swimming in the ocean, a killer hiding in my backseat, basements, cougars, clowns, zombies, abandoned houses, swimming in a quarry, rat hordes, heights, getting lost in a cave like Tom Sawyer, being buried alive, rustling cornfields, pets that come back to life, buckets of pig's blood, reading "The Shining" with a flashlight at three in the morning in the dark in a dead silent house...
     My fear has helped me learn what I'm made of. It has shown me what I am. My list of scary books is not comprehensive, and leaves off some greats like The Road, Perfume, House of Leaves, and several Stephen King titles. But most of the books I mention I first read as an adolescent, and they still haunt me today. Which means something."
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Huffington Post

Find out what's on that list here…

Se a post about Marisha Pessl's latest book Night Film here...

A Moment of the Mind

"[...]There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see [...] it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her." — Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian

What was on Marilyn Monroe's bookshelf:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Paris Blues by Harold Flender
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Fall by Albert Camus
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck
From:Media Bistro
See also: Women Reading
Photo from: Breathing Books