Mer L.'s blog

As my partner works at the Texas Renaissance Festival every year, my weekends in October and November are spent alone with the dogs, who don’t typically pass judgment over what I choose to watch for fun. This past weekend I finished knitting a scarf, drank endless cups of tea, and watched Murder, She Wrote. There’s something reassuring about Jessica Fletcher – she seems to know everything (from making a good lobster to poisons), she always solves the case, and she ends each show throwing her head back in laughter – that gal knows how to have a good time. 

What are your guilty pleasures?

The 12^th season of the Simpsons was recently released on DVD and, while I’m certainly going to date myself here, I grew up watching the Simpsons. I remember having a Bart Simpson toothbrush holder and watching each new episode Sunday night before a heated playground rehashing the next day. As I’ve been collecting my favorite seasons on DVD and watching them again as an adult, I began realizing that my elementary school self was not getting all the jokes! Some cartoons really are not just for (or meant specifically for) kids. What are your favorite cartoons?

I love historical fiction and reading about people from and events of the past. What I enjoy even more, though, are books set in the past but with fantastical flourishes – maybe something slightly magical, perhaps with ghosts haunting the scene, or of time traveling contemporaries who end up in a distant era. Are books like this really historical fiction? Are they fantasies or science fiction? Are they something else entirely?