What it is: The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo is a novel about Marjorie, a 17-year-old girl living in rural New Hampshire, and the challenges she faces growing up in a more or less abusive home where her parents keep her isolated and even use their own strange dialect of English. After getting a job as…
EDM started becoming really popular a few years ago, and now it seems like upbeat dance remixes are everywhere. I dismissed the genre immediately, but I made a deal with Catherine from Never Stationary: I would give EDM a chance if she did the same for one of my favorite things, and we’d both write our reactions.…
Roll the opening credits. Enter Average Troubled Male. Average Troubled Male has a mediocre, meaningless life. He feels trapped in his job and either hates his friends or has none. He can’t see the fun in anything, and he’s on the road to depression. What does he need? A) To get out of his cubicle…
What it is: Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh is an inside look at gang life in the Chicago housing projects, particularly the activity of the Black Kings at the Robert Taylor Homes during the early 1990s. Venkatesh spent years in and around the complex, collecting data and anecdotes for his graduate work in sociology. He…
Some search terms make sense and direct readers to what they want. Others aren’t perfect, but come close enough to work. The rest are a smorgasbord of “erm,” “okay then,” and “WTF?” Some people seem to be coming to my blog for advice on personal matters and…shopping? Some visitors seemed to need help with school assignments or…
I desperately needed an editorial calendar. A real one, anyway–my scribbled notes and dates were becoming too disorganized, especially when I wanted to plan for bigger blogging projects. When you're a #blogger who changes her mind as much as I do… pic.twitter.com/NVHqgdWw5G — Sabina (@VictimToCharm) December 19, 2014 I spent a lot of time googling…
What it is: The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell is a behind-the-scenes account the astonishingly awful cult classic The Room. It tells everything a fan of the movie would want to know, from anecdotes from filming to how it ultimately rose to fame. Much of the novel is devoted to debunking the myths behind the…
I got my wisdom teeth taken out on Monday. It wasn’t exactly a David-After-Dentist situation–in fact, I wasn’t even particularly loopy–but I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the Snapchats that document my post-surgery experience and figured I’d share here too. Each picture only lasted 24 hours on the app, but this post is presumably forever.…
New year, new reading list. This year, after reading a post at Cynk’s blog, I’m taking on the Read Harder Challenge. I’ve committed to completing 24 book-related challenges. Gamification of personal goals is a huge motivator for me, and even though I didn’t meet my Goodreads goal of 30 books in 2014, I’m setting that same goal…
I started Victim To Charm at the beginning of 2014. One of my resolutions was to “try blogging.” You can tell by the way I worded that goal that I doubted my likelihood to stick with it. Yet 163 posts later, here we are. I started out writing once or sometimes twice each week, primarily…
Victim to Charm 