fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
Hank Green's A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a complex story. An alien hive intelligence, the perils of social media celebrity and a talking monkey are among the natural headline fodder of the plot's explosive adventure. Beyond that, it's legitimately astounding that Green managed to release a book in mid-2020 that is so keenly attuned to [...]
We're five months into a global pandemic and the world is (still) on fire. If you listen closely, above the raucous tumult of daily news briefings and abrasively selfish protestors, you can hear the soft whine of every single person on earth collectively screaming through clenched teeth. We all need a break. We all need [...]
Rocannon's World may not be one of the first dozen Ursula K. Le Guin books that I'd recommend but the novel did birth a legacy that, rather appropriately, stretches through time from the story's 1966 publication through the present day. Needing a means of communication that could bridge the time-dilation gap of faster than light [...]
The explosive success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code made him unfathomably wealthy but it also indirectly made him a punching bag for a certain type of literary snob. Yes, that includes me. It's not interesting, especially in 2020, to note that Dan Brown's prose is stilted and awkward, that his descriptions of female [...]
When we first meet him, King Théoden of Rohan is in thrall to his laughably evil advisor, Gríma Wormtongue. Through the efforts of Gandalf, Théoden throws off the yoke of his oppressor and rediscovers his strength and his sanity. But, for all his bonding with Pippin and his gracious speeches to Eomer and Eowyn, he [...]
The final chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Breaking of the Fellowship," is broken into two parts: The first ends with Boromir falling to the temptation of the Ring while the second ends with Frodo and Sam heading out to Mordor as chaos rages behind them. These two passages lay out [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic with a vibrant interest in storytelling traditions and, because it was a lot easier for 13th century bards to remember rhyming stanzas than one long string of prose text, most of those traditions involve stories written in verse or performed as songs outright. Not content to merely translate and rewrite those existing verse [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was not known for his comedic stylings as evidenced by the fact that his work has been referred to as "dry" and "a slog." And yet the esteemed philologist was not without humor or the ability to turn an amusing phrase. The Lord of the Rings will never be mistaken for a comedy [...]
Before reading The Silmarillion, there are some questions that you should probably ask yourself: Do you know the basic stories of Gil-Galad and Beren One-Hand? Do you recognize names like Barahir, Grond and Fëanor and want to know more about them? Have you figured out, through context alone, what (fictional) words like dagor and ithil [...]
Though its opening line is among the most famous in all the Western canon, it's the closing lines of Charles Dickens' revolutionary classic A Tale of Two Cities that resonate with unshakable beauty. (For what it's worth, we don't even seem to know that opening line quite as well as we like to think because [...]
Songs & Stories 