You know Chandler from Friends? You know how in Friends, somebody would say something stupid, and Matthew Perry would do that thing where he would fling his whole body into one large, frantic gesture of utter incredulity? That is how I felt all the way through How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Exactly like that. I kept flinging the book across the room (really satisfying, by the way! A nice thing about ARCs is you can dog ear pages and throw them across the room or even rip out pages if you want, and it doesn’t matter because they belong to you,…
31 CommentsCategory: 1 Star
FiveBooks! What? How could you let me down like this? The Riddle of the Sands was supposed to be one of the five best books in all the land on the Secret Service. Uncool! I just thought it was going to be so excited, nonstop intrigue and deception, culminating in some sort of thrilling climax where all the previously-introduced thrilling spy elements would come together in for an astounding finish. Like the sort of thing H. Rider Haggard would do, if H. Rider Haggard wrote spy novels. Why was it not like that? The premise promised good things: Our protagonist,…
48 CommentsNope, not talking about the Senator from Minnesota (that’s weird, right? The lines between entertainment and politics are weirdly thin these days. Was it always thus?). I am talking about the books I have been reading lately, which have been full of people who lack integrity. Now I am ready to read about Betsy and Tacy, whose biggest deceptions involved reading Lady Audley’s Secret on the sly (I just wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That would be legitimately inappropriate for a twelve-year-old). The Sealed Letter, Emma Donohue After I read Room (yeah, yeah, I read it), I thought it might be…
31 CommentsInitially I had it in my head that both of the books my library had on the subject of the Black Panther Party (that I wanted – they had some older books, but I wanted shiny new ones with slightly more time perspective and declassified FBI documents, I hoped) were published by the University of Alabama Press. And I was going to say a few words about how fun it was for me to watch the Alabama quarterback being sacked over and over last night by South Carolina, almost funner than seeing my alma mater win after pulling a very…
22 CommentsOh Bruno Bettelheim, you silly bunny. So many things about your book annoyed me until I flipped to your about-the-author and looked at your dates. Turns out, there is some excuse for your dated Freudian psychology: you were born in 1903! After I knew that, so many things about you still annoyed me. I like for writers to use the phrases “oedipal conflict” and “oral incorporative stage” sparingly, if at all. Your dates are no excuse! I would have found it even more annoying if I had not suddenly remembered this (warning for language); and then every time Bettelheim said…
37 CommentsI was enjoying Righteous well enough for the first half of the book, though I did recognize that I might be burning out on Christian culture. I feel I am ready to move on and tackle some of the zillions of recommendations y’all gave me for fantasy books (y’all rock, by the way, thanks for those). And then, oh dear, then I got to the chapter about black churches, and it ruined the rest of the book for me. The chapter is hella condescending and stereotype-y: But these days, it’s not pimps but preachers who slip into custom-made three-piece suits…
15 Comments