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Review: How Shakespeare Changed Everything, Stephen Marche

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 Comments

Review: The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

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 Comments

Review: The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer; or, My Mumsy enjoyed her chocolate cake (a guest review)

So far my mother has only said overwhelmingly positive things in her guest reviews. I feel like y’all will begin to think that my mother likes every book she reads, and look, she doesn’t. There are many books, including some I initially think are a really good idea for a gift, that my mother doesn’t care for at all. She is pleasingly forthright about this, and then I always know what the book’s flaws are, and I have a good notion of whether I will find them to be surmountable. Here is a book my Mumsy did not care for.…

43 Comments

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

Nope, 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 Comments

Learning about the Black Panthers

Initially 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 Comments

The other two Mary Renault books I got from the university library

I am always trying to think of ways to maximize my reading pleasure when an author has written more than one book. Before I realized it was futile because everyone has different tastes, I used to go on Amazon and try to figure out what a shiny new author’s least popular book was, and then I’d read that one first so it would be all improvements from that point on. This did not work at all with, for instance, Salman Rushdie. I accidentally read his most-acclaimed book first, Midnight’s Children, and when (after consulting Amazon) I tried to read what…

38 Comments

The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim

Oh 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 Comments

Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler

I 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

Review: Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

Every time I have checked out a Jeeves book from the library, it has been because I went looking for something in the W section and failed to find it.  In this case, the library claimed they had several Jeanette Winterson books in, when what they meant was that they had absolutely no Jeanette Winterson books in at all.  In particular they did not have Sexing the Cherry, which is the one I was after.  I drifted gloomily down the shelves and checked out two Jeeves books instead. I do not advise this as a strategy.  It invites comparisons, and…

19 Comments

Review: Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare

They cut my head off in Titus Andronicus.  When I write plays, they’ll be like Titus…I liked it when they cut heads off, and the daughter mutilated with knives.  Plenty of blood.  That’s the only writing. –John Webster character in Shakespeare in Love Oh, Tom Stoppard.  You are so great.  I wish you would write screenplays for thousands of movies.  I wish you would have your own television show, and it would be called Tom Stoppard Is Not Ha-Ha-Funny But Everybody Loves Him Anyway, and on it, you could make wry comments about hermits who read newspapers and John Webster…

23 Comments