Scaring myself, mostly. This library has a lot of books inside of it, but it also has the scariest damn stacks I ever saw. They have these dark, narrow aisles, and the doors in the stairwells between levels swing open and shut with loud, prolonged, ominous squeaks. I always have the exact call numbers of the books I want before I go, because sitting down at one of the catalogue computers, with my back to the darkened stacks, does not inspire feelings of comfort and safety. The main aisles are lit, but you have to press a button to turn…
57 CommentsReading the End Posts
Typically I don’t read American historical fiction. I had to do a lot of American history in school, and so I learned a dozen dozen times about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and Reconstruction and the dreadful dusty Depression. I feel like I have already paid my dues where learning about those things are concerned. Louisiana history too. That project on the flood of 1927 was both tedious and depressing, so I have decided that Louisiana history and me are quits. I am a grown-up now, dammit, and that means I get to choose what countries and time…
36 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 CommentsAnd now for some comics that did not rock my world but count towards the Graphic Novels Challenge anyway: Burma Chronicles, Guy Delisle Once again Guy Delisle, French-Canadian animator and cartoonist, went a-traveling to a faraway land with an oppressive regime. In this case, his wife Nadège was working for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF); Nadège, Guy, and their small son Louis take off for Burma (Myanmar) for a year. Delisle notes at the beginning of the book that the UN has recognized the regime and calls it Myanmar, but that many countries, including Canada, have not. Hence Burma. If I…
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