Kevin Roose, son of liberal Quakers, decided to leave Brown University and spend a semester at Jerry Falwell’s “Bible Boot Camp”, Liberty University. There he attended classes on biblical history and evangelism, participated in a mission trip to Daytona Beach during spring break, and joined a support group for chronic masturbators. When he announced his intention to spend a semester at Liberty, his family and friends expected him to find a group of intolerant arch-conservatives marching in lockstep, but the reality (of course) was far more complicated. I could not put this book down. I must read thousands of books…
43 CommentsReading the End Posts
I read this for the Time Travel Challenge. Yeah, I’m not adhering to my list. TOO BAD. I’m making King of Shadows part of a time travel mini-challenge that I call the Books I Like Because They Contain Time Travel and in Spite of Having Been Written by Authors I Do Not Like as Much as My Big Sister Does Challenge. I shall include Time Cat in this mini-challenge too, because I can do that. Nat Field, a twelve-year-old with a tragedy in his background, comes to London as part of a company of boys to perform at the newly…
33 CommentsFor some reason I can’t seem to finish any books these days. There are a number of factors involved. I have a lot of good books right now. I am rereading Fables as well as several volumes of L.M. Montgomery’s generally-predictable-but-sweet-nevertheless short stories. I’m also reading The Two Towers, The Bell, Yes Means Yes, and more of Tom Stoppard’s plays. I have fallen back in love with a still-untitled (I’m crap at titles) story I’ve been working on for ages, so I’m working on rewriting that. Having scheduled a Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Marathon with my sister and…
22 CommentsThis weekend I drove down to New Orleans to visit my sister. I do not like driving to unfamiliar places, and driving in New Orleans, as you will know if you have been there, is not set up in such a way as to prevent a bewildered girl from getting lost. For that reason I have not managed to pay a solo visit to my sister since she moved to New Orleans two years ago (that reason and also the cats she has, which I am allergic to, but mostly I am just a bad person). We thought we would…
17 CommentsHaving read, now, two of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances (the other being The Reluctant Widow), and having begun making plans to dole them out to myself when I am having difficult days, I have been trying to decide what I like about them, and to remember why I refused to read them for so long. The facts as I knew them were that a) my mum, who gave me half of my favorite books, liked her; and that b) Stephen Fry liked her; and that c) Sorcery and Cecelia, which I love, was essentially Georgette Heyer with magic. Why would…
39 CommentsI do not appreciate the suggestion that Oscar Wilde’s cleverness consisted in paradoxical epigram. I will accept gracious tributes to Wilde’s way with epigrams, like Dorothy Parker’s: If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit. We all assume that Oscar said it. Thank you, Dorothy Parker. You have lovely qualities and could bang out epigrams with the best of them. I will not, however, sit idly by in the face of any slighting reference to Oscar Wilde that implies that he was not as witty and charming as he is…
22 CommentsThe word “grandiose”, in my family, is a loaded word. When one of us uses the word “grandiose” to describe someone, we understand that we actually mean “might possibly benefit from medication; updates as warranted”. I bring that up because if I had been traveling in Communist China with a girl I didn’t know very well, and she had started talking about the project she was working on that was going to be important to national security, I’d have called home and said, “Claire is waxing grandiose,” and my parents would have said, “You get her on a plane and…
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