This has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.” The excerpt I read from Being Mortal in the New Yorker dealt with the astonishing rarity…
31 CommentsReading the End Posts
Beautiful Darkness (Drawn and Quarterly) opens as a girl called Aurora has tea with a boy she has a crush on. (They met at the ball the other night.) Then — in seconds — they find themselves struggling to survive in the woods. They are all very wee, and the woods are normal-sized. They also appear to have emerged from the decomposing corpse of a little girl. Possibly — the book isn’t explicit about this — all of the tiny people are aspects of the dead girl’s personality, now set free to roam freely and tinily around the woods. If that synopsis seems unwarrantedly weird, don’t blame me. Apply…
17 CommentsOkay, these are a bit old by now. Too bad for you! I haven’t done a links round-up in a while and that is why. Kate Elliott discusses female friendships on television at The Book Smugglers, and recommends some forthcoming fantasy books, thus lengthening my TBR list for 2015 even further. Seriously, my 2015 list is out of control. I need help. An article on Pamela Colman Smith, the wonderful artist of the classic Tarot deck. Hers is the only Tarot deck I will condescend to use. Others are beautiful, but Pamela Colman Smith’s has all the symbolism. Rembert Browne…
10 CommentsThe podcast says Happy New Year!! Whiskey Jenny and I are back once again to talk about fictional workplaces (we have a small taxonomy of how to do these) and The Singer’s Gun, a book from Emily St. John Mandel’s backlist. We also play a game with Randon that deals with modes of transportation. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 33 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating!…
Leave a CommentIn my post last year about reading diversely, I forgot to mention another side effect of more diverse reading: gaining new areas of interest. Sri Lanka came onto my radar when I read the beautiful-covered On Sal Mal Lane last year, but it also left me uncertain about the particulars of the country’s civil wars. The difficulty is that when there are no hooks in your brain for new information to grab onto, you’re less willing to take in that information in the first place; and once you have taken it in, you’re less likely to retain it. (This is…
9 CommentsI received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher, for review consideration. The venerable Jack Zipes, one of the shiniest scholars in fairy tale studies, has brought us a lovely treat, which is a new translation of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales, decorated with wonderfully creepy illustrations by Andrea Dezsö. This edition includes stories that were later excised for reasons of provenance (Bluebeard was too French to keep in subsequent editions), incompleteness, repetitiveness, or family-unfriendly values. The Grimms make the following case for the inclusion of the sex-and-devils stories: Objections have been raised . .…
21 CommentsDid you miss us? Our podcast hiatus went longer than we intended, due to some technical difficulties on Whiskey Jenny’s end. But at last we have struggled through those problems to bring you a new episode! In this one we talk about serial writing and why it’s so great; we review John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van; and we play a game about games, invented by Randon! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 32 Or if you wish, you can find us…
Leave a CommentFor 2014, I set myself a goal of reading one book by a person of color out of every five books I read altogether. That number was on the low side because I’d never done this sort of experiment before, and I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. As many people (Amanda of Book Riot, recently) have noted, the book world is remarkably white, and it’s a cycle that reinforces itself. If — like many bloggers these days! — you embark on a project that necessitates your seeking out books by nonwhite authors, it can be tricky to…
45 CommentsHello my scrumptious delights! Did you miss my links round-up last time, when I did not do one? I did! But here I am again with a new one. Edan Lepucki thinks about whether character likeability is beside the point, at The Millions. And I kept thinking about how nobody liked Harriet Vane when Strong Poison came out. I know about this from Dorothy Sayers’s letters. Readers wrote to her in droves begging her not to marry Peter to that dreadful woman. BACK OFF, people of the 1930s. Harriet Vane is one of my favorite characters in all of literature.…
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