How Freedom and Necessity was described to me by Anastasia: An epistolary novel set in Victorian times, with magic! What I pictured: Sorcery and Cecelia The primary topic of the first forty pages of Freedom and Necessity: Hegel, I swear to God. You know, the philosopher. And his concepts of idealism. So, yeah. Me and Freedom and Necessity got off to a bumpy start. Luckily, I was on the bus and had nothing else of interest for my eyes to rest on for the duration of the bus ride, which meant that perforce I read past the first 40 pages…
17 CommentsReading the End Posts
Without You There Is No Us is a read for Nonfiction November, hosted by the marvelous Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness), Leslie (Regular Rumination), Katie (Doing Dewey), and Rebecca (I’m Lost in Books). Rebecca’s the host for this week, so head on over to her blog to see the nonfiction other bloggers have been reading and recommending! North Korea is an improbable circumstance, isn’t it? Whenever I think about North Korea, I’m surprised all over again. I’m like the grandmother in Emily Climbs who keeps insisting that a child can’t be lost in the nineteenth century. How can there be, in this…
24 CommentsWhat time is it? It’s time for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Awards! Huzzah! The only sad thing is that apparently Patrick Ness (in an uncharacteristically curmudgeonly turn) opposes the Bad Sex Awards. He thinks they’ll have a chilling effect on people writing sex scenes. Maybe they will have a chilling effect on people writing bad sex scenes. If you enjoyed the Sims Friends from my last links round-up, you’ll love this article about a woman determined to seduce the Sims Grim Reaper, a goal she pursued by repeatedly murdering her Sims in order to get the Grim Reaper…
25 CommentsHere it is the middle of November, and I have to accept that I am never going to get full posts written on some of these books before the end of the year. So I am doing a small batch edition. First up, Max Brooks and Canaan White’s comic The Harlem Hellfighters, which I received from the publisher for review consideration, and am (eek!) reviewing rather belatedly. The Harlem Hellfighters were an all-black infantry regiment in World War I; they never lost a man through capture or gave up a foot of ground to the enemy. Rather touchingly, Max Brooks…
6 CommentsWhen I was in middle school, there was this author called Lurlene McDaniel who wrote all these books about children my age with dreadful diseases who fought courageously against them and then died. I didn’t read any of them (because ugh), but I’ve always had her pegged as the Nicholas Sparks of the YA world. (Oh, God, has Nicholas Sparks written any YA novels yet? Let’s stop that from happening at any cost. I don’t care about the books themselves, but I don’t want to read the sanctimonious interviews Nicholas Sparks would certainly give about how his books are different…
23 CommentsUnspeakable Truths is a read for Nonfiction November, hosted by the marvelous Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness), Leslie (Regular Rumination), Katie (Doing Dewey), and Rebecca (I’m Lost in Books). Kim’s the host for this week, so head on over to her blog to see the nonfiction other bloggers have been reading and recommending! Some time ago I got the idea in my head that I wanted to learn more about a fuzzy thing I could not quite define that was related to shifting from a terrible, warry society to a less-terrible not-war society. As with so many things, it was tricky to…
12 Comments