Reading Rambo

How's your reading for the year coming? I hope well, because tomorrow is December and the holiday rush means THERE'S NO TIME, PEOPLE. nobody got time for anything Hahaha jk stats don't mean anything just enjoy what you're reading.  I feel like this year, I've focused a lot on non-fiction and graphic novels/comics, and I'm extremely happy about that choice. I'd never read any Sandman  before this year! It was out of my life! The sheer insanity of that. Although, if I'd read it when I was a teenager, I probably would've been horrified by discussions of sex, drugs, lesbians, etc, so maybe this is coming at just the right time.  True to form, I'm in the middle of a bunch of books. Right now we've got: Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth Century Americans: A Mormon Example . DON'T JUDGE ME. these gifs were legit right after each other in my gif folder and I never noticed before and this is my favorite thing of today Muham...

Thanksgiving, aka The Best Holiday of All of Our Holidays, is almost upon us. Let's all take this moment to remember that Jimmy Kimmel sketch where Meghan Trainor hawked a fake Thanksgiving album: But also! Also -- let's remember books read this year for which we are thankful. The following are my favorites for 2015 (so far). All these books have stuck with me in some positive way, and I'm glad I read all of them. Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance with the Macabre I haven't written a review of this yet, but IMAGINE A BOOK that talks about Regency murders and links them up with how the culture around them reacted and it all culminates in the much-later Ripper murders and it all gives you a greater appreciation for the Romantics who you maybe have made fun of a lot in the past. I like this book. Sandman I AM SO THANKFUL FOR SANDMAN . I'm on volume 8 in the series, and despite being in a state of decluttering my life and gettin...

You know how sometimes you look at the You of 5, 10, 15 years ago and can sometimes barely recognize yourself? Or you think how the people who've met you in the years since that time have no idea that certain things used to be The Most Important to you? From about ages 10 to 20, I was very, very into old movies. It started with PBS showing them when I lived out in the country and we only got seven channels because of some malarkey about satellite dishes not working out there. They'd show them late, and that's how I first saw Bringing Up Baby , the classic Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant comedy, and arguably their best. I also caught The Philadelphia Story that way, and both of these spawned a Katharine Hepburn obsession that culminated in my friend and me starting this community . I STILL LOVE THESE MOVIES. But our culture has switched to Netflix, so I basically never see them. I am, however, reading a book about 19th century murders, and it reminded me of my brief ...

As we have now seen for millennia, literature can be the sane voice of reason at times when anxiety, fear, and panic threaten to lead us into actions we might someday regret. I have great amounts of love for also known as middle grade fiction. This genre has a special knack for stating an idea both succinctly and clearly.  The recent tragedy in France made me think of a specific middle grade book series: Lemony Snicket's  A Series of Unfortunate Events . For those unfamiliar, it's semi-gothic, has a very particular and excellent prose style, and consists of 13 books, all about the three Baudelaire orphans. The thing I remembered from the series is that in one of the later books, the Baudelaire siblings are met with a difficult decision: they can use underhanded tactics to capture one of the many villains out to get them, or...they can choose to not. Every. Other. Children's book I've read would have had no problem with them capturing a villain and using th...

The Time Fetch is a delightful romp through ponderings of atoms, time, and Christmas cookies.  I snatched it from someone's table at Book Expo America last year (me: "Can I take this?" guy: "um...maybe?" me: "ok cool" *takes it*) and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since. UNTIL NOW, when I read it and loved it. So there are these little time-gnat/fairy things and they steal tiny bits of time. Not so you'd really notice. It's just that when time seems to go faster than normal and you are shocked it is already 2 o'clock, and how did that happen so quickly?--time-gnats. (note: they are not called time-gnats in the book, but it how they are best described) like Crysta in Ferngully but way smaller and also they eat time At a certain time of year, namely, the solstice, they go back into their home (the time fetch), which is a little rock/walnut-type thing, and they wait to be picked up. But if someone disturbs the time fe...

I wasn't going to see Suffragette . When it was first announced, I was leap-in-the-air excited, and then as time passed and disappointing reports kept trickling in, that enthusiasm waned and waned until my only motivation for going was a friend asking + a dull desire to learn more about the British women's suffrage movement. I'm extremely glad I saw it. My expectations were The Lowest because most of the articles I've seen about Suffragette  either commented on the whitewashing involved, or on the hideous PR debacle surrounding the Pankhurst quote "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" t-shirts the cast was photographed wearing. (Does Pankhurst say this quote in the movie? Yes, but it's in context, and therefore not horrifying) I have to do more reading to verify how accurate this portrayal of the situation was, but Suffragette  gives an on-the-ground view of what the actions and consequences were for the everyday women involved in the suffrage...

Continuing on with Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy , her 1986 attempt to discover how we arrived at the current patriarchal system that OPPRESSES OUR VERY SOULS and does things like make the default character on Grand Theft Auto a dude with no lady option unless you log into your online account, which is bullshit. It also does a lot of other things, most of which are very important. The Grand Theft Auto one was maybe not the most important. But it came up this weekend. So there we are. Lerner's book is really hard and I am here to read it for you and give you nice quotey bits that make you feel like you've learned something. Chapter 2 is "A Working Hypothesis." This begins with: The basic assumption with which we must start any theorizing about the past is that men and women built civilization jointly. She basically says that yes, man probably hunted, and woman was "the inventor of clay and woven vessels, by means of which the...

We don't talk about lesbian literature enough. Because in the grand scheme of things, there isn't a lot of it. But Curious Wine , originally published in 1983 by Naiad Press, was one of the bigger 1980s lesbian novels. Katherine V. Forrest is mainly known for her lesbian detective series, starring policewoman Kate Delafield, but Curious Wine and An Emergence of Green are her big standalone novels. This book is the gayest. A bunch of ladies sitting around a cabin, talking about Emily Dickinson. Then two of them lez out. Theeee end. But for reals though, Forrest's books are very much of their time, and you've gotta take this book for what it is if you're going to enjoy it. If you read it in 2015, it comes off extremely dated and very reactionary to the culture of the time. Suffice it to say, in both of Forrest's standalone novels, there's an evil male and a rape scene that reaffirms one of the women's decision to be with another woman. ...

Do you feel like there have been more great books coming out lately than normal? Like a weird abundance?  There are so many amazing books out right now and I haven't been able to get through any of them or even start some of them. But let's talk about them really quick, because that'll make me feel like I am somehow making progress when I am in fact not doing that at all. Drood  by Dan Simmons. Some of you hate this. But it stars Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and involves The Mystery of Edwin Drood  which I love SO MUCH so even though it's the size of a small elephant, I want to read it. I miss Drood, guys. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage  by Sydney Padua. I mean. It's a comic about Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace and how she basically invented the first computer. What exciting times we live in! The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age  by Myra MacPherson. I recently listened to a Stuff You Missed i...

You guys. When Antonia died because of course she did since she'd been raped, this is exactly what I said to Matthew Gregory Lewis: "WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS NOW USELESS WOMAN?" Lewis cried. "Oh, I'll just have her get murdered, 'cause since one dude violated her with his dick, now no one else can have her. She is literally ruined. I know it's 'technically' not her fault, but I think we all know it's her fault." Antonia's dead, Matilda was a demon the whole time, and Satan threw shade at Ambrosio. "Scarcely could I propose crimes so quick as you performed them. " #SatanShade WHAT TO EVEN THINK OF THIS BOOK. It's just a giant exercise in "let's feel superior about Catholicism and also write the most salacious things possible." But! It's semi-famous and people still publish it. And now we know what, like, 50 Shades of Grey was in 1796.  You know what else was published in 1796? Fann...

I normally keep my feelings about Swan Queen aka Emma and Regina on the terrible ABC show Once Upon a Time out of this space, because BOOKS and so forth, but last night's episode (that I didn't watch but saw recaps of on Tumblr) was the Swan Queeniest and I can't handle that this show, after five seasons, still has not put these two women together. Yeeeeah.... If any of these scenes had happened with a guy and a girl, the audience would be clamoring for them to get together, but because it's between two women, the Swan Queen fandom has to deal with a ridiculous amount of harassment and negativity. It took ages to even get the show's creators to acknowledge  Swan Queen as a thing, which is ridiculous because it's definitely the most active fanbase for the show (#motivatedlesbians).  Even if you ignore the size of the fandom, the way the show has structured Emma and Regina's frequently combative relationship is textbook for enemies who e...

What've we learned from The Monk this week. You allow a lady disguised as a dude to live at your monastery and soon enough you and her are banging 24/7, you're making pacts with Satan and murdering older ladies with pillows. Ambrosio! What a d-bag. What, sir, so your new awesome plan is to AGAIN DRUG ANTONIA and keep her prisoner in some underground crypt sex chamber? That's gonna get real boring real fast, and also, ew. You are terrible at life, and I do not like you. AND WHAT WAS UP WITH CHAPTER III OMG. All the things happened in Chapter III!!! The Prioress's evilness is discovered! She is horribly mutilated and murdered by a mob. A secret chamber is discovered at the base of a statue! Agnes is found! And now they're running around like at the end of Phantom of the Opera and searching for the seemingly-dead Antonia (I assume) in the near-endless caverns. Don't tell me you didn't listen to the end tracks of Phantom or even think about them while r...