Reading Rambo

Remember when Arthur Conan Doyle tried to murder Sherlock Holmes because he was so sick of him? I get that. Sherlock Holmes is a compelling character because he's a superhero, but he's got about as much personal depth as the Trix Rabbit. Why don't we just call him Perception Man, make a comic, and call it a day. "Alice, you sound kind of grumpy about this." Yes, because we won't stop carrying him through the decades in various incarnations.  Stopppppp. ( x ) The latest -- unless something new has been written in the last couple months, which I wouldn't be surprised by -- is A Study in Charlotte , where the descendants of Holmes and Watson are at a boarding school in America and have to solve mysteries. I mean. It's fine. It's a fine book. I left it alone for a week and didn't feel any kind of impulse to pick it up except that it was due back at the library. Tbh I haven't even finished it yet, but my lackluster enthusiasm make...

Michelle McNamara died, and I can't get over it. Michelle McNamara was not only Patton Oswalt's wife and the mother of their 7-year-old daughter, but a fascinating true crime writer and researcher. I found out about her through episodes of the podcast The Dork Forest , which she guested on four times, each time talking about her love of true crime research and what progress she'd been making on her book about the prolific but little-known serial killer The Golden State Killer. She was funny, she was engaging, she was clearly ridiculously smart, and I liked her so much. Her talk about not liking anything comic con-related and therefore hating to go to those with Patton Oswalt gave me hope that in relationships, you can love a person and not have to love, or even pretend to like, one of the interests that gets them out of bed in the morning (for those unaware, Patton Oswalt is a SuperNerd). I strongly urge you to listen to her Dork Forest eps (unless true crime squ...

You might be familiar with writer Julian Fellowes and his endless series about the British upper crust and their servants. He's written Gosford Park, The Young Victoria, and of course Downton Abbey , among a ridiculous number of others. If you like him, you like him, because his tone doesn't vary much. I happen to like him very much, despite never having seen more than one season of Downton Abbey and being a bit suspicious of his fetishizing of the aristocracy. His stories are just so fun  and dramatic and romantic and angsty. And now he is releasing a serialized novel, like the Victorian tales of yore. How very on brand for him! Belgravia is set in 1840s London, but begins at a ball in Brussels in 1815, right before the Battle of Waterloo. Chapter 1 is available for free, then the subsequent 10 are $1.99 each. I pre-ordered chapter 1 to download to my Kindle app because, to be honest, I am SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS IDEA. I don't make the time and I don't have the...

It's hard to disconnect. It's hard not to be going somewhere with a purpose. But Keri Smith's The Wander Society encourages you to do just those things. It is a guide to wandering, to not filling your mind with anything but the impressions of your surroundings and the most unfocused of your thoughts.  I'm not going to say we live in an age unlike any other in this respect, because if we were 16th century merchants and you told us to take some time off from scurrying to and fro from spice house to textile shop, we'd wheel about on you angrily and tell you to make off with yourself. [Exit, pursued by a bear] We are like all humans have been for all of time. We focus on things in the future. We focus on things in the past. We run from task to task, and we don't let ourselves wander .  Penguin asked if I wanted to review The Wander Society and I said yes, definitely, for a number of reasons. 1. I like things that are ostensibly going to tell me how to ...

I was browsing the internet a while back, reading about serial killers, as y'do, when I came across the Scottish "Bible John." In his article was a little paragraph discussing other Scottish killers. Among them was Madeleine Smith, who possibly (almost definitely) poisoned her ex-fiancé with arsenic in 1857 after he threatened to expose the letters she had written to him. According to the article, the letters, "when read aloud, caused a scandal in the Victorian courtroom." How do you not then look those up? After quite a bit of questing, but with my end goal in sight (i.e. pervy letters), I found them on a Harvard archive, located here . There are 149 of them, and DISAPPOINTMENT, very little raciness. Damn you, Victorians, and your easily shocked sensibilities. "This is my couch I need for fainting. It is definitely not because I like lying down" What I found from wading through almost all of the letters – for I will put up with m...

We have here a re-run of one of my favorite Doug posts. For those unaware, my friend Doug is hilarious and great, and sometimes I make him read and review classic books that he hates 90% of the time. Here is his Wuthering Heights post. It's awesome. -------------------------------------- I'm not quite sure how to describe in words what it was like reading Wuthering Heights from beginning to end. Luckily, this kid found a way to sum it up perfectly... Thank you, boy! Your hilarious suffering is not in vain. Hi, I'm Doug Wilkinson... Wait, what kind of Internet contributor name is that? Hi, I'm DeathStarBlowJob69, and I would have rather been God-punched in the dick with a meteorite than have ever read this book. Now, I use such extremes for comedic purchase, but I assure you, every character in this book would have literally rather been God-punched in the dick with a meteorite than suffer the indignity of not behaving like a piece of shit. Imagine you...

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner is a 1986 study into the possible origins of our current societal structure. I'm reviewing it in sections, because each chapter has a lot of ideas worth discussing. Part I can be found here , and part II can be found here . If you will remember, this book focuses on ancient civilizations and the earliest records we have of patriarchal formations. Most of these chapters talk about the Code of Hammurabi, and Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew law. In these we can see the gradual subjugation of women as it became codified and then part of our collective consciousness. This post is solely focusing on chapter 5, as it got way too long while I was writing it. Chapter 5: The Wife and the Concubine [A] man's class status is determined by his economic relations and a woman's by her sexual relations...It is a principle which had remained valid for thousands of years. A civilization's laws don't show us how its citizens actuall...

Today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. On March 25th, 1911, a fire broke out on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a block away from Washington Square Park. Most of the people on that floor got out. They telephoned the 10th floor, but were unable to contact the 9th. There were only two elevators, and an arguably locked door, which surviving workers said was locked (illegally) to prevent theft. The only fire escape collapsed under the weight of the people on it. They all fell. There had been no fire drills, because they would eat up company time, and while fire sprinklers had been invented, they weren't mandatory, so companies would choose to save money and not install them. Women worked with their chairs back to back, leaving no adequate escape routes. When the fire broke out, they had to climb onto the tables and step over sewing machines while trying to reach the exits. What this came down to was extreme irresponsibility on the ...

Penguin sent me this book unsolicited, perhaps because my blog speaks so frequently of Victorian literature, murder, women, and disaster stories that it seemed a safe bet I would like it. And I did . I thought at first that Jane Steele was just a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies approach to Jane Eyre , but where Jane is a murderer. It is SORT of like that, except Jane Eyre is mostly just referenced frequently throughout it as the heroine's favorite book, so her life is more inspired by it than it being a take-off of the direct text. Inspired by it indeed! Jane Steele's life parallels the other Jane's in most ways, including her disgusting cousin at the beginning, her time in a loathsome school, and her work as governess for a mysterious man's ward. It reminded more of Christopher Moore's Lamb than anything else, as much like Lamb and its "differenty" take on Jesus's life, Jane Steele's story mirrors Jane Eyre's, except for some very...

On Saturday I went to C2E2, a kickass nerd convention in downtown Chicago at our giant convention center, McCormick Place. This was my third year going, and second in costume. I entered it excited and left 70% still extremely happy, 30% enraged. Here's why: Being a nerd is one of the most positive things to be. A nerd's main function is to be excited about something. You're SO excited about something that you become uncool, because cool is not caring too much about something, which frankly is a stupid fucking concept, but I digress. C2E2 is WALL TO WALL NERDS. Thousands of people in one relatively condensed area, all excited about things, and frequently excited about the same things. C2E2 is the one time a year I can stop someone and excitedly yell "OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH" and they don't look sincerely panicked. They just take it in stride, because they dressed like Rufio from Hook on purpose, and they knew it was going to cause every person who was a chil...

 How did Hunter S. Thompson survive the 1970s. That's the oft-repeated question that circles around your brain as you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Thompson's drug-fueled report of the time he and his lawyer spent in Las Vegas in 1971. The trip was ostensibly for journalistic reasons, but it quickly devolved into Thompson and his lawyer streaking down the interstate in a giant Cadillac, pumped full of so many drugs and so much alcohol I have no idea how his organs retained any semblance of performing their sworn functions.  I spent about two hours in the bar, drinking Bloody Marys for the V-8 nutritional content. His catalogue of things seen while in his drug-induced insanity is worth reading, if only because if he had to ingest that many mind-altering substances, at least he wrote about it, so others could live vicariously through him while not destroying their bodies. And Thompson can obviously write. I won't begin to speculate on whether he would've be...

Opera is our most dramatic art form, and the most dramatic people within that art form are, arguably, sopranos.  ...yeah. Angels & Monsters covers the soprano from her operatic inception in the late 1590s to about 1900, giving the reader an overview of every major operatic period from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as brief biographies of the biggest players on the stage and how their relationships with the key composers of their eras. Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Beethoven, Massenet, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini are all covered, as well as many more, and all within about 300 pages. My primary knowledge concerning singers of the 19th century prior to this book came from a passing knowledge of some of their names, as well as information gleaned from a biography of Maria Malibran that intimated that opera singers were the rock stars of their time. "Their time" implying, I am aware, that that time is not now, proof of which I believe is e...