Reading Rambo

I FINISHED IT. THE ONLY ACTUAL IMPORTANT DEADLINE FOR THE READALONG AND I DID IT. The sense of accomplishment , it is as rich as I had expected. Because this was not only a two month readalong, but a grueling two month readalong. I acknowledge this! But who wanted to be reading this book for three months? I thought not. I have read ALMOST NOTHING ELSE this year, but I'm going to openly declare that it was worth it. Why? 1) The immense length of this ostensible biography actually led to it being an overview of early American history, making me feel like for the first time I have some real notion of how our country was formed 2) Politics were as screwed from the very beginning of America as they are now. Everything's not about to collapse. It's all going to be fine.  3) I don't like Aaron Burr, but him saying "my friend Hamilton, whom I shot" is pretty funny. 4) Also, Burr's heart described as "stuffed with cinders raked from the fires of h...

Let's imagine an alternate universe, a simpler one, perhaps, where instead of coming home and watching old Simpsons episodes while eating chocolate-covered frozen bananas, I read Hamilton, the book whose readalong I'm leading. Wouldn't that be something. But no, it's Simpsons and frozen bananas all the way down the line for me, so what I have to give unto you all this week, OUR PENULTIMATE WEEK, is a lovely linkup situation so I can read your all's posts on this book that everyone will feel highly gratified to have finished so that we may continue with our reading lives. As I read this past week, I found myself coming to a feeling of almost total detachment from politics today. Everything always feels so urgent, and if this person gets elected, then this horrible thing will happen, but if this person gets elected, then this other horrible thing will happen. Well, Hamilton and Jefferson were both convinced if the other one got power, everything would go to h...

I am especially bummed about being behind in my reading (YES, STILL) because this section talks about John Adams, and John Adams is my dude. So rather than say things like "how bad was 'Creole bastard' in the 1790s really?" and listen to Chernow talk about how terrible John Adams was, I'm going to talk about why I love John Adams. THE YEAR WAS 1995 and a 5th grade Alice was watching 1776 the musical every day and writing short stories about it for class. John Adams sure was great in that. THE YEAR WAS 2002 and a high school senior Alice was weirdly not finding any guys in her high school to have a crush on, so she decided she would say she was going to marry John Adams because he was short and talked all the time and argued with everyone and wore ruffled sleeves in a very becoming way. she also had this picture in her locker THE YEAR WAS 2010 and a 25-year-old Alice decided that for her golden birthday, she would go to Quincy, Massachusetts and visi...

How're you all feeling about Hamilton? Do you like him? While I assume he was likable , since the book keeps saying he was, I've kind of been pissed at him for a while. And this quote of his: "I pledge myself to you and to every friend of mine that the strictest scrutiny into every part of my conduct, whether as a private citizen or as a public officer, can only serve to establish the perfect purity of it" left a bad taste in my mouth about him, because sir. You have been having an affair for almost a year, and this is a baldfaced lie that you have said right here. I mean. Everyone's human. People make mistakes. People do stupid, stupid things, and it doesn't make them "bad" people. But the Reynolds affair just straight-up sucked, which fortunately, after all the "fatal enchantress" etc comments, Chernow admits. Thank you, sir. A lot of the rest was the Whiskey Tax (boooooo) and the French Revolution. Or rather the French Revolutio...

Because I skimmed this section, I will leave it to others to comment on the Maria Reynolds situation, as that is where we ended our reading for this week. If Chernow stays true to form, he'll be in Hamilton's corner and somehow speak of his being seduced by this "fatal enchantress," but maybe he was surprising and made it clear that everyone makes their own decisions and Hamilton has to be held accountable for being a cheating asshole. That's not all he was. But it was part of it. While this book can be occasionally frustrating while overall surprisingly readable, I wanted to take a second and talk about the unexpected benefit of this being a crash course in American history that goes to a depth none of my classes ever reached. I feel as if I'm learning about my country for the first time, and I have found myself shocked and embarrassed at what I realized I did not know about our founding, and the documents that brought us into being. The fact that Hami...

I didn't do the reading. I did none of it. But I am HERE FOR YOU ALL, as your gracious host who didn't prepare for your arrival at all but frantically spreads some towels on the bed in lieu of clean sheets and offers you a half-eaten box of Triscuits. Go-to with your posts. I'm proud of all of you, even if you, like myself, spent this past week staring at British dramas set in the 1960s and kept waving off Hamilton as something you'd "get to later on."

This week's HamAlong is dedicated to this redoubt: Yes, those are toy soldiers and tiny sticks. But LOOK that's what Hamilton and Lafayette had to deal with when they were fighting at Yorktown. How interesting . Redoubts. What a concept. I definitely did not read the last 40 pages of the reading that I assigned, but I highly enjoyed the other 60 or so. The war part was fine , but Hamilton and Eliza. Man. I'm such an Eliza fan. Yes, Angelica's great, etc etc, but Eliza . When the book was talking about her dad's property, did anyone else flash to this? Chernow's continuing to laud Hamilton when it seems maybe not deserved? I'm not saying Hamilton doesn't seem like an amazing genius, because he DOES, but his wife list? Is kind of what everyone writes. Like "Oh, I want someone pretty and nice and smart and maybe funny, I dunno." And Chernow is like "SUCH BRILLIANCE, what a remarkable man." I mean, in other ways, yes, si...

I don't think there's any doubt that Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton is a work of genius and that we are fortunate to be around for its beginning. Do you think Ron Chernow ever imagined that teenage girls would swoon over and highlight to death his 800+ page biography of 18th century Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton? But Miranda took this, frankly already rather prettily written, enormous book, and made one of the greatest musicals of the past century, which essentially means of all time, because musicals in 1916 were not what we call good. ...yeah. Week One of the HamAlong goes from Hamilton's birth on Nevis, which includes his dubious parentage and immensely different childhood from any other Founding Father, to becoming George Washington's right-hand man.  Wow, do I want to just trust the hell out of Ron Chernow. He seems so very much like he's trying to be fair and striving for the truth. I also suspect, though, like most biographers...