Reading Rambo

Should I know more shit about the Romans? I should probably know more shit about the Romans. It was just never emphasized in my education. I've picked up most of what I know through osmosis, but I still have no idea about any emperors except "Nero and Caligula were bad, but maybe Nero wasn't that bad, but wait, he probably was." And Hadrian had a wall named after him. Hadrian was an emperor, right? Probably. Sounds like it. Rome seems like something to know about because AT THE VERY LEAST our culture is shockingly similar to theirs, and maybe we can all learn something, etc etc. Who from the past would have adapted the best to 21st century American life? Romans. Romans would be all over selfie culture and Instagram and foodieism. All. over it. And we could probably understand each other pretty damn quick, as opposed to someone from the 14th century in England, where it'd be all like "Excuse me, I must go dump my chamber pot into yon busy street." ...

Bart Ehrman is an agnostic author who writes a lot about early Christianity, usually with intended-to-provoke titles like Misquoting Jesus and Forged .  Forged is about how some of the New Testament books are not by the person we think they are, only as usual, Ehrman is sensationalizing where there's no need to, as it was common practice at the time to write under the name of your teacher. There wasn't some scurrilous man or woman sitting there going "Ahahahaha I shall write this letter as Paul and ALL SHALL BE FOOLED." Or maybe there was, I dunno. But I don't think Ehrman can know their motives. ANYWAY. My church book group has been going strong for maybe four years now. We started off reading about the Gnostic Gospels, and since then we've done Karen Armstrong's Case for God (which I suggested and did not read); Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church (also did not read); something about Christians in the Middle East (ditto); and How the Irish Sav...

In 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee, 19-year-old Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her ex-fiancée, Freda Ward. The subsequent trial focused not so much on the horror of what she had done, but on the defense's argument that her engagement to a woman meant she was clearly insane. Alexis Coe's book Alice + Freda Forever is short and has a bangin' cover. She's clearly done a lot of research, and lays out the story clearly and chronologically while not getting mired in the historian's pitfall of injecting too much detail. She goes from the murder to the trial to the questioned fate of Alice Mitchell (spoilers: she died in an insane asylum, but whether it was of natural causes or suicide is unknown). I like true crime and I like lesbians and I like the 19th century, so this seemed immensely far up my particular alley. There is some frustration, as Alice Mitchell's feelings are never really  known. She kept no surviving journal from her months in jail, so t...

Do you guys remember Ready Player One ? Do you remember how AMAZING and fun it was and how you wanted to re-read it even though you rarely re-read books because omg there are SO MANY BOOKS and life is finite, so how can you justify the time? Remember all that? Right, so that guy wrote another book. Armada  is basically Ender's Game  + The Last Starfighter , and Cline definitely puts a lampshade on that particular aspect. The main character, Zack is in high school, plays video games all the time, and is very very very much obsessed with his dead dad. Then one day he looks out the window of his classroom and -- hey, it's one of the spaceships from the main video game he plays, which is called -- wait for it -- Armada. So the book goes from there. There're some pop culture references thrown in, but honestly...while entertaining enough, this one let me down a bit. I couldn't help thinking that part of the reason Cline's insane number of referenced copyrighted ...

According to a study by the University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo[...], between 2005 and 2012 more than one third of couples who got married in the United States met through an online dating site. Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance surprised me a lot. Mainly because I do not really like Aziz Ansari. I've watched his standup specials. I've seen almost every season of Parks & Rec . I have been exposed to all sorts of facets of Aziz Ansari as a performer, and I mainly find myself annoyed by him. SO. When I tell you that I really enjoyed his study on how people form romantic relationships in this day and age, know that if anything I approached it with a negative bias. But I wanted to read it because 1. Books by comedy writers are the shit. 2. I have done so very much dating via the internet and I wanted to see his conclusions. 3. Penguin emailed me and asked if I wanted to review it, and I did not buy a stuffed penguin from the Penguin Books truck...

Henry James is one of the most maddeningly frustrating authors I've ever encountered. I also keep coming back to his writing, so I'm inclined to think there's something there that I'm just missing. I have read and not really enjoyed or understood the following: Daisy Miller Washington Square The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl (half of it -- found my freshman year copy with "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" scrawled on the title page) The Turn of the Screw I feel like that's a pretty good representation of his works, although I'm willing to try The Golden Bowl  again, because I was 14 when I tried it and it's entirely possible my brain was pretty garbagey then. this is another possibility My main issue with James is that he decides what he's going to say in his book, and then he shrouds it in a fog of vagueness and ambiguity. His BFF was Edith Wharton, who did not  do this. Her books were also far more successful than his. COINCI...

I was listening to a true crime podcast this morning on my walk to work, and one of the hosts was talking about a "small town community with a daaaark secret" and my immediate reaction was "I LOVE small town communities with dark secrets!" And probably of dark secrets. And who. does. not. love them.  So , in the interests of gathering up potentials, DO YOU KNOW OF ANY OF THESE BOOKS. I read The Fever by Megan Abbott last year, which was in that vein. There's also Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, which I read in my early teens and thought was the cat's pajamas. The internet suggests Salem's Lot , but any mention of Stephen King horror novels terrifies  me, so I'm just not sure that's gonna fly, internet. I can handle Willow and that's about it There's also Peyton Place  by Grace Metalious, which I've only heard of because there was a movie in the 1950s starring Lana Turner, but if it's small tow...

I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I had grown up knowing that marrying a woman was possible. I can imagine growing up seeing the disgust on my mom's face when Ellen came out, the uproar the country went into when Hawaii was on the verge of legalizing marriage equality in 1996, and the years of being told that the Bible clearly states being gay is not okay. From today on, children growing up in America will see marriage equality as totally normal. They won't grow up seeing it debated in legislatures and hearing their potential marriage compared to incest and bestiality because the HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND talked about "equal dignity in the eyes of the law" and declared marriage for all a fundamental right.  This is huge. This is progress. This is human beings realizing experiences beyond their own are okay. This is us still having a long way to go in terms of civil rights, but this is such  a big step to take along the way. Let'...

If you were ever interested in children's literature, you most likely read Harriet the Spy . If you did not, it is a weird and great book about a girl named Harriet who lives in New York City under the watchful eye of her nanny, Ole Golly, and goes around spying on her neighbors and classmates and writing about it in her spy notebook. Some stuff happens. You should read it. AND THEN. Then you should read this follow-up that I never even knew about until my delightful friend Jenny casually mentioned it the other day. The Long Secret  is about Harriet and her friend Beth Ellen on vacation in a town near Montauk, New York, where both their families have summer homes. Like this dog, they are doing quite well for themselves. THE LONG SECRET  IS MAYBE BETTER THAN HARRIET THE SPY . But this is possibly because I'm reading it as an adult and more aware when Louise Fitzhugh is Doing Something Very Good in her book, as opposed to when I was a kid and thought the  Anim...

If you will remember, in 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other noted feminist writers published The Woman's Bible , which reexamines the Bible from a 19th century feminist perspective. It is the shit. The second book of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, and something Christianity has in common with Judaism) is Exodus. Exodus has the story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt, Moses parting the Red Sea, the creation of the Ten Commandments, and the journey to the Promised Land. Basically it's this movie: 80-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton once again comes out swinging with: The question naturally suggests itself to any rational mind, why should the customs and opinions of this ignorant people, who lived centuries ago, have any influence in the religious thought of this generation? BUT SHE GOES ON. Women have had no voice in the canon law, the catechisms, the church creeds and discipline, and why should they obey the behests of a strictly masculi...

Hot damn, Revolutionary Summer .   If you feel like there might be a whiff of scandal around the name of Joseph Ellis, there is! Ellis, who won a Pulitzer for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation , also falsely claimed to have commanded a platoon in Vietnam, when what he really did was teach history at West Point.  Sir. Teaching history at West Point is nothing to sniff at. But I get that you might have some weird "I feel bad for not having fought in a war" thing when you write so much about them. But still. It's ok. You just keep writing short but informative histories about our Founding Fathers. So Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence unsurprisingly deals with the summer of 1776. The way Ellis differentiates this from SO MANY other books about that year is he says that most people write either about the Continental Congress, or the Continental Army, and you have to write about both because they affected each other. Fair. Point...

So what with travel, summer doings, and general heat-produced languor, books and other reading materials have fallen by the wayside, AS WELL THEY SHOULD. Life is for living! Out! out, gentle sirs, into the world to explore its manifold treasures and wonders! Basically how I live life But no, reading's the shit, and I've been doing a little of it. I'll climb back on that horse for reals soon, but for now I'm kind of dithering by the barn. I just read volume 1 of East of West , and HOLY SHIT, YOU GUYS.  I think I've discovered with comics that if I'm not really  into them, I shouldn't continue. Because there are some comics I'm really, really into, and enough of them exist that I don't have to make myself read Hawkeye . I am not saying Hawkeye is bad . It's probably great. But after trying that, Sex Criminals , and Bitch Planet , I've come to the conclusion that I am just not on board with that guy and his wife's writing. I feel ...