My dream job, if you didn’t know, is to archive obscure children’s books. This will probably never happen, ever. Not even in an alternative universe. This is what dreams are for. There was this children’s book I have remembered fondly from my childhood that I decided I must find again, a book passed down from [...]
Archive for the 'Books' Category
God, I hate Poe. He’s okay in small doses — a poem, maybe a short story — but I’ve never even been able to slog my way through “The Fall of the House of Usher,” much less the full-length mess of The Narrative Disaster of the Passive-Aggressive Arthur Gordon Pym. I just don’t care, I [...]
James Fenimore Cooper’s Greatest Romance
Published January 4th, 2009 in Books and Education. 7 CommentsFinally, paper numero uno is completed for my damned American Lit course, a paper gently mocking James Fenimore Cooper’s American masculine sublime as symbolized by Natty Bumppo and Major Duncan Heyward. I swear, Cooper would have bumped uglies with Hawkeye if he could figure out how to get it on with one of his own [...]
Fort Necessity and Family Reunions, Oh My!
Published June 23rd, 2008 in Back In the Day, Books, Class, Education, Family, Racism and Travel. 3 CommentsWe got home from our trip to Pennsylvania yesterday, and thanks to some of your suggestions we did manage to visit Fallingwater as well as Fort Necessity and a couple of other places. I thought we were closer to Pittsburgh than we actually were, so once we realized that Pittsburgh meant another couple of hours [...]
I’ve been looking for some for the last several days — apparently Ethan has been on the receiving end of racist sentiments at school recently, and he’s really confused and hurt by it. Because E is such a big reader, I figured we could look at something together and talk about it. My conversations with [...]
Career Choices and The Shock Doctrine
Published November 7th, 2007 in Books, Poverty and Racism. 6 CommentsSo I pretty much have to buy the new Naomi Klein book, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, and end my fiction-reading-only era thanks to this post and a certain realization. For awhile I seriously researched moving to the New Orleans area in the wake of Katrina to take a teaching job, until I realized that I was [...]
God Doesn’t Hate Fags
Published November 4th, 2007 in Assholes, Books, GLBTQ, Good Reads, Hate, Law, Religion and War. 0 CommentsLo, my heart is warmed this Sunday with excellent news from earlier this week: God doesn’t hate fags and the church of Fred Phelps lost a righteous $10.9 million lawsuit: A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals in the belief that the war [...]
I’ve loved Thomas Lynch for some years now, so I’m definitely recording this program tonight. Lynch is an appropriate subject for both Halloween season and the PBS and NPR lovers among us. As the third-generation funeral director in a small Michigan town, and as a single father and poet, Lynch wrote several critically acclaimed books [...]
Dennis Hartley writes reviews of “Eastern Promises” and “This Is England” over at Hullabaloo. I saw the latter about a month ago and it was well worth the money. See the trailer for “This Is England”, which, if I’m correct, is still available for cable users with IFC On Demand (they release movies that are [...]
Madeline L’Engle died yesterday of natural causes: Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ms. L’Engle [...]
I was going to write a post about how I was a really bad English major. I’m a reader, not a critic, pathetically subjective and skeptical of so-called objective criticisms. I love subjective writing and always looked for opportunities to inject my academic papers with arguments on its behalf. I was the girl who by [...]
The newest literary media darling has found its way into my hands, and I can’t wrench myself from it. Then We Came to the End has been reviewed endlessly over the last week, and for whatever reason it compelled me. Let’s call it timeliness. I went to the local book shop on Sunday afternoon, realized [...]
My much-anticipated first graphic novel has yet to arrive and I’m a little worried. And disappointed. What does it take to get a good book around here?
So I just bought my first graphic novel. The supernatural geek girl blogger forces came down from the sky and forced me onto Amazon to order it for a buck fifty, and now the transformation is complete. I’m a cheap, comic book-reading, bespectacled, weakling nerd. (Next, Linux.) Somebody congratulate me. (via Fierce Femme)
On Christmas Eve, Chef’s First Time
Published December 24th, 2006 in Books, Chef and Religion. 12 CommentsMy mother, under the guise of a lonely old lady (love you, Mom!), has convinced Chef and I to attend the Christmas eve church service tonight. It’s been about five years for me unless you count a few weddings. Chef, however, has never ever ever ever been to a church service. I had to fill [...]
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