Reading Rambo

Do you ever think how hilarious it would be if certain authors were married to other authors? Like how pissed off they'd be at each other and like 'WHY DID I EVEN MARRY YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE WE LIVE IN DIFFERENT TIME PERIODS.' I think I'd super-enjoy having Nathaniel Hawthorne married to Dorothy Parker, because I love both of them, but Hawthorne has said some shit about ladies. Mainly that female authors were a "damned mob of scribbling women" and that they should be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell." damn, sir. But would Dorothy Parker put up with that shit? Hellllllll no. She'd write some withering but hilarious op-ed from the POV of a man saying women cannot write and Hawthorne would read it and be like "STOP MAKING FUN OF ME RIGHT NOW DOROTHEA" and she'd be like "Stop calling me Dorothea right now or so help me God" and he'd be like "YOU NEVER DAR

Remember how Emily at As the Crowe Flies (and Reads) hosted the readalong of Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl and I fell off the earth for a week and neglected to post a final post YES, WELL. WELL INDEED. Here is my overall review for/reasons why you should buy and read How to Build a Girl . Do you enjoy breezy narrators who make you feel safe about the world? Do you wish to read some YA but not with an embarrassing teenage sand-fairy or whatever the new thing is on the cover? (pretty sure it's sand-fairies) Do you stare nightly at your copy of How to Be a Woman and say in the loudest corner of your heart "Why God, WHY has Caitlin Moran not written a book that is basically exactly her life but in the form of a novel for young girls that will hopefully teach them how to be the best version of themselves while not being overly preachy?" Yes? To all of those? Oh, but where can you find such a book. Ah-ha! How to Build a Girl , coming out in Septe

Despite articles like the Wall Street Journal's Why the Public Library Beats Amazon and IBT's Why Oyster Isn't 'The Netflix of Books' , I am here to say that I am TOTALLY FOND OF OYSTER even though I had doubts. Serious doubts. Like why should I pay $10 a month when I have a billion books on my shelf I haven't read and can get eBooks from the library? GOOD QUESTION, ME. Regarding the WSJ article (which focuses on Amazon, but why would you use them -- they are AMAZON), when it says "libraries, at least for now, have one killer feature that the others don't: e-books you actually want to read" my response is...what? I am a serial skimmer of my library's eBook availability list, and keep in mind this is the Chicago Public Library, not something ridiculous like Skokie (SKOKIE BURN), and anything in the realm of 'oh right, I've been wanting to read that' is unavailable and will not BE available for weeks-to-months because other p

I believe last week is the first week I've never updated? I think? So here's some stuff to make up for that: That was cool, right? Yeah, totally. So my life has become an ever-whirling maelstrom of chaos and busyness and yesterday I almost wept with gratitude because I had time to do laundry and take the clothes off the back of my chair. Most of the busyness that has pushed me over the top is entirely my own doing and I deserve no -- NO SYMPATHY. But friendship is what makes us human. No, that's not even true, because check out how sorry this raccoon is that he hurt his cat friend: But as is sometimes the case in life, I also had stopped reading ennnnnntirely and only sort of kind of started again Saturday night when I finally finished Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl , which I will properly review and link up to  the ever delightful Emily's blog  since she hosted the readalong for it. Oh right, I also haven't looked at blogs in a week

So if you'll remember from the other day , Jacob stole his twin Esau's birthright, which means he gets all the firstborn son stuff. Not cool, Jacob. In the second half of Genesis, their father Isaac (son of Abraham, let's keep this patriarchy line straight) does THE SAME THING HIS DAD DID and when he's in a foreign country with his wife, he's like "Oh, that's my sister," and the king's like "Oh, your sister's pretty attractive" and then he sees "Isaac caressing his wife Rebekah" and is like "Wtf why did you say she was your sister??" I don't get why this is a repeated story in Genesis, but it seems really important to them. Maybe it was really, really funny back then -- I don't know what senses of humor were like 3000 years ago. they wouldn't even get the Oprah bee gif, guys So then it's time for Jacob to for-real steal Esau's inheritance, and it's messed up because Isaac's like

I AM SLIGHTLY TIPSY but here is a vague approximation of the evening I have just partaken of: 1. Delightful friend Katie-Anne asks if I wish to attend the Chicago Women in Publishing event in lieu of her, as she is bizzay. 2. I say yes, because it is literary trivia and I am competitive as haylle. 3. Other delightful friend Julie attends with me, as I refuse to be a trivia team of one. TURNS OUT ladies in publishing know how to party. By which I mean one girl and I kept giving each other the finger and then laughing really hard and also sharing which Harry Potter house we were in. She is a Slytherin but we're gonna work it out. We're gonna work it out. This helped Our team was The Fighting Mongooses, only POSSIBLY bested by City of the Big Shoulderpads. Or maybe that other one that won that I can't remember. Julie? Something about reading? No idea. ANYWAY. Our name was because of Futurama , which is the best team name source possible. Julie suggested "Th

Genesis is the book of the Bible for the lazy man. It's the first one, and it has some of the best stories, so they're most of the ones that've gotten bandied about in popular culture for centuries. But there're 50 chapters in Genesis, so it's a bit long, and not everything became famous and I AM HERE TO HELP. Genesis obvs starts with the creation of the universe. BOOM. Made. But there are two creation stories (oops) in Genesis 1 and 2, so first you have the big one where it talks about seven days, and where it's like LIGHT. WATER. LAND. PLANTS. STARS. BIRDS AND FISH THINGS. OTHER ANIMALS. MAN. NAP TIME. That's the order of stuff. But then the second creation story's just like "There was NOTHING except a bunch of dirt. Then some water. Then God made man out of the dirt and put him in this big perfect garden that you can never go back to sorry." With Adam and Eve, the special things people usually point out are 1) No mention is made

I'm pretty tired, 'cause I was up late trying to finally wrap up this whole season 2 of Buffy thing I've been working on for like two years. But we've got a readalong post, so that'll be happening on a minorly functioning brain. Yeah, I said "minorly," spellcheck, and you can deal. This seems appropriate for last night AND this book we're reading Johanna had sex, etc etc, big moments in life, controversy because she's like 16 and these musician guys are therefore gross, but the REALLY upsetting thing to me is the NOW CONSISTENT incorrect handling of movie references. Pop culture love is an embarrassingly large part of my life. More particularly movies because growing up in the country, we had no cable. The internet was a tiny baby that could do NOTHING. And there's only so much PBS you can watch in a day, so my siblings and I watched movies ALL THE TIME. Those things are sacred. And Star Wars  -- who's not going to realize somethi

I don't know how to hold books for pictures. I posted a blurby review of Edan Lepucki's California before I'd finished it, because that's how I do, but I have now actually finished it and attended an event of hers hosted by the excellent Chicago bookstore The Book Cellar (no, I did not get the double meaning of that name until I said it out loud, which was embarrassingly recently). I was impressed by The Book Cellar, Edan Lepucki, and California . All of them. Let's discuss why in reverse order: California is a book I requested from Little, Brown because I loved the cover SO MUCH and it said something about post-apocalyptic AND a small community with dark secrets. I would actually call it "semi-post-apocalyptic," but the two main characters are still forced to move into the forest and pee outside and build things out of wood they've chopped themselves and go to bed when it's dark out because THERE IS NO ELECTRICITY IN THE POST-APOCALYPT