Reading List 2008 (10/136)

June 6th, 2008

This week’s reading:

Mayday, Nelson DeMille & Thomas Block
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope
Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear
Queen of the Country, dgk goldberg
The Devil You Know, Mike Carey
Cart and Cwidder, Diana Wynne Jones
Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones
The Spellcoats, Diana Wynne Jones
The Crown of Dalemark, Diana Wynne Jones

I left this way too close to Shabbat, so I can’t really post much about the books. Very briefly, Trollope is wonderful but loquacious; Mayday makes me want to switch the genders of all the characters to illustrate casual sexism in thrillers; Carey puts together a totally amazing urban fantasy world that doesn’t make me roll my eyes even once, with a super-appealing protagonist who’s nonetheless kind of a bastard; I should be used to YA fantasy often being all about boys (and sometimes girls as they relate to boys), but I expected better from Jones. (Though that said, I thought this was perhaps the best thing of hers I’ve read; she doesn’t hand-wave the ending which I really appreciated, and all the plot threads are well carried through.)

Shabbat shalom!

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Now Playing …

May 23rd, 2008

I’ve been requested to write about what I’m playing, too, not just what I’m reading. So I’ll be picking a day (maybe Mondays?) to write about my play experiences. This is just a heads-up, to let you know (yes, you, Dana!) that I think it’s a great idea and I’m really excited about it.

(Expect to hear a lot about Angband. Just color me old-school.)

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Reading List 2008 (19/126)

May 23rd, 2008

This week’s reading:

The Annals of the Heechee, Frederick Pohl
The Boy Who Would Live Forever, Frederick Pohl
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
More Sex is Safer Sex, Steven E. Landsburg
Angelica, Arthur Phillips
The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis
Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis
The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis
The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis
When the Tripods Came, John Christopher
The White Mountains, John Christopher
The City of Lead and Gold, John Christopher
The Pool of Fire, John Christopher
Earthbound, Richard Matheson
Season of the Witch, Natasha Mostert
The Good Guy, Dean Koontz

This week’s reading was an illustrative lesson in “Just because two things seem similar, they are not necessarily both good.”

Take, for example, my little trip down memory lane. I decided to re-read the Narnia books because of the Prince Caspian movie (which, by the way, I very much enjoyed) - and they are largely delightful. The Horse and His Boy, particularly, shaped my ideas of what a good adventure story is, though I could have done with a little less virtuous-white-Christians vs. evil-brown-Muslim subtext. And then you get to the last book, and it’s all “Gee, aren’t you happy to be dead? Let’s stand around and watch while Aslan does a bunch of apparently random things!” Honestly, I’ve always understood why Tolkien found the series morally repugnant, but in the other novels it’s much easier to ignore the propaganda in favor of the great story. The Last Battle? Not so much - although I have always had a terrible crush on Tirian. He’s so heroic! And brave! And doomed! And he has a freaking unicorn!

(In my mind, Tirian looks like a cross between a young Antonio Banderas and my boyfriend. Don’t ask.)

Anyhow, the same thing was at work in the Tripod series - one of my favorite books when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and shelved next to Narnia, so naturally I had to re-read it. The prequel was just … weak. And re-reading the rest of the books, there were a lot of great scenes - but there was also a lot of talk about how “women just aren’t interested in standing up to oppression” that made me want to kick someone in the nuts. YOU ARE THE FUCKING OPPRESSOR, JOHN CHRISTOPHER. See how you like it when I stand up to your misogynistic ass.

The most blatant case, though, of these-things-are-similar-but-by-no-means-equally-good, was the two books on economics I read this week.

Let me pause here to tell you that the Taleb book blew my mind. Blew. My. Mind. I was talking to the boy about this last night, and I think it’s that it was the exact right book at the exact right time to help me solve some of the academic difficulties I’m struggling with - particularly around how we construct creativity. Even better, he’s a wonderful writer. So when I read it, I kept going, “Oh, my god! He just articulated THAT thing I’ve been trying to argue my way around for weeks! And he’s witty while doing it!”

Er, which means you probably want to know what the book is about, right? Well, the short summary is that it’s about how bad people are at understanding statistics and probability. He alternates between taking a philosophical bent (how do we know things? how do we know when we know enough to say we know?), a psychological approach (the standard work on heuristics and bias in decision-making, but well-presented), and an economic approach, which I really appreciated as a multi-disciplinary girl myself. I think my favorite parts, though, were his bits about the stock market specifically, about his own history as a trader, and about the names-carefully-changed stories of others.

Actually, no, my favorite part was the writing. Witty, delightful, eccentric, and a model of clarity. I have to figure out how to write like that - or, better, like myself in a way that is as excellent as his writing is.

(I am going to write this guy a letter telling him how much I loved his book - and I didn’t even write a fan letter to Phillip Pullman. So you should go read it right now.)

This only made it more depressing, of course, when I read Landsburg’s humiliating attempt at economic cleverness. Among other things, Landsburg falls into a number of the specific risk-analysis traps that Taleb points out, which left me snickering at him up my sleeve. Ultimately, though, what killed the book for me was Landsburg’s utter failure to recognize that we are human beings first, and economic actors second. He makes the classic economist mistake of saying, “Now, in a world full of rational consumers ….” at which point I can pretty much stop reading. Because all the research and literature shows that we are not particularly rational! And we are not going to become so just to please Mr. Idiot Economist Landsburg! Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t! We’re just not wired that way!

Grr. Arrgh.

Though I think part of what makes me so angry is that if I hadn’t read Taleb first, I might have been much more seduced by Landsburg. He takes on provocative questions and comes up with some clever ideas based on economic theory. He just forgets that economic theory is a model, and not a particularly good one, for the ways that people behave in reality.

Grrrrrr.

At least Season of the Witch was very good, so that took the bad taste out of my mouth. Alchemy plus sexual tension plus psychics plus detective work equals a very happy girl! My only complaint is that the twist ending is fairly obvious to anyone with a reasonable knowledge of mythology, which means I spent about a hundred pages waiting for the protagonist to clue in. Still, the boy didn’t pick up on it, so maybe I just read too much for my own good - and even having spoiled myself, I read the whole thing in one sitting. Very nice, and I will definitely read more of her work.

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Reading List 2008 (10/107)

May 9th, 2008

This week’s reading:

Button, Button, Richard Matheson
The Unquiet, John Connolly
Lust in Translation, Pamela Druckerman
Invisible Prey, John Sandford
The Witch’s Boy, Michael Gruber
More Tales of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
Educated in Romance, Dorothy C. Holland & Margaret A. Eisenhart
Gateway, Frederick Pohl
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Frederick Pohl
Heechee Rendezvous, Frederick Pohl

I should remember that I don’t like John Connolly. In point of fact, his meandering, rambling, obsessive novels just suck. Friends, if you ever see me pick up one of his novels, remind me that I hate his protagonist almost as much as I hate his plotting. The suggestions of the supernatural mitigate this, but only very slightly; Connolly’s taken what, six books to get to where he should have been after the first one.

The wonderful, wonderful, wonderful The Witch’s Boy makes up for that with room to spare, though. A lot of fairy tale retellings fall into the trap of “fantatwee,” assuming that because they can replicate a story’s structure they can replicate its mythic power. (When instead all they do is shout “LOOKA ME I KNOW A FAIRY TALE!” Phatic communication indeed.) Gruber, though, melds together fairy tale tropes to make a heartbreaking story about parenting, power, hope, despair, and growing up. Periodically his characters stop to retell their version of a classic fairy tale - or live it! - and a few of the sub-tellings seem forced. Still, the frame story is a tale of remarkable power and originality, which draws on fairy tales we’ve all heard and builds something that feels equally mythic from them. Personally, my sympathies were very much with the witch (who adopts an ugly orphan boy she finds in a tree stump, with devastating consequence), but every character had a lovely resonance and I wanted to know more about their stories.

Lust in Translation was disappointing, if only because I couldn’t believe the author had so little to say on such an interesting topic. Druckerman does a cross-cultural survey of attitudes and practices toward extramarital sex … and somehow manages to spend a good 20% of every chapter talking about herself, her writing process, and why she chose to do the research she did. Was she trying to pad the volume? I don’t know, but I wanted a lot more adultery and a lot less of her. More stories of other people’s experiences would have done a lot here!

Pohl’s Heechee series is about what I expected: a terrific classic SF series, which I have to read very carefully to avoid wanting to kick someone in the nuts. I just keep saying, “He didn’t know any better” when it comes to his portrayal of female characters. Still, I’d read one Heechee story in an anthology somewhere and realized it was a pretty awesome concept, and indeed the books are really very good when they aren’t pissing me off. I could use fewer recaps of the physics - yes, I DO get it already! - but the world-building and action sequences are equally excellent.

Finally, Educated in Romance was just about as good as I thought it would be. (Fuck you, culture of romance!) It’s the account of an eight-year longitudinal study of gifted college women in the eighties, and how they “made choices” (i.e. existed within a system that constrained their choices and actions) that took them off serious career paths. The authors show how college culture doesn’t reward women for engaging seriously with academics, and in fact makes it a competitive disadvantage to do so. As depressing as that was, though, the authors found that the women who retained their commitment to learning did so because of their ideas about how college should function. Rather than trying to get a credential or maintain their identity as “smart people,” the women who stayed on track had a clear concept of college as an opportunity to learn from experts. Even though every girl in this group had to marginalize herself socially and culturally to make this happen, it gives me hope that we can educate girls in ways that will inoculate them against the bullshit that college culture has to offer.

See you next week, folks! Shabbat Shalom!

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That Book Meme

May 1st, 2008

You guys know how to tempt me to do a meme: make it about books!

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, and italicize the ones you own but have not read. I’m adding one more innovation of my own - placing an X by the books that I probably wouldn’t read if you bought me a copy and then hit me with a stick.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Reading List 2008 (8/97)

April 25th, 2008

This week’s reading - notice that I am finally caught up!

The Seduction of Common Sense, Kevin K. Kumashiro
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn
The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones
Portrait of a Marriage, Pearl S. Buck
The Mission Song, John LeCarre
Garnethill, Denise Mina
Exile, Denise Mina
Resolution, Denise Mina

What if first contact had already happened? In a tiny medieval German town? And no one knew about it for some very good reasons? That’s the premise of Eifelheim, and it’s a rocking one. Add amazing historical research, a wonderful sense of setting in time and place, some tragic miscommunication with aliens, and a whole lot of religion, and you’ve got a recipe for a winner. It’s Michael Flynn’s best book to date by far, and the best sci-fi book dealing with religion since The Sparrow. Go and read this right now. Seriously. You are missing out.

Denise Mina has been my consolation that Eifelheim is over. These are wonderfully dark, gritty mysteries where the protagonist is seriously messed up. She’s an incest survivor and budding alcoholic who’s only recently been released from an institution - and yet you never get the sense that Mina is talking down to her or patronizing her, even as many of Mina’s characters do. Maureen O’Donnell doesn’t go out and solve crimes; she just lives in a world full of people doing violence, of one sort or another, to each other every day. She does what she has to do to survive. The books only get better as the series goes on - and although I often don’t find Maureen likable, she’s a compelling character that I couldn’t wait to find out more about.

On the other side of the spectrum, Portrait of a Marriage was some awful, awful claptrap. Here, let me summarize the book for you. “He was a wealthy artist. She was a farmer’s beautiful daughter. He needed her presence to work. She cooked and cleaned and ran the farm, because he was married to ART and not just to her. Oh, wasn’t it romantic that he left his life of wealth and leisure, and ended up as a second-rate artist. What a sacrifice he made. Oh, his manly beauty. Oh, her earthy sensuality. Oh, their long and loving marriage.” I really wanted to kick someone in the nuts.

Also, I keep feeling like I ought to like Diana Wynne Jones, but I just … don’t. The Merlin Conspiracy was better than most of the other Jones I’ve read; I loved the world of Blest and the traveling Court, and I liked a lot of the individual characters. But when it comes down to it, I often feel shortchanged by the way her books end, in a welter of too-rapid resolutions and references to throwaway elements mentioned earlier. Which is sad, because given how often she uses time travel, she ought to be one of my favorites.

Shabbat Shalom, folks! Happy reading, and I’ll see you next week!

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Reading List 2008 (15/89)

April 18th, 2008

Almost caught up! Here’s my reading from the last two weeks:

Smart Girls, Barbara A. Kerr
By Frequent Anguish, S.F.X. Dean
Such Pretty Toys, S.F.X. Dean
Voice of the Whirlwind, Walter Jon Williams
A Hell of a Woman, ed. Megan Abbott
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey
The Fever Tree and Other Stories of Suspense, Ruth Rendell
Rain Fall, Barry Eisler
Hard Rain, Barry Eisler
Rain Storm, Barry Eisler
Killing Rain, Barry Eisler
The Last Assassin, Barry Eisler
Rising Phoenix, Kyle Mills
Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini

I’m writing this post between grading my students’ papers and getting the house ready for Passover (eek!), so I don’t really have the time to respond to my reading. Sadly! Because a lot of it was delightful! On the other hand, I really don’t want to put this off, because this batch of books means I’m all caught up with this year’s reading. That number in the post title means 15 books since I last posted - about two weeks’ worth - which takes me to 89 books for the year. Ah, such lovely and delightful reading …..

Since I can’t review them all, the three books I’ll point you all to are the Shippey, the Abbott and the Kerr. (Two non-fiction! What’s gotten into me?)

Kerr is part of my ongoing project to read about feminist issues, particularly surrounding gifted women (yes, I am one). I found the book powerful and very personal, to the point that I’m having a hard time writing about it. She has a bit where she talks about how brilliant women have to come to terms with “the cultural disability of being born female,” and looks at the various stages of grief that gifted women go through when they realize how handicapped they really are. I was just kind of like … whoa. Yes. That’s me. And I hope I never get past the anger stage into acceptance!

I thought her analysis of how gifted girls transition from being interested in things to being interested in people was quite fascinating as well, and I’m still not sure how I escaped making that transition. The book made me feel incredibly lucky that I’ve kept work, learning and ideas at the center of my life - and makes me see that the people who argue that love “should” be at the center rarely actually put it there themselves.

Not that love isn’t also at my center. But it hasn’t shoved my work-esteem-production-orientation aside as it does for a lot of women - I think because I’m pretty consistently willing to say “fuck you” to the culture of romance.

So: FUCK YOU, CULTURE OF ROMANCE.

Which, by the way, is the next book on my feminist reading list! Er, the book that explores the culture of romance is, I mean. Though someone should really write a book called “Fuck You, Culture of Romance.” I’d buy it.

Seriously - if you’re a gifted woman, go read this book.

After that you should pick up A Hell of a Woman, while you’re at it. I just read Megan Abbott’s Queenpin, a totally brilliant female-centered hard-boiled noir, and so as soon as I saw she’d edited an anthology of women in noir, I had to pick it up. My faith was totally justified. These stories range the gamut from entertaining to genuinely compelling. “High Yellow,” in particular, totally captivated me with its portrayal of “passing” in 1950s Washington, DC. I really like hard-boiled pieces that reach out beyond the emotional lives of the characters to touch something larger about how our world works, and this one was brilliantly done. Nobody - or at least nobody I know - is so stuck in their own heads that they aren’t affected by money, work, race, class, power, and, of course, the book’s key issue, gender.

Even better, the authors all list their favorite female noir at the back of the book, which means I’ve got a totally rocking reading/viewing list.

The Shippey is part of my book club with my friend A.; he’s been meaning to read it, so I challenged him that we should read it together. I don’t read that much non-fiction that isn’t for work or school, but I found this one absolutely delightful. I re-read Tolkien every year (Hobbit through Silmarillion only, thank you, I’m not crazy enough to read all the tales), so his analysis was totally ringing all kinds of lovely bells. I wasn’t that impressed with his bit about evil - though only because I thought what he was saying was relatively obvious - but his analysis of the use of myth and allegory was totally super. Really it was all great. I loved all the research and the historical background, like the “filling in the gaps” of the linguistic oddities he encountered in his professional work with myth.

Oh. My. God. Tolkien wrote fucking midrash. My mind is so blown right now.

I’ll close with that, then. Shabbat Shalom and happy Pesach to you all. I’ll see you post-Seders!

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Reading List 2008 (17/72)

April 11th, 2008

Almost caught up! This is the last batch of backlogged books; maybe later today I’ll actually log this week’s reading.

The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope
Rupert of Hentzau, Anthony Hope
Red Cat, Peter Spiegelman
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Greenmantle, John Buchan
Mr. Standfast, John Buchan
The Three Hostages, John Buchan
The Island of Sheep, John Buchan
Grotesque, Natsuo Kirino
Infinity Plus, ed. Keith Brooke & Nick Gevers
Angelmass, Timothy Zahn
Blindsight, Peter Watts
Archer’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones
Deep Storm, Lincoln Child
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Oliver Sacks
What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
Bad Luck and Trouble, Lee Child

It’s just a few too many books to do extended comments, so I’ll just mention the extremes. Nothing here was really terrible - even the Lincoln Child, which had a surprisingly unforgettable climax. Also any story set underwater is going to creep me out doubly! So really that just means talking about the books I particularly liked.

The unexpected surprise - and I’m still not even sure if I really liked it - was Blindsight. It’s a far-future story about consciousness and aliens and vampires and love and evolution, which already means it’s got a lot of stuff going for it. I’m still chewing over the book’s message, and the ending is heartbreaking and sad. At the same time, there are long stretches of the book that involve the characters going “Whoa! An alien thing! We have no idea what’s going on, but let’s go into long descriptions of what we don’t know!” This for twenty pages at a time. I could have done with more plot and less random ranting about the alien artifact - though given the protagonist’s nature, maybe it’s not such a surprising narrative choice. Still, even with some weaknesses in the middle part of the book, I’ve found myself thinking about it, off and on, almost every day since I read it. I’m going to have to call that a win.

I love John Buchan, I have always loved John Buchan, and I’m fairly sure I will always love John Buchan. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a glorious adventure novel, far better than the movie. Sorry, Hitchcock fans! Some of the later books have structural flaws; for example, Mr. Standfast jumps around in time and place a bit more than I thought served the story, while in The Three Hostages my poor Dick Hannay didn’t get to do nearly as much in the plot as I might have liked. Still, Buchan has a gift for handling drama in a way that feels adventurous but plausible - which is precisely where many modern thrillers fail - and his characters are wonderfully likeable. If I could write a book that felt like this, I’d be very pleased.

Finally, Anthony Hope is everything that I thought he’d be - at least in The Prisoner of Zenda. Love! Romance! Mistaken identities! A kingdom at stake! Evil uncles! Poison! Kidnapping! Swordfights and assorted mayhem! Rupert of Hentzau gets significantly darker, and I regretted the change in point of view. Still, both books made me wish I had more to read along the same lines. Any recommendations?

Shabbat shalom!

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Reading List 2008 (16/55)

April 9th, 2008

… and this is the point where I admit that when I’m really stressed out, I read horribly cheesy thrillers.

I read the entire Lucas Davenport series, by John Sandford. There are sixteen books in it to date. Do you really want me to list them all?

I suppose you must know the true depths of my shame. I didn’t just read these books. I re-read them. This is maybe the third time that I’ve turned to these books for help sleeping during a seriously panicky period in my life.

What’s weird about them is that the main character is a cop who makes a lot of money (no, really, a lot of money) on the side. What’s his job, you might ask? He’s a game designer. Which would be more awesome if it were more plausible; this guy’s a freelance RPG writer and somehow manages to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in spare cash. Either the author didn’t do his research, or I seriously have to get hooked up with Davenport’s gig.

Okay, okay, for the really OCD here (yes, that would be me) I’m listing the books. In order. Are you happy?

Rules of Prey, John Sandford
Shadow Prey, John Sandford
Eyes of Prey, John Sandford
Silent Prey, John Sandford
Winter Prey, John Sandford
Night Prey, John Sandford
Mind Prey, John Sandford
Sudden Prey, John Sandford
Secret Prey, John Sandford
Certain Prey, John Sandford
Easy Prey, John Sandford
Chosen Prey, John Sandford
Mortal Prey, John Sandford
Naked Prey, John Sandford
Hidden Prey, John Sandford
Broken Prey, John Sandford

Now I just have to decide if I want to keep the books. I think it’s good to have a literary anaesthetic on hand, but jeez, do they take up space … and hopefully I won’t need to read them again for a couple of years.

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Reading List 2008 (14/39)

April 8th, 2008

I wish I could say “This Week’s Reading,” but I haven’t posted since February. Oops!

Watch this space for a slow catchup on my reading list. If I post more than fifteen books at a time, I won’t end up saying anything interesting about them, and I did read some pretty interesting books in the last six weeks ….

So, without further ado:

Day Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
Twilight Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
Stir of Echoes, Richard Matheson
S is for Silence, Sue Grafton
Bad Blood, Linda Fairstein
The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild
Against Love, Laura Kipnis
The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, Miriam Peskowitz
The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander
The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander
The Castle of Llyr, Lloyd Alexander
Taran Wanderer, Lloyd Alexander
The High King, Lloyd Alexander

… which takes me up somewhere through the first week of March, as best I can recollect.

The Lukyanenko books were quite good - increasingly good, I might even say. Sadly I discovered about thirty pages from the end of the third book that there is, indeed, a fourth book in the series. Argh! I hate not being able to finish a series right away. So I have a bit of sour grapes about that.

The Grafton and Fairstein books were totally “I can’t sleep and I need something cheesy” reads. Sadly, the Grafton is the last in the series that’s available in paperback; her books are consistently entertaining and remarkably well-written for a long-running mystery series. Even more sadly, the Fairstein was just terrible on every level. The writing was mediocre, the characters barely believable, and the so-called mystery alternated between obvious and incomprehensible. I picked it up because I was looking for a new emergency-anxiety series, but clearly Fairstein won’t be it.

The Tarkington was sadly also depressing, but possibly only because my expectations for it were a bit too high. I was hoping for a family saga a la Buddenbrooks, when instead what I got was The Thorn Birds. Still, looking back five weeks later, I’m very glad I read it, and I like it much more than I realized at the time. The characters are sharp and distinct, and for once the female lead shows some good sense when it comes to avoiding involvement with the arrogant, self-obsessed moron who’s after her. The parallel love story between the protagonists’ parents is heartbreakingly sad, and probably worth the price of the book all by itself. It’s easy to forget the kinds of social responsibilities that people thought they had - though given my own background in a very duty-conscious community, I found it not only a sharp reminder, but a sharp commentary on how closed societies function.

Stir of Echoes was a re-read, as was the Alexander series. I like Stir of Echoes more every time I read it; I think I’m on my third or fourth time through it. What I really appreciate about it is that the protagonist gains telepathic powers - but stays rooted within his very small community, and uses it to deal with interpersonal problems that are relevant to his own life. I’ve always found the “I gain powers and then I GO SAVE THE WORLD” to be less interesting than the personal consequences of ability, and Matheson does a really lovely job with it.

The Alexander is a series I grew up with; as long as I turn off my feminist brain while reading it, I can take great pleasure in it. But, er, I have no personal intention of giving up my great talents so that I can be the nice pretty wife of an important man, so I just pretend that I get to be Taran and not Eilonwy. Though I admit I don’t like Taran all that much either. He’s kind of a whiny fucker - think Luke and the vaporators. I really read the books for the lovely adventure and the wonderful secondary characters, like Fflewddur Fflam and Gurgi. Munchings and crunchings is a household term for us!

Finally, I read some books that probably require longer responses: The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, The Time Bind, and Against Love. Against love! I am against love - or, more accurately, I’m against what Kerr calls the “culture of romance” that we like to pass off as love. Of course, I’m not sure I can get behind Kipnis’s position either, which is very much anti-commitment and monogamy-as-discipline. I’m more or less built monogamous, and I can’t imagine being any other way, so although I hate many of the things she hates, I also felt fairly alienated by her very entertaining polemic.

Happy reading, folks. More books tomorrow!

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Reading List 2008 (10/136)

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