The Geekiest Geek to Ever Geek Down the Pike, and Other Tales

I have been a fan of John le Carré since I read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for a college history class.  His George Smiley books appeal to me at the deepest part of my soul.  My family teases me because they say the movies based on le Carré's books are all dialogue - usually incomprehensible British dialogue, at that - and no action.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy consists almost entirely of old British guys talking in circles, which is, in my estimable opinion, what makes it so good.  The George Smiley books are gritty and twisty and show the blurred lines between good guys and bad guys in the Cold War.  Le Carré's non-Cold War books however, while engrossing, unfortunately tend to be a teeny bit preachy and usually have a conveniently, even unrealistically happy-ish ending.  This includes books like Little Drummer Girl , The Night Manager , and The Constant Gardener , all with varying levels of polemics on issues ranging from Big Pharma to arms t...

In 2007, when I was deciding which grad school to attend, I was contacted by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs explaining why that school was the best fit for me.  That professor was Dr. Charli Carpenter, and obviously her appeal worked as I currently live in Pittsburgh.  I ended up taking a class on international humanitarian law with Dr. Carpenter, which I absolutely loved.   Upon my decision to attend Pitt, my dad immediately went online and ordered Dr. Carpenter's book, "Innocent Women and Children": Gender, Norms, and the Protection of Civilians .  Welp, it is now 2019.  So it took me 12 years to actually get around to reading it.  Unless you are super into international humanitarian law, and have a scholarly bent, I would not recommend this book.  It is an academic work, and is written as such.  It me a while to get back my grad school brain. "Innocent Women and Childr...

I haven't read a lot of Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles , Fahrenheit 451 , but Something Wicked This Way Comes popped up on some list of spooky books or maybe an NPR Books Review in which a new book was compared to Something Wicked This Way Comes - who knows. Sci-fi is usually not my schtick (but fantasy is, apparently? Wizards are much cooler than aliens), so that may account for Bradbury's notable absence on my bookshelves. My October reading calendar always includes a re-read of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Raven, but I try to find an additional paranormal- or death-related book to add in. Last year it was Mary Roach's Spook . I got Something Wicked This Way Comes for a Christmas present, maybe 2018 or 2017 (I am still reading books I bought/received in 2007. My TBR list is several hundred books long. The stack of books IN MY HOUSE that I own but have not read yet numbered in the seventies this year. So, taking a year or two to read a book is not bad f...

I am currently trying to work my way through basically every text J.R.R. Tolkien has ever written.  Or at least the published ones.  Not just The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit .  Not even just The Silmarillion and Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.  ALL of them. Also, books written ABOUT Tolkien and Middle Earth.  I've read critical theory reviews of his works, books about the deeper allegorical meanings (despite the fact that he famously hated allegory) and source works on which he based Middle Earth.  I think, at this point, I've read four different translations of Beowulf.  And it's not always an easy task.  Christopher Tolkien, bless his heart, has patiently, methodically, painstakingly combed through all these random typewritten, handwritten, loose-leaf, bound manuscripts to try to trace the evolution of what Tolkien called his legendarium.  And I've been trying to slog through all of it.  The "finished" works (the ultima...

Jo Nesbo's Macbeth is the third of the Hogarth Shakespeare books I've read (the other two were Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood, based on The Tempest, and Vinegar Girl , by Anne Tyler, based on The Taming of the Shrew. NONE of them have been good. Maybe it's because, let's be honest, not all of Shakespeare's plots stand up three hundred years later. What makes Shakespeare's plays great is the writing. The dialogue, the soliloquys, and most especially the insults are still classic. But almost all the comedies are the same story line, set in a different Italian city, with different names. So when you strip away the details, the plots aren't always great. Or, maybe, it's because it's hard to do a good re-write, as many of the recent reboots of '90s and '00s TV shows and movies have proved. Nesbo's Macbeth is a SWAT team leader set in drug- and crime-riddled 1970s Scotland, and MacDuff (here just Duff) is the head of the narcotics unit, desper...

There are, roughly speaking, two types of readers. One type is the book-buying type.  The hoarding type.  I fall into that category.  I love to own books.  Every now and then, when I miss my books, I rearrange them (which, apparently, I have in common with Bill Clinton).  Sometimes I get a little distressed over whether my various copies of Beowulf (which, I swear, are breeding on my shelf on their own), all my books about Tolkien, and my books by Tolkien should all be sorted together, or should be sorted by alphabetical order.  Should my signed copies of books be sorted onto a special shelf?  Or should they be mixed up with the others?  Stored in stacks, or with their spines vertical?  (This last dilemma is being solved for me because, in general, you can fit more books if they're stacked, and I am rapidly running out of space).  I dream of one day owning enough books that I can endow my own library.  I keep some books that I d...