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

I'm super behind on reviewing books (and, frankly, reading) owing to much more travel than usual.  I love travelling, and my family and friends are scattered across the East Coast, so there are a lot of reasons to leave home.  I am at the same time something of a homebody, and flying to Florida three times in as many months has really cut into my sitting-on-the-couch-and-doing-anything-close-to-relaxing time.  I always do the 50 Book Challenge, though I never reach 50.  This year, I managed 28, against a goal of 27.  It includes a few re-reads, some selections from Our Shared Shelf (Goodreads' feminist book club), and some new friends. 1.  Persepolis II , by Marjane Satrapi (OSS read) 2.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 3.  The Fellowship of the Ring , by JRR Tolkien (re-read; don't argue with me about the whole "The Lord of the Rings is one book split into three parts for financial reasons" argument.  I do...

If you liked Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian , you might be into Possession , due to both novels' epistolary and historical natures. I say "might" because The Historian is a lot easier and more accessible to the average reader. The Historian is unputdownable, while Possession is a slower burn. Where The Historian is easily accessible, Possession, with the exception of its happy ending, is much more cerebral, with frequent oblique references to academic theories that a scholar in history or literature would find familiar, but most of us will end up needing to gloss over. Those parts are actually not 100% necessary to follow the story and start to thin out later, so if you can force your way through the first quarter, you'll do fine. The only thing that stops me from considering Possession to be a really great book is the ending, which was obvious and a little too... happy , in a fairy-tale type way. I'll leave it at that so as not to give anything away....

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales appeals to my inner morbidness and love of the dark and unconventional, but sort of bumps up against a general discomfort on my part with short stories. I don't have a problem with short stories, per se, but they're not really in my wheelhouse. I'm not saying I enjoy those long-winded nineteenth century Russian novels, but I do love a good book I can immerse myself in for hours and forget about the world. Short stories are too brief for that kind of escapism. They also leave too many unanswered questions. They tragically end just as I begin to love a character or dive into a tale, without offering any explanations or directions, or even much backstory. Luckily, tragedy is the soil in which the stories in Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales take root. While the stories are short on revenge (I think I was imagining short supernatural versions of The Count of Monte Cristo ), each tale is tinged with sadness and a good helping of eerie discomfort. Only on...

I walked in on my husband watching one of the ubiquitous airings of The Two Towers on TNT a few days ago during the "where is the horse and the rider" bit of the movie (though why anyone would want to watch anything other than the extended version is beyond me).  In the movie, Theoden says "Where is the horse and the rider?  Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains.  Like wind in the meadow.  The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow".  This is one of my favorite parts of the movie.  The Rohirrim make The Two Towers movie easily the best of the trilogy (though The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite of the books).  In the book, these lines are recited by Aragorn.  In case you don't remember the full text, they are as follows: Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand o...

Why didn't I finish Unexplained Mysteries of World War II ?  Well, for starters, "mysteries" was a bit of a stretch.  A brief portion of the book was devoted to actual mysteries.  And then the "coincidence" portion started, in which William Breuer found events that were actually pretty likely, and then acted as though these were miracles.  My favorite/most loathed example?  The "Look Out Below!" portion, which tells the story of how both German and British paratroopers decided to land on the same beachhead AT THE SAME TIME.  The odds against this are described as "astronomical".  Or, maybe, the Allies were both battling for Sicily, and the weather was good at this time.  You know, either or. Another example is of a paratrooper who discovered that his parachute was inspected by his own mother.  The odds that his specific parachute was inspected by his own mother were certainly slim, but it's pretty likely that someone would get a parachu...

For years I prided myself on never not finishing a book.  I forced myself through every book I read, no matter how awful.  I figured that there's no way to get the full picture of a book until it's been finished.  I struggled with the first 75 pages of The Lord of the Flies , and had to restart Captains Courageous at least twice (to be honest, I don't remember anything about it, other than that I restarted it several times and it's got a maritime-y theme).  I won't say that I was rewarded for finishing Captains Courageous , but the last 25 pages of The Lord of the Flies made the previous month worth it (yes, it took me a month to get through 75 pages.  I really hate shipwrecked stories). Then I stumbled on 1Q84 .  I made it a quarter of the way through, and decided that I couldn't take it anymore.  Life is too short to read bad books.  Yes, it was reviewed highly by... The Economist?  NPR?  Probably both.  Maybe it was just over...

Can't figure out why William B. Breuer keeps describing the Japanese generals he discusses in Unexplained Mysteries of World War II as "warlords".  It comes off as kind of racist, especially when I don't remember seeing anyone else described that way. Breuer also has this weird way of applying these really strange adjectives to different figures, in particular repeatedly calling Canaris "the little admiral", when his size seemed to be unrelated to the context. Currently reading: Unexplained Mysteries of World War II by William B. Breuer Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf