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...

Bitter Orange reminds me of a lot of other books.  One reviewer compared it to Rebecca , and the setting in a manor house called Lyntons is a reference to Wuthering Heights .  I am also currently suffering through Sophie's Choice (am I the only person who finds the narrator to be insufferable, the writing overwrought, and the general tenor to be racist and sexist?), and I had some initial difficulty in keeping the two books separate. It took me  a little while to get into the book for the reasons above, especially because Frances, the narrator is, like the narrator in Rebecca , very wishy washy and personality-less, which I find terribly annoying.  However, once I got a little further in, the mystery, hint of a ghost story, and sheer dramatical tension had me hooked.  Frances is an unreliable narrator, and the couple that she hooks up with, Cara and Peter, are charming and cosmopolitan, and clearly hiding something. Frances is visiting  English countr...

I just finished The Pagan Lord , Book 7 of the Saxon Tales (or the Saxon Chronicles, or The Last Kingdom series, or whatever the series name is on the version you have).  I was reluctant to start it, because no matter how much I am fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons, I just felt like it would be another story with weird names and a shield wall and Uhtred calling someone a turd and then saving the day.  Of course, I was right, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  It's usually what I love about The Last Kingdom.  And so once I dug in, I was hooked, as per usual.  Uhtred, of course, does save the day, and he does call a lot of people turds.   This one picks up ten years after the events in Death of Kings , during the uneasy peace following the great battle (at an undetermined location, somewhere in East Anglia) that closes that book.  Edward is still king of Wessex, Alfred having died in Death of Kings , and Aethelred and Aethelflaed still maintain ...

Well, it's the end of 2018, and despite working significantly more hours than last year (my department is slowly collapsing like a flan in a cupboard - bonus points if you remember that as a reference to the Austro-Hungarian Empire), I managed to beat my Goodreads 2018 Reading Challenge goals, and actually read more books and more pages than I have since I started keeping track on Goodreads in 2012.  My stats for the year were 37 books and 13,985 pages.  I attribute to my seeming success to the fact that I quit Facebook in late January (I say "seeming success" because, in retrospect, maybe those numbers are a little sad.  Like, maybe I should have been off having actual adventures, instead of reading. However, I made somewhere around $8,000 in overtime this year and I am counting the fact that I was able to spend any time at all not working as a victory).  I actually suspended my Facebook account because of reading.  I always bitched and moaned that I didn't hav...