Sometimes I wonder how much the liking of a book is tied to the time when you first read it. I wonder if I would still love some of the novels I first read in high school as much as I do if I’d been older and had a more developed critical eye than I did then. I started reading the Twilight series in the wake of a bad breakup, and I remain fond of the series (especially the breakup arc in New Moon) despite […]
Some Classics Are Classic For A Reason
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today’s world, it’s ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It’s more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family. If you’re a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn’t going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens…two young people, the children […]
What’s In A Name?
One of the quirks I’ve noticed since I’ve been living in Nevada is how proud people are of how long their family has been in Nevada. If someone is a third, fourth, or fifth generation Nevadan, that will be one of the first things out of their mouths when they meet you. Growing up in Michigan, I never heard someone proudly call themselves a third-generation Michigander. It never would have occurred to anyone to say. Part of it, I think, is the immigrant culture of […]
The Specialest Snowflake
For some reason, Moby-Dick has gotten a reputation as a boring slog of a book. That’s what I had in my head before I read it last year, anyways, and was delighted to be proven wrong. It’s actually both lively and informative, full of adventure and interesting facts about whaling in the olden days of yore. And while our narrator, Ishmael, is a bit of a cipher, Captain Ahab is one of the most memorable characters in literature, with his ivory false leg and burning […]
Thank God (Or Gods) It’s Over
After exploring ancient, Eastern, and Western mythology and religion up until the approximate time of the Dark Ages, Joseph Campbell’s final volume of his Masks of God series deals with the “modern” world. As societies became increasingly mobile and fluid, the social purpose of religion and myth (transmission of local cultural “rules” to each generation, and the acceptance of those rules) fades in importance. Now what? Creative Mythology explores what happens as cultures begin to intermingle, how local symbols are repurposed for new reasons in […]
A Gender-Bending Reign In Ancient Egypt
The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney
When I was a little girl, my mom bought me a book about King Tutankhamen. It had beautiful glossy photos, and I was fascinated by the short life of the boy king…and the maybe-supernaturally shortened lives of the people who excavated his tomb and awakened the mummy’s curse. From there sparked a love of ancient Egypt, peaking when I was absolutely nerdy enough at age 9 or so to write a letter to the editor to correct one of the Detroit papers when they ran […]