Well. Five years. I haven’t much to say. I will, instead, direct viewers to a work of art, Graydon Parrish’s The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001, brought to my attention by an article in the Hartford Courant….
I know, I know. Believe me, Your Humble Blogger is aware that you have all had these conversations about genre before. Besides, y’all went through this back when The Time-Traveler’s Wife was on the best-seller lists, and wasn’t on the…
Well, and Linda Greenhouse, the NYTimes Supreme Court reporter, wrote Becoming Justice Blackmun more, it seems, out of opportunity than anything else. There was the archive, and there she was. I suspect she would rather have written a book on…
There was an interesting thread over at Benjamin Rosenbaum’s blog recently, about … well, about slipstream and genre. But no, really, there were things that were interesting. Honestly. Well, I thought there was interesting stuff. One of the things I…
The problem with Eleanor Updale’s Montmorency is not that it wasn’t good, it’s that it wasn’t good enough. A clever set-up, decent writing, some lovely period detail, and for what? In fact, the whole book felt like a set-up. That…
It’s at times like this that I miss the Medium Lobster. Who else is going to explain it all to me? I mean, Our Only President—still the only one we’ve got—has just given us a birthday present of chained captives,…
Have you noticed, Gentle Reader, how annoying people are? No, not like that. It’s that conversations amongst people are, like everything else, more complicated than that, impossible to control, incoherent, fractal, unherdable. And what really gets up YHB’s nose is…
I was mostly annoyed by What’s the Matter with Kansas, even though I do think that Thomas Frank has some valid points. Unfortunately, I have done just enough reading of social science to find the use of individual history backed…
One thing that’s frustrating about Labor Day is the absence of labor, that is, of trade unions, from the day. Our Only President, in his perfunctory message, pointedly addresses workers as individuals, rather than as part of a movement. He…
What YHB should probably do is knock out a half-dozen Book Reports, just because being so far behind makes the thing seem more like a chore and less like a treat. Particularly since my shallow reading habits force books to…