Hyperbole is alright

HaHA I bet you thought I was going to say something hyperbolic there. You'd only be mostly right, since that was the original plan.

Anyway, it's been awhile since I shared a PBS Idea Channel video and also I don't have anything else to write about (except, you know, several reviews I should probably get to) so hey, why share the video titled LITERALLY OUR MOST AMAZING EPISODE EVER!!!

For those of you who haven't watched it (yet) it is about our (meaning us denizens of the interwebs) use hyperbole pretty much all the time and what happens if you need to talk about something that is actually THE BEST THING EVER.

I was trying to come up with something clever to say here but I got nothing. I was thinking well I agree with what's said here and I use hyperbole ALL THE TIME and perhaps I should stop doing that. Then I thought about it some more and realized...no. I'm good. I'm good with my hyperbole, at least right now. I agree with everything in this video. I think he makes good points and I'm sure at some point I'll change. Or the general internet culture/language will change. I just follow the crowd. But the point is, I needed a post and here's a video you guys should watch.

QUALITY POST!

"Can we go back and start over?" "How far back?"

It took me a long time to pick up Landline by Rainbow Rowell. I have no idea why but this seems to be a thing I do with all of her books. I know it's going to be AMAZING but I don't pick it up right away. Or maybe "so I don't pick it up right away." Perhaps I'm holding onto it as a "I know I'm going to love this so when I'm in a slump I'll have something to read that will suck me in." You'd think I'd know since it should be as easy as asking myself, but myself doesn't really know why it does what it does. I think it was Meg's review that finally made go "I need this in my life now" and thus I began.

Unlike her previous books (Attachments, Eleanor & Park, Fangirl) Landline isn't about new love. It's about worn in love. It's about a couple that has been together for years. They've gone through the first glances, the first kisses, the butterflies. Now they've been married for 15 years, have 2 kids, and the butterflies aren't really there. It's not that they don't love each other anymore, but when Georgie decides to stay in L.A. and work on a pilot for her dream show instead of going with Neal and the girls to Nebraska for Christmas, well, is love enough?

But something strange happens. While staying at her mom's Georgie finds she can talk to past-Neal using an old yellow landline phone at her mom's house. The Neal from when he and Georgie were early in their relationship, still in college. Can talking to past-Neal help her fix the problems with present-Neal? Should she?

The tone here is closer to that of E&P, more serious, less fluff, but don't think that means it's missing Rowell's humor and banter. I love Rowell's style.

Neal didn't take Georgie's breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay - that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.

Seth and Scotty brainstormed. Georgie brain-hurricaned.

And the banter! Have I mentioned the banter?

When were you smiling? No one in your family smiles. You're a dynasty of wasted dimples.

"You didn't make me go," he said.
"You can't make me do anything - I'm an adult. And I'm much stronger than you."
"Upper body strength isn't everything; I have wiles."
"Not really."
"Yes, I do. I'm a woman. Women have wiles."

And I haven't even mentioned all of the other characters. Georgie's writing partner, Seth, her mom, her sister, her kids. They're full characters who feel like they exist outside of Georgie and Neal's story.

I loved this book. Obviously. It's Rowell and I expected to love it and of course she didn't disappoint. I've given up trying to rank her books. I love them all, don't make me choose. If you haven't read
any of her stuff yet, I encourage you to reconsider your life choices and rectify this problem. Landline isn't a bad place to start.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 127

Rowell, Rainbow. Landline. St. Martin's Press, 2014. Kindle

Come along with me, in search of Dr. Seuss

I was hoping to have another review to post this week, but clearly that didn't happen. A couple late nights, a broken toe*, and here we are, with only one review. BUT THEN Alice wrote a post about Andrea Martin aka Aunt Vuola in My Big Fat Greek Wedding which made me think of Dr. Seuss (for reasons) and I decided I wanted to write about that! And now here we are.

I loooooved Dr. Seuss. I love him now. When I was little TBS used to do a month dedicated to Dr. Seuss, which mainly meant they'd show a bunch of the cartoons made from his work. Among the cartoons was this movie, In Search of Dr. Seuss.

In Search of Dr. Seuss is sort of a documentary. I mean it is in the sense that it is about the life of Dr. Seuss. BUT it's still about Dr. Seuss so how much sense would it make to have a documentary about the guy be very serious and dry? No sense at all, is the answer. Or something that rhymes and also includes a made up animal is actually the right answer but I'm not nearly as clever as Seuss so I can't come up with that.

In the documentary/movie Kathy Najimy plays a reporter looking to get the inside scoop on Dr. Seuss so she goes to this crazy house and meets this sorta creepy guy (Matt Frewer) who tries to get rid of her. She sees this book and creepy guy starts freaking out when she goes to open it (yet he doesn't actually move to stop her so...) Once she opens it, she's sucked into this Seussian world and that creepy guy is now a sort of creepy Cat in the Hat (but 1000x less creepy than Mike Meyers CitH)

I'd trust him with children

and they go on this journey exploring Seuss's life, told mostly by his characters. It answers important questions like:

What if we had Eileen Brennan play an adult Cindy Lou Who (with a little bit of PTSD) reminiscing about the Grinch?
How awesome would it be to have Robin Williams read the Cat in the Hat to a couple small children?
Why don't we tell the story of Yertle the Turtle via gospel choir AND ALSO rap?

Why not, indeed?

WHO ELSE IS IN THIS? You're asking yourself? WELL
Patrick Stewart
Christopher Lloyd
Billy Crystal
Howie Mandel
Andrea Vuola
David Paymer

This guy

Obviously, this is the best thing ever. Would you like to watch it? It's on YouTube (naturally, and with Spanish subtitles so, bonus?) so there you go. Enjoy. Now I'm going to go sing that intro song for awhile.

*Have I mentioned that I'm basically a human disaster? The short story is I wanted to put together this new coffee table we got and while doing so I dropped one of the (very heavy) legs on my toe. I cried and yelled for about 10 min, wrapped my toe in a tissue (cos of course I cut it also), finished putting the table together, made dinner, then sat on the couch admiring the table and icing my foot. It's all sorts of pretty colors now. The toe, that is. The table does not change colors. I band-aided the toe to its neighbor to keep it from moving around too much, and otherwise I'm pathetically limping around.The broken toe goes well with the stitches on my head.**
**I had this NON-SERIOUS bump thing removed after having it for a gazillion years. The stitches weren't an accident, but that hasn't stopped me from whining about them.

What is the most villainous move on the market?

I keep checking my drafts folder thinking "Maybe I was smart and started a post about this book around the time I finished it, so I have something to work off of now." And every time I check I am disappointed that there's nothing there. I also continue to NOT start a post about whatever book I just recently read, thus continuing the cycle. Hooray, responsibility.

At some point I was wandering around my local bookstore thinking about how I would change the layout and looking for something new to read when I stumbled on Chuck Klosterman's book I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) and I thought "Why not".

I read his Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs a while ago (pre-blog) and I think I read Fargo Rock City around that time as well, but I can't really remember which doesn't say much for that book. It does, however, serve as a good reason for me to keep this blog up so I can, you know, remember what I read. Anyway, I haven't read any books from Klosterman in awhile BUT I do read the guy regularly cos at some point he took over writing the NYTimes Magazine column "The Ethicist" and while I read embarrassingly little of the newspaper (despite the fact that it's delivered every weekend AND comes with an online subscription so I could read it ALL THE TIME) I always read his column. So I figured this would be an entertaining option.

Klosterman talks about the concept of villains in pop culture and what that says about us. How villains may be evil, but they're also the character people seem to like the best. He talks about the thin line between vigilantes and criminals a la Death Wish and the guy, Bernhard Goetz, who did his own version of Death Wish. He talks about 80s hair bands and 90s gangsta rap, how terrible we collectively were to Monica Lewinsky and not Bill Clinton, and what a successful dick Perez Hilton is.

Here's what Klosterman says the book is. Or rather, what it isn't:

And most notably, [this book] will not be a repetitive argument that insists every bad person is not-so-bad and every good person is not-so-good.  Rational people already understand that this is how the world is. But if you are not-so-rational - if there are certain characters you simply refuse to think about in a manner that isn't 100 percent negative or 100 percent positive - parts of this book will (midly) offend you. It will make you angry, and you will find yourself trying to intellectually discount arguments that you might naturally make about other people. This is what happen whenever the things we feel and the things we know refuse to align in the way we're conditioned to pretend.

Here's the thing. Much like his other two books, I honestly can't remember much about this one. I know I'm behind on my reviewing but it hasn't been that long, yet I can't remember any details of this book.  And I read Bad Feminist longer ago, and yet I remembered enough of that one. I do remember vague feelings while reading it: entertaining but kinda pretentious. Even looking at the titles of the essays isn't bringing back any memories, although skimming through random pages is helping. And It's making me think "Hey, this sounds good! I bet I'd like this" before I remember that "yes, I've read this. Supposedly."

I guess if you see this sitting around, give it a try. If you're a fan of Klosterman, you'll probably like it. If you're not, it's not bad, just not really memorable. I may read it again at some point and at that time I'll update this if I come up with any new thoughts.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 9

Klosterman, Chuck. I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined). Scribner, 2013.

October Reading Wrap-Up

How did October go for me? I honestly forgot that one month ended and a new one began and therefore I didn't get around to writing my wrap-up post till now. Good job, me. But now I've remembered that November is actually a different month (and by that I mean I'm finally getting around to reading blog posts and saw Kayleigh's wrap-up) which means it's time for me to tell you what I read last month! Hooray.

Number of books read
4
Misery by Stephen King
Maus II by Art Spiegelman
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
I'm Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Number of pages read
1,022

Percentage of fiction read
50% - whoa 1/2 non-fiction

Percentage of female authors
50% - BAM

Percentage of white authors
100% - sigh

Percentage of US authors
100% - double sigh

Percentage of ebooks
50%

Percentage of rereads
25%

Percentage of review books
0%

Books written by decade
1950s - 25%
1980s - 25%
1990s - 25%
2010s - 25%

Books by genre
Horror - 50%
Graphic novel - 25%
Memoir - 25%

Look how even last month was! That's nuts. Except around white US people. That was pretty much status quo, which I really need to work on.

Change requires intent and effort

I should really catch up on my reviewing because I feel like every book I've been writing reviews for I read roughly a billion years ago. At this rate December is going to be FULL of horror story reviews.

Anyway, remember how awhile ago how people were reading and raving about Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay and how having a review around that time would have been really relevant? Yeah, I'm just getting to it now.

I'm not sure when I first heard about Roxane Gay's collection of essays, but I know a bunch of people with good taste were reading it and saying good things about it so at some point I saw a copy on sale at my local bookstore and decided I must have it. It was a good call.

As I pretty much literally just said, Bad Feminist is a collection of essays. Most of them deal with feminism. Actually, I guess all of them deal with it in varying degrees, some more overtly than others. Some are about how she's a bad feminist because she falls short of certain feminist values, others are about feminism and race, my favorite is about Gay's love of Scrabble. There are a bunch of pop culture references (Hunger Games, Gone Girl, Django Unchained) that I'm sure are going to date the book in the future but for now I enjoyed. The pop culture reference make difficult topics more accessible.

The book is split into 5 sections:
Me, which, duh, focuses on her with essays like "Typical First Year Professor" and "To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically" (the Scrabble essay)
Gender & Sexuality, which is the longest section and has pieces like "How To Be Friends With Another Woman" and "Blurred Lines, Indeed"
Race & Entertainment, which has "The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances of 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help" and "The Morality of Tyler Perry"
 Politics, Gender, & Race with "The Politics of Respectability" and "A Tale of Two Profiles"
and finally Back to Me with Bad Feminist, Takes 1 & 2

She's tackling some serious topics, and while the essays aren't necessarily light-hearted (at least not all of them) they don't feel like you're being lectured to, or worse yelled at. Things don't feel hopeless and those pop culture references give you a way to think about and work with these ideas and a language that is easy to understand.

To the title. She calls herself a "bad feminist" saying:

I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain...interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.

Pretty much she is a feminist, if not a "Professional Feminist." So you know, she's an actual feminist instead of some idea of what one should be or has to be. Love it.

I wish I had this as an ebook (or I guess had it as well as an ebook) so I would have a bunch of quotes already highlighted to share with you. You should probably just read this.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 172

Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist. Harper Perennial, 2014.