June 16 is a day of celebration and extreme geekery for modernist lit types everywhere, but nowhere more so than Dublin, which is so explicitly and accurately mapped in Joyce’s Ulysses that if you care about it at all, it’s still possible (required, even) to trace the exact path its antiheroic protagonist Leopold Bloom walks [...]
Archive for the ‘Book Club’ category
Alternative Book Titles
OK, so I’m laid up with a busted ankle after a poorly executed slide into second base on Sunday. I’m on the couch all day, so have plenty of time to write a wonderful post for you people. But I don’t feel like writing, OK? I feel like playing online poker and watching bad TV. [...]
Sex education
Teen fiction is a massive fiction market, but when I was a teenager in the early 1980s we had to make the leap from children’s literature to literature with nothing in between. Well, that’s not entirely true. I vividly remember the cruelty and transgression of Paul Zindel’s The Pigman and the taboo-busting discussions of menstruation [...]
Tuesday book review
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in a very long time. It’s an amazing, complex story told with remarkable skill by a narrator you feel you want to know. The old cliche came true for me: I was sorry to see it end. It’s the [...]
Book club: The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer
A few months ago, longtime Unfogged commenter Tripp started talking about a book he’d recently read that, he said, explained a lot about the current political situation. I checked it out. The Authoritarians is a summing up of the work of social psychologist Bob Altemeyer. Altemeyer has made it available free online (you can also [...]
Reminder: Book club next Tuesday
We’ll be discussing The Authoritarians by social psychologist Bob Altemeyer. It’s a quick, fascinating read, available for free as a PDF here; it even includes a handy test that tells you whether you’re a right-wing authoritarian follower, in case you’ve been wondering. Seriously, check it out before next Tuesday if you have a chance.
Announcing the first Great Whatsit book club
When I was a kid, I got the greatest pleasure from doing what other people expected of me. Still, there were glitches. My friend L—’s dad taught our Deacon’s Quorum class in church (Sunday School for 12 and 13-year-old boys) a few times and seemed to be annoyed with me when I didn’t like his [...]
