Saturday, yay
1. I got a gift card from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spikedluv to the Laurel Mercantile store, the online store of the couple who does the Home Town TV show on HGTV. The Savannah candle is on its way to my house! <3
2. The conference went off without a hitch. It's the first conference we've had since I became president and started coordinating almost 10 years ago in which every single presenter showed up. LOL There's usually at least one person who just no shows. We also had our first international presenters (from Greece and China), so that was an excellent first!
3. I got my class up on time, and I think it's going to be great. It's British and American poetry through an ecocritical lens, so we're starting with the usual suspects--the Romantics and Transcendentalists--but then we're going to get to the fun stuff. LOL I'm doing this class with a creative project instead of a research paper, so I'm excited about that, too. I usually get really fun and interesting work for the project, and it's not the same boring old research paper.
4.
A Book Of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry by Czesław Miłosz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is such an interesting anthology; I think it is probably most interesting for what it says about Milosz and the way he approaches writing poetry (I'm sure scholars of his work find this anthology invaluable for that purpose). I enjoy many of the poems in this anthology, but the way Milosz thinks about poetry is so alien to me, and what he values in a poem is not what I value in a poem. The different categories he divides the poems into are also a bit odd to me, and I have trouble understanding why a poem belongs to this category and not another or how one belongs to a category at all in some cases.
But on the whole, lots of good poems here.
View all my reviews
Entropy in Bloom by Jeremy Robert Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don't typically read or watch horror now; I loved it in my teens, but what was cathartic when I had nothing to fear and felt invincible has ceased to be entertaining now that the truly terrifying world we live in has turned me into a ball of anxiety. LOL
I tend to define horror as the supernatural (ghosts and monsters) and slasher stuff (evil, murdery people), but reading this collection shows me I've been selling the genre short. Nothing in the collection scares me (probably because it's very light on the supernatural with only one proper ghost story), which might sound like a bad thing for a collection of short stories, but it's a plus for me!
I think I would define these stories primarily as social critique--of toxic masculinity, of youtuber influencer culture, of environmental harm, and other issues--and the best horror has always been social critique. The stories straddle genres; there's humor and sci-fi and eco-horror mixed in.
A bit too much gross-out body horror stuff for my taste or I'd have given it the full five.
View all my reviews
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I hadn't read this since grad school, and I had forgotten how absolutely fantastic this novel is. Collins is such an amazing writer. The plot is so deliciously twisty, the characters so deftly drawn (Marian is my blorbo), and the narrative structure so fascinating (without Woman in White, do we get a Dracula?). It had been so long since I'd read it (twenty years OMG) that I could only remember the broad strokes and not the intricate details of the plot. I couldn't put it down until the Secrets were finally revealed!
Highly recommend.
View all my reviews
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology by Kenneth L. Feder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of my oldest child's textbooks for an archaeology course they took last semester, and I think it should be required reading in every course because fundamentally it's about exercising critical thinking skills. The whole book is about archaeological hoaxes and debunking them (but also about the larger issues of the scientific method and how to apply it and how to figure out if someone is tricking you--principles to recognize misinformation and conspiracy theories). Much of the book is about historical hoaxes concerning people long dead, but a good portion of the book is about the ancient astronaut theory, and Feder doesn't pull his punches. He is very upfront that the core of this idea is 100% racism, and he doesn't shy away from calling Erich Von Däniken, author of Chariot of the Gods (one of the foundational texts of this theory), racist and delusional. Feder points out that it's always the cultures of color who are assumed to be unable to have accomplished their architectural, scientific, and intellectual achievements without the intervention of alien assistance.
The book is written in a conversational style with lots of pictures and links to websites and other resources if you want to do a deeper dive into any of the hoaxes. Highly recommend.
View all my reviews
spikedluv to the Laurel Mercantile store, the online store of the couple who does the Home Town TV show on HGTV. The Savannah candle is on its way to my house! <32. The conference went off without a hitch. It's the first conference we've had since I became president and started coordinating almost 10 years ago in which every single presenter showed up. LOL There's usually at least one person who just no shows. We also had our first international presenters (from Greece and China), so that was an excellent first!
3. I got my class up on time, and I think it's going to be great. It's British and American poetry through an ecocritical lens, so we're starting with the usual suspects--the Romantics and Transcendentalists--but then we're going to get to the fun stuff. LOL I'm doing this class with a creative project instead of a research paper, so I'm excited about that, too. I usually get really fun and interesting work for the project, and it's not the same boring old research paper.
4.
A Book Of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry by Czesław MiłoszMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is such an interesting anthology; I think it is probably most interesting for what it says about Milosz and the way he approaches writing poetry (I'm sure scholars of his work find this anthology invaluable for that purpose). I enjoy many of the poems in this anthology, but the way Milosz thinks about poetry is so alien to me, and what he values in a poem is not what I value in a poem. The different categories he divides the poems into are also a bit odd to me, and I have trouble understanding why a poem belongs to this category and not another or how one belongs to a category at all in some cases.
But on the whole, lots of good poems here.
View all my reviews
Entropy in Bloom by Jeremy Robert JohnsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don't typically read or watch horror now; I loved it in my teens, but what was cathartic when I had nothing to fear and felt invincible has ceased to be entertaining now that the truly terrifying world we live in has turned me into a ball of anxiety. LOL
I tend to define horror as the supernatural (ghosts and monsters) and slasher stuff (evil, murdery people), but reading this collection shows me I've been selling the genre short. Nothing in the collection scares me (probably because it's very light on the supernatural with only one proper ghost story), which might sound like a bad thing for a collection of short stories, but it's a plus for me!
I think I would define these stories primarily as social critique--of toxic masculinity, of youtuber influencer culture, of environmental harm, and other issues--and the best horror has always been social critique. The stories straddle genres; there's humor and sci-fi and eco-horror mixed in.
A bit too much gross-out body horror stuff for my taste or I'd have given it the full five.
View all my reviews
The Woman in White by Wilkie CollinsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I hadn't read this since grad school, and I had forgotten how absolutely fantastic this novel is. Collins is such an amazing writer. The plot is so deliciously twisty, the characters so deftly drawn (Marian is my blorbo), and the narrative structure so fascinating (without Woman in White, do we get a Dracula?). It had been so long since I'd read it (twenty years OMG) that I could only remember the broad strokes and not the intricate details of the plot. I couldn't put it down until the Secrets were finally revealed!
Highly recommend.
View all my reviews
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology by Kenneth L. FederMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one of my oldest child's textbooks for an archaeology course they took last semester, and I think it should be required reading in every course because fundamentally it's about exercising critical thinking skills. The whole book is about archaeological hoaxes and debunking them (but also about the larger issues of the scientific method and how to apply it and how to figure out if someone is tricking you--principles to recognize misinformation and conspiracy theories). Much of the book is about historical hoaxes concerning people long dead, but a good portion of the book is about the ancient astronaut theory, and Feder doesn't pull his punches. He is very upfront that the core of this idea is 100% racism, and he doesn't shy away from calling Erich Von Däniken, author of Chariot of the Gods (one of the foundational texts of this theory), racist and delusional. Feder points out that it's always the cultures of color who are assumed to be unable to have accomplished their architectural, scientific, and intellectual achievements without the intervention of alien assistance.
The book is written in a conversational style with lots of pictures and links to websites and other resources if you want to do a deeper dive into any of the hoaxes. Highly recommend.
View all my reviews