“Colleges should remember that selecting students by GPA more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.” ― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life I found William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep through reading one of his early articles which formed the basis for this book. As someone who attended state universities, then went to art school, I have felt the sting of feeling comfortable with my well-rounded education and intellectual curiosity, then slowly realizing that […]
Religion makes some people kinda cray cray.
I had wanted to read Under the Banner of Heaven for quite a long time, and finally found a copy at my local used book store this year. I started and stopped reading several times, to pick up lighter, less gruesome novels, but I kept coming back to read this intense, true-crime novel, that is less about the horrible murder of a 24 year old mother and her 15 month old daughter (and it was violently and insanely horrible), as it is about a fundamentalist […]
This is more about me than the book.
In How to Build a Girl Caitlin Moran manages to write a story of teenaged angst that so closely resembles my own experiences that I though she had perhaps stolen my diary and just added a lot (like, a lot, a lot) more sex. Except I didn’t keep a diary in those days. (Now you would call it a journal, and be really precious about it). How to Build a Girl is the story of Johanna Morrigan, a working-class girl in 90s England who hates […]
Do you cyborg?
Cyborgs are a common theme in SciFi, so Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke, with short stories from authors from around the world is a welcome anthology for the genre. I picked it up, specifically to read Madeline Ashby’s contribution, “Come From Away” but I was definitely invested in reading more. Unfortunately, more doesn’t begin to describe Upgraded. In all, there are 26 stories, which, might honestly be over-egging the pudding a bit. When your theme is so narrow that every story pretty much has to begin […]