Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is one of my favorite books ever. I've read it many, many times and I always find new things to love about it. I also taught it several times back when I was running undergrad English and writing classes in graduate school. I think it's an astonishing book, not just for its powerful, uncanny vision of the not-so-distant future, but also for the beautiful, poetic ways that Atwood uses language. Indeed, language—how it is used, how it changes, who get to use it, private versus public voices and vocabularies, and, to quote another great poetic work, "who lives, who dies, who tells your story"—is one of the main themes of the novel. Ugh, I just love this book. If you haven't read it, you really should, ESPECIALLY if you, like me, live in or around Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the book is set. Reading The Handmaid's Tale has been an even richer experience for me since moving to Cambridge. I can walk through Harvard Square and see glimpses of Atwood's Gilead superimposed upon the walls or ready to rise from beneath the surface of the streets, like the palimpsest that Atwood herself evokes on the first page of the novel.
Read Morereviews/recommendations
2015: The Year That Was (PART 1)
Many people lament the trend toward end-of-year lists and best-of round-ups, but then again many people are terrible. I am not beholden to terrible, joy-despising people. Sharing awesome things is a joy-conducive activity and one that I'm very fond of, so without further ado, here are just a few of my favorites from 2015. This is Part 1 (books and music); Part 2 (food, podcasts--yes, podcasts again--and other fun things) is TK in the near future.
**NB: These are things I enjoyed this calendar year, not necessarily things that were released in the last 12 months. I'm behind the curve pretty much always, but on the assumption that you might be, too, I hazard that some of these might still be useful!**
Read More
Undercover
I'm not going to make commentary on Taylor Swift into my personal #brand or anything, but I did want to write a few words about this week's development in Swiftiana: Ryan Adams' entire-album cover of 1989.
Read More
Stranger Than Fiction: A Review of the Welcome to Night Vale Novel
This is a review for the novel Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, set in the same universe as the podcast of that shares its name. This book is not yet published, although you can preorder it for when it does come out on October 20—I was lucky enough to be able to get a free ARC, or advance reader copy, when I was at Book Expo America* for work in May. I realize that this puts me in a privileged position, so I'm going to try to avoid any spoilers or proprietary information.
Read MorePodcasts for Nerds
Podcasts are definitely one of my favorite forms of media. The podcast is an incredibly diverse, democratic, and creative format. The average podcast that I listen to is between 25 and 45 minutes long, with some outliers at the very short end being just a few minutes in some installments, and some of the more rambling ones stretching to over an hour each. I listen to several a day, mostly thanks to the fact that I walk to and from work, about 40 minutes each way. The bulk of the shows I subscribe to could be loosely called "educational" but a better word might be "exegetical" (as long as we're taking a pretty wide view of what is a "text"—and as a former academic, I certainly do). These podcasts are usually run by highly intelligent and vocally charismatic obsessives who have a passion for sharing the things they are obsessed with. Some are produced as more traditional radio essays, some as panel discussions, some as sort of dramatic monologues. (Podcasts are also the reason that this blog is built as a Squarespace site, since they are one of the most frequent sponsors on nearly EVERY SINGLE PODCAST I listen to, so when I started to think about making a blog, that was pretty much the only way I could conceive of doing it.)
Read More