Somebody, somewhere, recommended Push the Button as an alternative for those who are interested in reading about 24/7 BDSM lifestyles, rather than 50 Shades of BDSM Doesn’t Work That Way (and also as a book with persons of color as the protagonists). I don’t remember who, now, but I am ever curious so I picked it up. I’m afraid I’m about to damn the book with faint praise: it wasn’t terrible. Certainly it was a quick read, and I liked Star/Nicole and David even if […]
The Promise of Intimacy, Denied
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a book review without finishing the book — but the last time was in the early 1980s when I read the first and then last chapters of Jane Eyre for English class. Plus one chapter in the middle I’d been assigned. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the most Devastating Plague of All Time is *exactly* the sort of book that should have been up my alley. It promises to be a look at […]
Lots more Whacks
Lizzie Borden took an ax… Those of us familiar with Lizzie’s story (or just with the rhyme) believe we know what happened next. Cherie Priest, though, looked at the variety of facts available, asked herself the writer’s favorite question (“What if…?”), and came up with an almost entirely different story. Though father and (step-) mother still take their whacks.
If Schroedinger opened Pandora’s box…
What happens when what you’ve always known yourself to be is locked away from you? What happens when a secret that’s been a secret for hundreds of years suddenly isn’t a secret anymore? (A word of warning, regarding secrets: Here there be spoilers for the first two books in the series. I’m sorry. I can’t discuss this one without discussing them, at least a little bit.) Ex-libriomancer Isaac Vaino doesn’t have an answer for the second thing at the beginning of Jim Hines’ Unbound, because he’s […]
Read a Book, Ya Idjits!
I’m going to guess there aren’t too many places outside fan fiction where you’ll find Supernatural mentioned in the same breath or sentence as Hamlet. Let alone Aristotle, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant (who’s a real pissant), or Thomas Aquinas. Or Simone du Bouvoir. Or many other philosophers. Just so we’re clear: yes. I mean *that* Supernatural. Not the idea of the supernatural, or defining the supernatural, though certainly some chapters address those topics and I think a great many philosophers have covered that ground. For those people who […]
A New Year, Same Old Crazy
(Several words of warning: There are very mild spoilers for the book down toward the end, but nothing an astute reader couldn’t figure out from the description and the genre.) I figured that, as it’s a whole new year and all, that it was time to pay a third visit to Lil Littlepage-Eller, Boris, and the rest of the free-form asylum also known as Crazy, VA. So far, the Lil & Boris series has been a nice series of comfort nibbles with inhabitants I’ve always described […]