Lit City Blues

Look, I read a lot of books on my own but I've also got a healthy posse of crotchgoblins, so it occurred to me that poking into the weird and wonderful world of Children's Books or more precisely, the books my children sometimes charm me into reading (when they pick good ones) or force me into reading (when they pick the bad or interminable ones) and so because Kids should do shots (like Bookshot) but they do drink plenty of juice boxes, when given the opportunity, Kids Bookbox was born and for this inaugural edition of what I'm sure will be an intermittent feature on the blog, we're going to look at an interminable book and a charming book. So, first up: the interminable book. Let's leave aside the tiresome Culture War Brain Worms that had the internet all in a tizzy about Dr. Seuss being canceled sometime last year. The fact is that every parent should probably realize by now that Dr. Seuss has a lot to answer for and not necessarily in a good way. Yes, they'r...

We are clinically insane. But we loved our first Great Dane so much that after my parents' dog got sick and couldn't play as much we wanted to get her a friend and so what's better than one Great Dane? Two of them.  Yes, we know we're crazy. Four kids, three cats, two dogs... and Penelope Joy (Poppy for short) is finally home and settling in. 

Development doesn't usually bother me. The great economic engine that powers the city, county, state, and our nation I think makes it more or less inevitable. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the multiple steel-and-glass apartment complexes that seem to be springing up all over downtown, but I'm not going to join protest groups like The Coalition Against The Shadow to protest Mordor's plans to build a tower on the edge of downtown. While Wal-Mart isn't my favorite corporation on the planet, I laughed at the whole STOP IOWA CITY WAL-MART thing. (Not because Wal-Mart wasn't shitty at the time- my impression is that it treats its workers marginally better now, but because Champagne Socialists and White Liberals always, without fail, come down on the side of performative activism instead of wanting non-rich people to have an affordable place to buy food.)  And if you really want to throw it all the way back to way back in the day, it still amuses me that the Firs...

I stumbled across the Revolutions podcast a few years back and ate that up like nobody's business. Not wanting to stop consuming quality history content, I went ahead and took the plunge into The History of Rome- though I'll freely admit that Roman history is not something I've ever been particularly interested. Having consumed all that content and appreciating the level of work that Mike Duncan put into creating his respective podcasts, I figured the least I could do was buy his book, The Storm Before the Storm . As I mentioned, Roman history just isn't my thing. That's not because I dislike it- I grew up eating up Greek mythology and loved the epics of Homer, but I just never got into it for whatever reason. Other than the basic outline of Roman history (first a city-state, then a Republic, then Ceasar comes along, crosses the Rubicon and they become an Empire which eventually splits in two while Byzantium continued and the west collapsed) I didn't get into t...

  …loading …loading TERRAN UNION ARCHIVES//02102571//THE SUMMIT AT EL AUIUN …buffering ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE WILL BEGIN IN THREE, TWO, ONE- The Great Hall in El-Aaiun was starting to fill up as the delegates began to file in. From his place on the podium, the Commandant General of the Polisario Front, head of State of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic watched in satisfaction. They had been waiting a long time for this meeting. There were a ridiculous number of nations on Earth now and when the Terran Union had agreed to a rotating Presidency their fight for freedom from the Moroccan oppressors had not yet been won.  Two centuries later, they were free and the Presidency of the Terran Union had finally rotated to them and the Commandant could not be more pleased. Most nations had spent their Presidencies on mundane things like economic development or mining the asteroid fields or repairing relations with humanities now far-flung colonies across the local spiral arm of the Milky W...

Since the inception of the current Marvel universe, I've always been sort of fascinated by the character of Hawkeye-- not just his on-screen portrayal (Jeremy Renner) but as the MCU took hold and began to expand, I spent some time acquiring comics and graphic novels and digging into the origin of a few of these characters here and there. I actually have the Matt Fraction/David Aja run on Hawkeye-- which is where the series draws many of its plotlines and overall milieu.  (I'm going to allow myself a minor parenthetical here: I did get on the pull list of our local comic store for a bit, but I was a bad customer and could never make it down there enough to pick up my stuff on the regular. But, I do have a decent long box worth of various comics and a half-decent collection of graphic novels to boot-- two of my favorites from this era? Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier is a beautiful origin story for multiple D.C. heroes and gorgeously drawn to boot and... Matt Fraction/David A...

I have always loved The Illiad , ever since I was a kid. Admittedly, I was a kind of a weird kid and my parents had an amazing prose translation that I would dearly love to get my hands on again. I read that thing over and over and over again until it probably wore out and the cover fell off. I also seem to recall in elementary school, I found an illustrated version that I would also dearly love to get my hands on again as well. I couldn't tell you anything about it, but I have a vague flash of a memory of a picture of the burning ships and the Myrmidons rushing to defend them. All of this is to say that when I snagged Madeline Miller's Circe off Audible and saw that she had also written a novel called The Song of Achilles , of course, I was going to snag that too and listen to it first. Doing some digging on the book itself: Circe was actually Miller's second book and The Song of Achilles was actually the first novel she wrote. (Per the book's wiki-page it took he...