Gay flirting disguised as incisive commentary on French society disguised as a dick joke. GodDAMN, James Baldwin.

God, Baldwin could write. He could especially write gay flirting disguised as incisive criticism of American society disguised as gay flirting.

Straight people are not allowed to do history anymore. They're definitely not allowed to write biographies of """"possibly"""" and/or """"allegedly"""" LGBT historical figures. They literally don't see it when it's right in front of their face. (This book was written after Google!!! He could have fucking Googled it!!!!)

If someone had told me Coalhouse Walker Sr. was in this book, I'd have read it so much earlier. Doctorow's Ragtime is in my Top 5 books of all time, and Coalhouse Walker Jr. should seriously be considered one of the most iconic African-American characters in all literature.

*snorts in New Englander (New English?) daughter of an Ohioan*

*snort*

There's going to be a Grant docu-drama miniseries this Memorial Day, and watching the trailer, it really struck me how much, millennia from now, historians will debate whether he was real: "Oh I get it, his initials were 'U.S.' He won the war with tactics considered dishonorable at the time, even burnt a whole city to the ground…and named 'Ulysses'? Yeah sure okay…"
Trailer: https://play.history.com/shows/grant/videos/grant-art-of-war-trailer

And the other two were Adamses.

I like these poems, but they do seem to undermine the title of the collection. I mean, it's not called "the princess and the knight save each other in this one". #poetry #NationalPoetryMonth

“Baby Rolando had a nice, solid feel to him, a bunch of rolled socks stuffed inside one big sock, dense and sleepy, not one of those scrawny flapping-chicken babies one ran across from time to time.“ 😆

You guyyyyyyyyyyys 😍🎩❤️

Can we all just stop and appreciate the balls it took to get that kind of concession out of the Confederacy?

(Oh yeah, in case you're wondering why I deemed April to be #AmericanCivilWar month as one of my reading themes, it's because apparently April is considered in many southern states to be "Confederate History Month" and FUCK THAT.)

I'm going to come right out and say one of the taboos of audiobooks: one of the benefits of audiobooks is that you can just let the parts that don't interest you very much just sort of drift past you. I am very interested in the overall life of Ulysses S. Grant, but I have only ever found two military maneuvers interesting, and since Grant is neither Hannibal nor Yi Sun-sin, I'm happy to just let the minutiae of Shiloh and Vicksburg float on by.

Well, I'm glad we've fixed these problems now 🙄

Awwww, proud SCOTUS papa.

When your trains crash and the ICC reports that you've been neglecting rail maintenance in order to pay out dividends you couldn't actually afford:
Charles Mellen: *surprised Pikachu face*
Louis Brandeis: *sips the tea he's been spilling for six years*
(BTW, "vilify" here means "barefaced anti-Semitic libel".)

You know, this book doesn't go as easy on Lee as I was worried it might. I mean, it still goes easier on him that he probably deserves (it opens with the factoid that he "didn't own slaves" without mentioning that his wife totally did) but post-Little Round Top, you're mostly left with the impression that his previous victories may have had more to do with Union failures and his men's loyalty to him than his actual leadership. #CivilWar

What I really love about Kilrain here is he's cutting through to the real hypocrisy of the Founders, putting aside such grand Enlightenment ideals as "All men are created equal" and just saying "you can't have a nation with 'no aristocracy' and also have a permanent, legally-created and sustained underclass." #CivilWar #AmericanCivilWar

Goddamn, now that's a thesis statement. #CivilWar #AmericanCivilWar

So I guess this book has been on Mount TBR for a while. #jewish #jewishbooks #jewishauthors #jewishlit

You know what I love about this play? Its total fanficcy origin. Shakespeare added his OC to this historical RPF epic trilogy, and then once it was finished, BNF @queen_bess was like, “could you pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease write something new with him? idec if it's a modern au comedy or whatever, i just want more falstaff!!!!!!!“. And Shakespeare got all “omg senpai has noticed me!“ and just did it.

It totally counts as reading Shakespeare to just pull up an old BBC production on Kanopy as long as you have the book next to you, right?

Welp. #science #isolationinteractions

After this part I wondered, "What if time has multiple dimensions?" and I went to see if anyone had ever thought of that before. The answer is yes, but I still feel very clever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions #science

Mood.

Minor quibble perhaps, but in a book about women's lives and achievements, it seems a little weird not to mention that Gone with the Wind also won a Pulitzer. #WomensHistoryMonth

Idontknowwhatiexpected.gif

#WomensHistoryMonth #intersectionality #fail

Libby was hiding The Portable Dorothy Parker from me as "Selected Readings from..." As far as I can tell, the only one from the print version that's missing is "The Waltz", and you can get Tallulah Bankhead reading that one on YouTube (you're welcome, btw): https://youtu.be/WKR9GyrXELE

So I don't love it when books perpetuate the myth that when a woman has PIV sex the first time, it absolutely, 100%, nothing-you-can-do-about-it WILL hurt/bleed, but can you at least let me PRETEND the guy is just inexperienced himself and hasn't quite gotten the hang of foreplay? Don't have them talk about it after and ruin that excuse for me 😕

I am DYING. #WomensHistoryMonth #InternationalWomensDay

I'm having fun with this premise, and I like Johnnie Christmas's art, but I got to this page and was like, "why isn't this manga?"

Oh God, turn-of-the-century MGTOWs 😲

Margaret Sanger wasn't fucking around, y'all. #WomensHistoryMonth

Big mood

#WomensHistoryMonth #MarchTBR

Yes I'm reading myself children's books for #WomensHistoryMonth, and this is one badass Durga (art by Rebecca Guay)

Another half-finished, pre-review thing:
1) I haven't read her follow-up on the male brain but I can already tell you they should have been one book.
2) I recognize that books like this basically require generalizations, but it becomes glaring on the occasional instances she acknowledges a spectrum of behavior, or uses “likely“ or “probably“ in asserting causality.
3) Shrinks need to realize when they use patient anecdotes in their books…(cont'd)

I'm not quite done yet, so this isn't a review exactly, but I've decided that my problems with this book come down to this book's subtitle being inaccurate. “The Failed Promise of Gender Equality“ suggests an analysis of how the political/cultural gains of women in the '90s were rolled back/weakened over the next 15 years. But in actuality, a better subtitle would be “The Decade that Was Shittier for Women than You Remember“ #WomensHistoryMonth

Oh, the irony of taking a break from a book about misogyny to read a book about manhood 😉

I'm far from the DNF point with this book, but I don't love it either. So far, her analysis of '90s trends lacks adequate historical perspective (e.g. acting like the '90s invented the male gaze in advertising or predatory weight loss products). Plus, there's a good deal of contradiction/lack of nuance. First she'll praise empowered, sexually-assertive women, then basically call every woman who bought Victoria's Secret a dupe of the patriarchy.

Forty pages from the end of this 762-page book, and I finally see why this 1972 edition I have calls itself "prophetic", because it got the moon landing entirely wrong and nothing else in it is particularly prophetic of anything else.

Because today is literally a bonus day, I'm using it to finish books I put aside last year. You may remember I put down this book because, to borrow a phrase from Marge Simpson, "a book character was having difficulties".

But there's also a neat bit of #BlackHistoryMonth trivia attached to this book! When it was made into a movie, MLK Jr. was approached to play one of the Senators (and there were no black Senators IRL at the time)!

I'm CRYING 🤣😂🤣

(This book takes place in Berlin, FYI)

You will never convince me that Paul Beatty doesn't read Discworld.

This book, you guys. THIS. BOOK.

(I love Paul Robeson, and he deserved so much better than he got from this country. But he was a black man who was better at everything than everyone else in the pre-Civil Rights USA and a Communist through both Red Scares so it's just remarkable he even survived past 35, never mind past 70.) #BlackAuthors #BlackHistoryMonth

I got barely a page into this book and thought, "if it goes on like this, I may have a new favorite book." I am a goddamn sucker for book-long shitposts like this. As long as it doesn't have much of a plot, this is going to be fantastic. (Alternatively, it can have too many plots that come together seamlessly at the end like A Confederacy of Dunces or every Wodehouse novel, and that is ALSO my jam.) #BlackAuthors #BlackHistoryMonth

(The question being about why doesn't Congress just fix our broken immigration system)

These were 5th graders in 2013. I hope they vote in November. #racialjustice #BlackHistoryMonth

Cozy! If Mount TBR wasn't so high, I'd probably pick up the next one (and still might, down the line) but it's not an urgent need.

Curious about whatever discourse there probably is around a white guy writing about a Botswanan woman, though.

Seeing step machines in the gym always makes me think how this used to be forced labor in Victorian prisons. Now we pay for the privilege.