The Soap Box

 The Great Readathon of 2025 continues.  I got a little bogged down in March, but thanks to May's book being brief I've not only kept up with the 1-book-a-month schedule, I'm even a little ahead. I don't know whether it's fate or happy coincidence or good reviews and careful curation, but the books that have crossed my lap have been pretty fantastic. March: The Once and Future King by T.H. White .  For all of my fellow OG Disney nerds, the first part of this book was the inspiration for The Sword in the Stone.  The story is divided up into multiple books.  The first one is very childlike and whimsical and...annoying.  I didn't particularly care for it, but I trudged ahead anyway to please the ghost of my high school English Teacher.  I'm glad I did.  The second book started with what is frankly one of the top three most disturbing scenes I've ever read.  It was jarring.  And yet it was necessary.  The opening book takes place from a...

Due to some probably misguided effort to read some of the more influential books of our time, I found myself slogging through White Fragility  by Robin DiAngelo in March.  I struggled with this book for multiple reasons.   For starters, I already knew the premise prior to reading and had seen the real-life effects of this line of reasoning; it took some effort to read it with an open mind.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the main idea is that the U.S. (and any other western colonialized nation) is built upon white supremacy, which validates and prioritizes the experiences and perspectives of white people over those of other ethnic groups.  Because we exist in and benefit from this racist system (racism being the mix of political and social power and race), white people are inherently racist and are complicit in racism regardless of their actions, choices, or efforts to be anti-racist.  It is therefore incumbent on white people to rec...

Since 2020, I feel like every year we all collectively look at each other hopefully on January 1st and say, "Well, it's got to be better than last year, right?" So how's 2025 so far? I was going to write a whole diatribe with many bullet points about the things that are frustrating me (and they are legion), my take on current events, a treatise of my political positions, point out the inconsistencies and hypocrisy and hysteria all around and in general all the things that are threatening to kick-start another stress-driven shingles outbreak.  And then I remembered my Stoics. I'm not a Stoic by nature.  I am prone to anxiety and anger.  I get really stressed out about current events, from Biden's ghostwritten presidency to Trump's bullying foreign policy to preventable disease outbreaks to Doge uprooting the government to the perpetual hysteria over literally any statement or policy that comes from the current president.  I am greatly frustrated by things o...

I used to read a lot.  I was never pulling down 10 books a month but I considered myself pretty well read.  I still read a lot with the family.  While I love that, I decided to challenge myself and get back into reading for me again.   1 book down, at least 11 to go. I started off 2025 with a book a friend recommended a couple years ago-- The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  Frankly, everyone needs to read it.  It's one of the books of our era (one of the smut-free ones, anyway), and it makes up for the lack of darkly handsome and amoral fey lords by tackling some of the biggest social issues and consequences of our time. The book focuses on the sharply increasing fragility of the rising generations. I appreciate the authors' assertion that this fragility is not natural.  Humans, Lukianoff and Haidt assert, are actually anti-fragile; we are naturally resilient to trauma and stress.  However, we can be train...

Forget the wars and politics and AI that will kill us all.  It's time to talk about something actually important.  As you know unless you've been living under a rock, Hollywood has been having a moment "discovering" much beloved fan classics the last few years--Game of Thrones, Dune, Wheel of Time, the thousand Lord of the Rings projects...every other show seems to be a remake or adaptation of some beloved movie or book.  You'd think this would be an exciting time to be a nerd.   You'd be wrong. Now, I can't speak for all my fellow nerds, but I've been incredibly disappointed in just about all of them.  Expressing this has gotten me a lot of flack and accusations of being an unrealistic purist (among other things). That's not fair.  I'm not a purist; I understand how difficult it is to turn a book into a scene-by-scene remake, and why it just can't work a lot of the time. Some extraneous plot lines have to be eliminated, sometimes character...

I used to read voraciously. Over time, chaos and obligation have conspired against me so that when I do have time to sit, I'd rather scroll mindlessly through my phone and not think at all.  Every couple of years, though, circumstances align and I find myself in a flurry of reading.  That time has come, so I hit the library. One of the books I picked up is How to be an Anti-Racist , by Ibram X. Kendi.  It's not my usual, to be honest; I lean more toward fiction, and from various articles I'd perused over the years I already knew we disagreed on several major philosophical points.  However, he is one of the leading contemporary voices on race.  Jordan Peterson (another author I've binged lately) says that if you want to understand someone, you have to listen to them, and be able to describe their point of view to their satisfaction.  It naturally follows that if I want to understand Kendi and his acolytes, I need to go to the source material instead of skimm...