In a bit of "wow, sometimes the timing is just really good" news, I discovered a couple of months ago that the house I had lived in for 25 years caught fire in the fall, and while no one was hurt and there was no real fire damage, there was TONS of smoke and water damage, so no one was living there and it was undergoing unreal amounts of repair/renovation.
Kinda glad I moved out on my own the year before that happened, me!
I finally read Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that had been on my vague list for several years. It was fascinating, not just for the background on Wilder but for the general history of it all, and especially the way it followed her entire life. Which, I know, biography, duh, but I read the books as a child in the early 70s and then watched the tv show not much later, and they were about Totally Olden Times and a generation long, long gone - but turns out not actually so much, really. Wilder died just a few years before I was born, during my oldest brother's actual lifetime. That is somehow a lot closer in time than my brain had ever parsed us as being before this. The early parts of her biography still felt like forever ago, but then it was also about things my parents lived through and talked about. It was weirdly hard to wrap my head around Half-Pint having electricity and a phone, but even more weirdly, it made it easier to grok the fictionalized-history aspect of the books. (Which Fraser addresses throughout, and it's clear that on some level Wilder was basically all about truthiness, which is just sort of mind-breaking. Stories were true even if they didn't really happen, or happened to different people in different ways, because they felt true emotionally.)
Anyway. The book is really interesting and I highly recommend it, although not if you're not prepared to see some serious feet of clay on Wilder about certain things, even though the biography is thoroughly sympathetic to her. The more personalized look at the history overall struck a ton of chords in me, with modern parallels that are just frustrating and fascinating. This has been sticking in my head a lot more than I expected it to. I don't want to turn this into a book report, but yeah. Highly recommend.
But! A week or two back, someone in the comments on a totally different topic linked to a different "collection" of posts by Devereaux, This. Isn't. Sparta., talking about all the ways pop culture gets Sparta wrong, particularly as seen through the lens of the movie 300. I started reading on a whim, figuring I'd see what the first few paragraphs were like, and then just didn't stop reading. It's engaging and well-written and interesting, and I wish he'd been writing the blog for five years instead of just one so I'd have more of an archive to catch up on. Good, good stuff. Also highly recommended!
Randomly: My decades-old degree in English has paid off once again, in that I was idly doing Washington Post crosswords the other night and as soon as I saw that I'd filled in "ode-n------a--" realized it had to be Ode on a Grecian (x), because of a paper I wrote 30-odd years ago.
The daffodils are blooming (see icon), but then the other day out on a walk with the dog it randomly started to hail very intensely. Ah, April.
Both dorinda and rosaw asked what I've been reading lately, so it seemed like a good one to tackle next. I've gotten weirdly out of the habit of reading novels in the past few years, but started picking up nonfiction. Sloooowly, though; and huh, I just realized it's because I have a mental block against getting too involved in anything in case I need to drop everything and Go Do The Thing (whatever the thing may be). That is an incredibly useful thing to know, so yay for this question!
Anyway. Novels/fiction may finally be working their way back into the mix, as I settled in a few days ago with Anne of Green Gables (♥) on the theory that I could really use something gentle and charming to sink into in the midst of this political miasma - and wow, good call, I felt much better afterward. I have oodles of fiction on my to-read list, so am looking forward to getting back into that. I got Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others for Christmas, after loving The Arrival, so that will be up soon.
But other than that, it really has largely been nonfic for a good while now. I am still reading Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton - I was going great guns with it but put it aside and haven't gone back to it yet. I will, though. It really is that good. (And then up: Chernow's Washington. Good writer, Ron Chernow!)
I'm also reading (about 3/4 done with) And Then I Thought I Was a Fish by Peter Welch. I got there via a metafilter post about something else this guy posted to his website, and in the comments someone linked to his essays recording his psychotic break. I went to read them (still online for free here) and got so sucked in that when I hit the point where he posted a link to the $2.99 kindle version, I had to buy it.
I'm ALSO reading (well, listening to - it's good highway listening) Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance. She does the Audible narration herself, which is sort of fabulous. I just kind of want to follow her around like a puppy, really. She is amazing.
As for stuff I've finished more-or-less recently (past couple of years):
I'd been hearing about 1491 and the sequel, 1493, off and on for years, and finally pushed 1491 to the top of my list to see if the hype was really justified. It was; I have to force myself not to shove copies in people's hands and tell them to read them. I knew I'd been taught mostly incorrect history, and had picked up bits and pieces of better information as I could, but these laid things out as a cohesive whole I'd never seen before. It was one of those worldview-shifting experiences for me.
A whole bunch of epidemic/disease-related books, of which my favorites were:
And finally to lighten things up a bit, two books by Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess). Both draw heavily but not exclusively on her blog, and her writing just cracks me the hell up.
... and now I've written this list up and am suddenly re-interpreting the request to be "talk about the actual content of things you're reading", but it's nearly midnight and that will have to be another night. *g*
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