Commentary and review

I never intended for this to become a book review blog, but I tend to write about what I do, and in the winter, I read.  Well, I also complain about the cold and contrive to find ways to avoid taking my clothes off and/or going outside, but those things don't make for compelling content.  So it's books for now.

*****

Books and current events, actually.  Right now, half a million women, give or take, are marching on Washington, just a few miles away from the couch where I sit with my laptop.  I sympathize with their cause, mostly, but the organizers of the march made clear that they don't want pro-life women anywhere near their protest, so I didn't go.  Just as well.  My son had a swim meet today, so I held a clipboard instead of a sign.  Now I'm back home and about to return to my book: Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede.

Every so often, I'll hear someone mention a book that I've never heard of, and I'll be curious about it.  Then someone else, in a completely different context, will mention the same book, and I'll think about how odd that is, that twice in a day or so, I'm hearing two different people praise the same relatively obscure book.  When I then see or hear a third mention of that same book, I consider critical mass to have been reached, and I immediately buy the book.

*****

Total non sequitur alert: I just watched Sean Spicer's first press room briefing.  That was the type of performance for which the phrase "I can't even" was invented. No words.

*****

OK, maybe a few words.  Was it completely unexpected that the Trump administration's very first concern was not how to reunite this very divided country, nor how to create jobs for the working-class voters who supported the new President, nor how to defeat ISIS or address any of the myriad threats to national security?  Was it any surprise that on their very first full day in the White House, the Trump administration's very first message to the country was a petty, whining little complaint about the media's supposed misrepresentation of the allegedly huge crowds at yesterday's Inaugural events? Does Donald Trump ever do anything other than cry like a big orange baby?

*****
Anyway.  Back to This House of Brede.  It is, appropriately for today, a book about a group of women; specifically, Benedictine nuns in post-war England. The protagonist is a successful Oxford-educated professional woman who at age 40 or so abandons her high position in a government agency and joins the Benedictines as a novice.  Although the action, such as it is, all occurs inside a quiet and isolated religious cloister, it's still page-turningly gripping.  Like all great novels, Brede creates a completely self-contained world like no other, but still completely recognizable.  I recommend it.

*****

Because I like to suffer, and Lent is still months away, I decided to take an online HTML class. It's still too soon.  I graduated in 2014, but I find that I'm still all full up with book learning and can't do with any more just now, so no more HTML class.  I'll just wing it.  That approach usually works really well.

*****

Books, politics, and incompetent coding.  If you were looking for sharply focused thought neatly distilled in spare and concise prose, then you came to the wrong place. Live and learn.