Oh I LOVE that take on the story! I’ll think about it next time I read it :)

I don’t know how to do a spoiler alert! I keep seeing them but I don’t know how to do that… Then again, it’s the first paragraph. “whatever walked there, walked alone” certainly implies that whatever is haunting Hill House may seduce Eleanor to thinking she’s joining it but that she hasn’t at the end of it, that there are no trapped spirits and Hill House, there’s just the malevolence of the house itself. It actually makes for a much bleaker ending.

I’m so glad you found it! I read it in middle school first because Stephen King said it was the most frightening book ever written and I completely missed that Theo is bisexual/lesbian. I missed all the sexual stuff, all the tension. I reread it maybe every 10 years and each time I understand it differently – it’s like Turn of the Screw that way. 10 years ago when I read it I thought it was actually a horror novel, and she joins the house at the end, and then someone online pointed out to me that the beginning (and end) of the book actually points away from that… so I had to re-read it again, last month! And… It feels different again. There’s just so much subtlety to it, it’s one of those books that feels different every time you go to it.

I would second this! Going Postal was the first Pratchett book I read and I think it’s a fantastic one to start with, because you don’t need to know much of anything about the world and the plot fires on all cylinders all the way through.

I know the person who always recommends “guards guards” posted first here, but I find that one of the weakest books in the series for what it’s worth.

The thing is… It sort of depends what kind of books you like. I’m not crazy about murder mysteries, so the guards books don’t do much for me. I love satire and fantasy storytelling, so Carpe Jugulum and Lords and Ladies are faves. I love opera, so right now I’m re-reading Maskerade! If YA fantasy is your thing, the Tiffany Aching books are perfect.

For my money though his best book is small gods, which is an utterly humane satire of all human religion (and atheism). If you were going to read one, I’d say that one – but it’s very much a standalone and an introduction to his writing style more than it is a Discworld novel.

I’m about to shoot myself in the foot… Coffee table art books are sometimes designed to be laid out horizontally. (This also applies to large art folios if anyone has those.) They have sturdier bindings and covers with the assumption that they may be lying flat for long periods of time. The key here is not to stack too many of them because of their weight— the bottom one might deform. But two or three out where you can see them – they are meant to be displayed/stacked that way! :)

He is a hero! And it’s heartbreaking that this happened at all. But… if the cops hadn’t done that (temporarily arrested him) and it turned out that he was also a shooter, we would be condemning them for that too. He’s covered in blood, he’s holding a handgun, he’s screaming – if the cops had reacted badly that could’ve ended so much more terribly than just him being put in the squad car while the cops try to figure out what’s happening and who everybody is.

You should ask the library of Congress. They have a helpline where you can submit questions, and I bet they can get you an expert archivist in the history of books who can give you a much better answer than I ever could!

You do you! There is a reason that millions of librarians over hundreds of years have gone for vertical, but if you keep them clamped tight enough and somehow support them all every single time you want to take a book out, yes, I suppose you can store them spine up. Good luck with that!

If you’re storing it vertically slightly open, yes. But if you’re storing it vertically packed in with other books, with maybe a nice bookend to tuck it up tight, the boards are actually holding up the pages. Hold your phone between your hands, slight pressure on either side… you can see that takes the full weight with no extra “pull” exerted elsewhere.

Well that’s a can of worms – the hardcore feminists of the 1960s famously said that marriage is just prostitution with a ring!

Historians would say that it’s important to understand that companionate marriage (as we call it) is very much a 19th/20th century ideal. Most marriages have been transactional marriages, and many still are – there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, and it doesn’t preclude seeing marriage as a type of partnership as well. Looking at our presidents, we could say the Obamas appear to have a companionate marriage, the Trumps appear to have a transactional one ;)

Yes, and she’s absolutely right about that. May r I’m being completely unfair and criticizing the book she didn’t write, or the book I wish she’d written – I just wanted a little more nuance from her, and I don’t think it would’ve undermined her argument. I was also completely surprised to find out that the Ripper’s victims were not working prostitutes, and she’s done an amazing thing by recovering as much of their stories as she has.

As far as the media portraying them as prostitutes in a suggestion that ‘they deserved it’ – I kept thinking of the fact that the early tabloid photographer Weegee famously would carry a pair of women’s panties with him, and before he took a picture of a murder scene he would throw them down to make sure that they were in the foreground. Which is awful, but is to say that the media was trying to sell papers and the idea that prurient sex makes murder more interesting has its own disgusting history, naught to do with the truth, that intersects here– I know, she couldn’t write a book on everything!

Heavens forfend, no, please don’t do that. Take a hardcover and really look at it. You have two weightbearing stiff boards, a softer and more flexible non-weightbearing piece (the spine) joining them, usually paper that is simply glued in creating a cradle in there, and then the pages are attached to the spine/paper with glue. If you put it in the way I think you’re talking about, the weight of the pages is going to be pressing down on the flexible spine/glue. The only faster way to destroy it would be – before someone asks – to store it with its spine facing upward and the pages pointing down with the glue taking all their weight.

More simply: books are designed to be stored vertically with their spine facing out. That’s how they’re supposed to stand. They’re only made for that.

I expect this will get downvoted, but I’m a professional historian who works on this era. And there were a few things I really didn’t love about this book.

But first— she’s completely right about the sometimes disgusting and exploitative approach that much popular media has shown toward the ripper’s victims, and the media’s assumptions that they were all prostitutes (and that that only means one thing). She’s right about all of that, and I think it’s great that she’s giving histories to these women who too often have just been portrayed as victims.

BUT… two things…

Despite what she claims, we (current historians) don’t really talk about “prostitutes” as much as we talk about “transactional sex,” which exists on a spectrum. Even from her book it’s clear that some of the five participated in transactional sex. Certainly hooking up with a man for a few weeks or months in order to provide yourself with food and shelter, then moving in to the next man. is a type of transactional sex common in this period, and is often framed as a type of prostitution, although a more stable and safer one than working in the house of prostitution, which itself is more stable and safer than streetwalking. Exchanging shelter/food/clothing/protection for sex was seen sometimes as different from taking cash (as is true now) but all are forms of transactional sex.

I was also uncomfortable with how much she seemed to need to argue that these women were not prostitutes. So what if they were? It leads her to speculate beyond her evidence. In particular, where she was arguing that a woman was out at midnight because she was planning to pawn a hat to get some money seemed like a massive reach to me, those shops wouldn’t be open at that hour— but she can’t admit that there’s even a possibility that sex was involved, and that’s a weakness.

I wanted the book to just be more up-to-date with its approach to transactional sex. If some of these women did engage in transactional sex – and there were a lot of different ways that could’ve happened – and it was also clear from the book at a couple of them did at times – well, so what? It’s a chance to talk about the social structures that made it impossible for women to earn a decent living and any disposable income in the absence of a male provider— which she does at times to her credit!— but not as much as she could’ve. She’s so busy dodging the prostitution charge that she doesn’t talk about the role transactional sex plays in a society with those kinds of restrictions… And the ways that in turn is absolutely a benefit to men in such a society.

I also wanted a little more on why there’s this prurient aspect to the media approach to the ripper’s victims. Again, if one or more of them were prostitutes, so what? That not all of them were makes it clear that the ripper was an opportunistic killer of women, and the reasons these women were so vulnerable is what unites them – regardless of whether or not one or more of them engaged in transactional sex. Adding a sex twist to murder has always sold papers, and she had a golden opportunity to talk about how easily and cheaply that was done here.

I just wanted more. And I wanted her to feel to be a little less aggressive with her “they NEVER!” She hasn’t got proof for that. What she does have is the fascinating stories of five women who have been misused by history, and who offer an important counterweight to the too-often glamorized Victorian age.

I know people who game a lot and are perfectly functional people, physically healthy and with lots of friends in real life. I don’t think it’s an inevitable outcome to have depression or anxiety or weight gain, but especially when we’re talking about kids this young I think that the problem is that they aren’t going to all react identically. Some of them are going to be able to maintain mental & physical health, and life/school/game balance, just fine! Some won’t. The problem is that we don’t know who’s who when they’re 12.

24 hours of gaming a week seems like a lot that young. At that age I was still figuring out what kinds of things I wanted to do, but there was time to try music lessons or different sports. (That said, I probably spent 24 hours a week reading, easily… back in the 80s my teachers worried that that would make me fat and lacking in social skills and friends! ;)

The advice is that it will damage the bindings. How quickly it will damage the bindings will depend on the book, on how the binding is made, and on how much weight is on top of it. Books are designed to be stored vertically.

And in my experience, considering the size of most hardcovers, if you’re stacking them horizontally you’d have to have a pretty tall stack to actually save space over having them be vertical.

The teachers I know at the grammar school level have always referred to it (out of the kids’ hearing!) as No-friend-o because of the association they see between gaming heavily and lack of social skills/isolation. That said, the games have changed a lot and quickly over the years, and especially for kids who are playing team games and know each other in real life it can be just another social outlet.

Covid has left* so many* kids struggling with social skills. 12 is a tough age, too. Your son sounds like a great kid, with a lot of interests (nothing wrong with math and engineering! And I say that as a history teacher.)

The idea about games that includes storylines makes sense to me, and wouldn’t it be helpful if there were some detailed studies on what kinds of video games are most helpful to kids in improving specific skills? I don’t know if they’ve even bothered to do that.

A control!?! That would require more than sending out a questionnaire, of course they didn’t do that.

I’m not sure if there is an official time, most of the advice is not to do it at all. I rotate them once a month and so far (4 years) the books seem fine, but they are trade paperbacks and the bindings are flexible to start with.

It’s worth noting that this measured well-being only as self-reported mental health, clearly with a focus on whether anxiety or depression as linked to gaming. This didn’t look at the cost to these kids of spending the equivalent of a full day every week gaming in terms of impact on grades, social life off-line, lack of physical activity etc., or compare any of those things among kids who don’t game/game less.

No, please don’t do that. It can do real damage to the binding. Books are sort of practical machines for holding printed pages, and they are meant to be stored upright with the bottoms of the boards taking the pressure. If you store them on their sides the pressure gets transferred to the hinge, which is the most vulnerable part of the binding.

Not helping this is the fact that it encourages people to pull a book out from the bottom of the pile by using the edge of the binding, which never ends well.

If you do want to stack paperbacks, which I have done guiltily for space reasons, rotate them regularly so that the same books do not stay on the bottom, and when you do that carefully take the whole stack off the bookshelf, turn them vertical, and then re-shuffle, rather than trying to pull one book out from the bottom.

source: occasional librarian, daughter of a real librarian

The Anomaly is very much speculative fiction in the sense that it’s not about the anomaly itself, and it’s not science fiction in the sense that there will be a scientific explanation. It simply has something strange happen and then explores in detail how all the characters deal with it, which is a different way to approach storytelling.

If you’re interested in books like that, Jo Harkin’s Tell Me An Ending fits the bill— you’re contacted by a company, it turns out that you paid not only to have a memory erased, but to have r your memory of erasing the memory erased. Due to a lawsuit, they have to offer you the opportunity to get your memory back – but you can’t know what it is beforehand. Do you trust your past self? Or does not knowing what happened to you drive you so crazy you’re willing to re-traumatize yourself/destroy your marriage/whatever the consequences would be that your past self was trying to avoid? Then it follows the people involved as they struggle with the decision/consequences.

In more typical sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s Doors of Eden explores what would happen if we had parallel earths where evolution had taken a different path. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of – so… what would happen if squids became dominant and ruled earth? What would happen if rats did? Sounds crazy but it’s a really great book.

That is absolutely gorgeous! Thank you for linking to the recipe – I’m going to try to make that for Thanksgiving :)

This photo – obviously originally in black-and-white – was taken by Margaret Bourke-White showing African-Americans queuing up for support in the aftermath of the 1937 Ohio River Flood disaster. Life Magazine ran it as the cover image.

RIP! Some of the more traditionalist professors in my graduate school could not even hear his name without beginning to shake and froth at the mouth like Cujo. He wrote some of the smartest and occasionally funniest work I read in graduate school, even if I had to do it in secret. Thank you for stretching my mind in all the directions, Bruno!