what is going down?

Sam and I had a chat this morning regarding Angels and Ages, as she wanted to know what I find so fascinating about this book and why it is that I usually burn through books, but I am savoring this one. I think it makes me miss being in school. I have learned some pretty cool things: that embalming humans was developed during the civil war to get bodies back to their families without being grotesquely decomposed.

For the last year or so I have been reading all the fiction books I never had time for. I have been exploring genres like sci-fi and vampyres. I really dug the Joe Pitt series that Charlie Huston wrote. Made me think of quotation marks and vampyres in a whole new way. Another blogger had the good fortune of interviewing Huston, you can read that interview here. Huston does not designate speech from his characters with more anything more than a - dash, leaving the reader to interpret who is speaking... totally awesome!

Again, the Jim Butcher Dresden Files books were kick ass. There is a pile of fiction waiting for me to read on the table at home, but for now, here are a few passages that are resonating with me today.

Part of Shakespeare's genius lies in his ability to create characters who intend no harm and end up covered with blood. And so Shakespeare suits liberal violence, with its corrupted currents, admirable ambition, and casual slaughters-and what makes Lincoln and Truman admirable, if not heroic, is that they knew that.

People thought that natural selection might prove that Britain was powerful because nature intended it to be, as they thought that Einstein's relativity might imply that anything goes at a party. (In fact, the point of natural selection is that Nature doesn't play favorites, just the odds, just as Einstein's relativity is special because there's something in it that isn't relative, the speed of light, which is absolute. It would make more sense for us to become sun worshippers in the light of Einstein than moral free-for-allers.) - Adam Gopnik Angels and Ages