I'm not sure I understand what you are meaning by "nature."

I don't think this line of thinking is particularly valid though. Or even logical or scientific.

Sorry that I'm so late, feel free to ignore.

Well how do you distinguish degrees of misogyny then? What words should we use? It seems ridiculous and counter-productive to pretend that all levels of something are the same. A person so crazed with hatred that they were torture another human being is different than a person who will passively allow them to…

But how do you define "sexual maturity"? Puberty is a process and it doesn't strike someone like a lightening bolt. Even if you accept "sexual maturity" as the end of childhood, it still begs the question of what that means. Especially now with puberty happening earlier and earlier (I mean, a 10-year old with a…

But don't questions of degree matter? I mean "warm" and "scalding" don't mean the same thing and there's a reason why we distinguish them. Cultures and people who have an active hatred of women exist and they don't function the same way as cultures that are "only" sexist. If you're going to address cultural sexism,…

I liked Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn too. Read it a bunch. It's a perfect, classic, sword and sorcery novel. I learned to have a lot more respect for Tad Williams, after dealing with how ridiculously self-indulgent successful fantasy authors can get (see e.g. the Wheel of Time).

You don't think there's any value in reassessing the things you've loved in the past? I reread books that I enjoy. It's been really interesting to me to look back at the entertainment I loved as a kid/teen and see which things hold up to adult-me and which things just make me cringe (or just leave me uninterested).

I don't understand why thoroughly discussing the misogyny in book is a "lazy" way to review a book. Personally, if I think the philosophy behind a novel is disgusting or stupid, it's going to effect my appreciation and enjoyment of the novel as well as how I view the author, all of which is relevant to the novel. If…

That reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How exactly do you know what your "genes" are telling you? Appealing to nature can justify anything because "nature" encompasses the totality of human and animal behavior. I mean, if a step-dad smothered his wife's kids, we wouldn't all say, "Oh, well his genes…

Really late in replying but Nine Stories and the Glass Family are my favorite things ever.  I delayed reading them for years because I thought that Catcher was only okay and I allowed myself to be prejudiced by what I "knew" about Salinger.  What a surprise and a joy, I'm only sorry that I didn't get to them sooner.  

The thing is too that the actual Salem victims were older people and the "superstitious mob" were power-mad teenage girls, who figured out that they could get lots of attention and power by accusing people of witchcraft. 

@eric827:disqus , I think arguing over Woody's relationship with her actually isn't very useful because we can't know.  But I would say that, as his son explained, she was definitely his son's sister.  And choosing, out of all the women in the whole wide world, to pick your son's sister to be his step-mother, is gross…

Actually, he took the name after he made it big.  His original name was Gaius Octavian.  He named himself "Caesar" to make it clear that he was Julius Caesar's heir, and "Augustus" because it sounded regal without making him use the forbidden term "king."

The Roman Senate was already pretty useless pre-Augustus, he just spared everyone messy civil wars between various powerful generals and imposed benevolent dictatorship.

So happy to see someone else who's read Barry Hughart's books.  I loved them to death, it always made me sad that he never wrote more.  And I totally love to be able to see his world on screen.  And it's always refreshing to read a fantasy novel that's not set in Celtic/Nordic-world.

Statistically, it probably is an American library, but I'm not sure why that would matter.

It probably takes longer to unpack the best tv episode ever than to explain why a bad show had a bad episode.

I've got to say that I'm surprised that anyone likes Faile.  For me, she symbolized everything I came to hate about his female characters.  They all basically became her, and she was a horrible, unpleasant person.

Thank you for that.  I do admit that I hopped on wikipedia to find out how it all ended, but I gave up trying to read it several books back.