When people speak French, this is what I think of.

it's a lot less fantastic if you're one of the women in question. About the most interesting part of it, for me, was mapping the little fibs it's speckled with: for a memoir, it's remarkably untruthful on some of the details.

That's a pretty backhanded dismissal. If you're calling him sexist you ought to take the time to make the case. Also, it's listed as a novel.

In any event, it's very well written so I'm not sure what standard you're holding him to.

Basic feminist standard. In its -- okay -- memoiristic novel format, it doesn't have a chance to pass the Dykes to Watch Out For test, but, much of the point of it seems to be that women are merciful sex objects (or else they die, and that might be kind of a sex object too). Which, that's really tiresome, especially when you're the sex object.

I'm sure we could chalk a fair proportion of it up to his being a product of his time, but it still really tiresome.

I love this!

I AM A GENIUS OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL AND I WANT TO BE YOUR CLASS PRESIDENT.

Warner Brothers buys the option for the book proposal by Josh Lieb, one of the many brilliant Daily Show writers.

"The premise centers on a chubby 13-year old boy who everybody assumes is the dumbest kid in the seventh grade. He really is an evil genius and the third-richest person on the planet, with a secret compound beneath his unsuspecting family's modest suburban home. He hides his identity to keep himself safe from his enemies and because he can't legally claim his empire until he turns 18."

I remember reading an interview with M. Night Shyamalan where he was talking about where he got his ideas, and he came up with something along the lines of "There's a kid in the class, the dumb kid, but what if he really isn't dumb? What if he's really the smartest kid in the class? Why would he need to keep that a secret? And there's your movie."

I guess there really are no new ideas under the sun...

It's Dexter's Laboratory!

From way back, meara wondered if this book was interesting: NUNS: A HISTORY OF CONVENT LIFE 1450-1700, by Silvia Evangelisti.

I finally got around to starting to read it today, and I'd say it's a readable scholarly work but not a page-turner. If I didn't have such a huge stack of library books to try to get through or if it was a specific research interest of mine, I'd finish it, but I ended up just skimming.

IOReadingN, I hope I stumble across a good novel soon. I just finished two nonfiction books that were interesting but a bit sloggish--WELLINGTON IN INDIA, by Jac Weller, and AFTER THE ICE, by Stephen Mithen. So I'm ready for a good thinking woman's page-turner. In the past couple of days I've tried a fictional biography of a royal woman, but was thrown out of it by info-dumping and an overly modern voice within a few pages. I think I'm going to stop trying to read fictional royal bios, because I always have those exact problems with them, no matter the author. I guess for fans of the subgenre, the voice and infodumps are a feature rather than a bug. I also tried a very old traditional Regency romance (1977 copyright) that I saw recommended on a website, but the heroine was such an over-the-top Mary Sue that I gave up after two chapters. It was written in omniscient POV, and everywhere the heroine went fellow stagecoach passengers, servants who helped her, etc. were struck by how wonderful she was. She was unusually tall, slim but buxom, with striking eyes. She was an orphan, orphaned by Waterloo, no less, with an adventurous childhood as an army brat. She was a poor relation governess to her cousin's spoiled brat child but made him a model child within days. The hero was a good 15 years older than her, with prematurely steel-gray hair and slate-gray eyes, and he was all crusty and masterly until won over by her spunky good nature.

Hmm. I have a Bernard Cornwell waiting in my towering stack of library books. Maybe I should go for the reliable known quantity...

Did anyone else read Steve Martin's BORN STANDING UP? Really really well done. I can totally hear his voice as I was reading it, and it made me miss his standup routines something fierce. It's sad how he's totally turned into "generic family comedy" guy (for the most part). I had to buy ALL OF ME, ROXANNE and LA STORY to remind me how much I used to like him in movies (and need to also get some of the earlier seriously goofy stuff). There doesn't seem to be anything available of his standup on DVD, tragically; I may need to find his records somewhere (I know a couple got re-released on CD).

OMG. The Sweet Valley High series is coming back. Updated for today's audience, including shrinking the twins from size 6 to size 4: [link]

I gotta say, clothing sizes have changed enough from the 1980s that a perfect size 6 from 1983 probably IS a current perfect size 4, if not a perfect size 2. I am the same size in men's Levis that I wore in high school in the late 1980s, but have gone from a women's 10-sometimes-an-8 to a solid 6.