alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

I listened to the LA Theater Works recording of the "My Fair Lady" play. It was a delight, and hearing the audience's reactions was a nice addition. In an effort to expand my reading of the classics, I've been listening to a few plays every year. While I do not like reading plays, I really enjoy listening to them.

In this story, British sleuth Maisie Dobbs sets off to find a runaway heiress and ends up solving the mystery of why several well-to-do murdered women were found with a bird feather at the scene of the crimes.

I like the setting of these books—interwar England—but Maisie is so reserved and stoic that even her budding romantic relationships are dry. I'm not sure if I'll continue reading the series.

Lovely illustrations. The story is surreal and scenes fade together like in dreams. It's a good halloween read.

I always thought these comics were funny and clever when I saw them pop up in my social media streams. But when I read a bunch back-to-back I realized something that ruined them forever: this is everything I hate about Portuguese. I like the Portuguese language, but the stiff Latin structures and words make me feel like a robot, an alien, let us say. I spend much of my day trying to convince students to use words that are not cognates when they are speaking English, precisely so they do not sound like a Nathan W Pyle creation. People literally pay me to convert pages of text written exactly like this into readable English. After the halfway point, the more I thought about it, the more I detested the jokes.

They "lost the grace,"

as we say in Portuguese.

Potent.

THE CUTEST. My only regret is I didn't read this in October. It's a celebration of all things fall.

The first book I read by Tillie Walden was her memoir Spinning. Are You Listening has many of the same themes: disconnected families, coming out, coming of age, emotional isolation. It's beautiful, but a bit of a somber read.

I listened to the LA Theatre Works recording (I like hearing the audience). It was ok, a bit "stagey" but I guess it comes with the territory.

You might not realize if your pastor has signed your church on to the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and in so doing has affirmed the unorthodox belief of the eternal submission of the Son (ESS). The ESS says that Jesus is in a position of submission to God the Father, eternally, even after his ascension to the throne. The reason that ESS is important for the CBMW is to show that all women are to be submissive (/are inferior to?) to all men, "like Jesus is to God." As if the Bible doesn't have enough illustrations of authority and submission to choose from, Wayne Grudem et al needed to resurrect a heretical one. A lot of Baptist churches and pushers of the Gospel Coalition have subscribed to this belief, so go ask your pastor about it if you are in the target audience ;)

Aimee Byrd did a good job of tackling different angles of this issue and putting the debate in layperson's terms. Each chapter comes with discussion questions and there is lots of recapping, so it's clearly meant for chapter-a-week discussion groups.

The whole book relies heavily on quoted material, but at least she footnotes (unlike Mark Driscoll...ha). The one chapter where she does shine with original voice is in a thorough buttkicking of parachurch organizations. I have to say, I had never thought too much about why they are so prevalent in the US and why they are so *profitable* (financially, not in the christianese use of the word). Byrd's hypothesis--that women are unable to serve and be served in spiritually fulfilling ways in the Western evangelical church because of its obsession with American (non biblical) constructed gender roles, and thus women have to look outside the church in order to satisfy these needs--is a satisfying explanation. I would have liked to read an expanded version of this. I have a hunch that the rise of Christian influencer moms on instagram is closely related--very performative gender role confirmation, "tribes" of women not really connected to a church, etc.

Anyways, good book if you have a stake in this game, but probably not that good if you are not already a part of these circles.

PS unrelated to the book, I'm going to start unfollowing people who use the word tribe to mean friends. Gag