This is the second book in this series and I'm now grateful that it took me so long to get around to the first because now I get to read the second right away.
Now I just want the third. There's a third, right?
It turns out I like space opera and milSF when it focuses on the characters and solving mysteries. And where the plot revolves around complexities of military battles and taking sides rather than a very stark "we good, them bad, kill!" approach, which bugs me.

I am so glad these books came out in English because they are difficult enough in my first language. Which is not to say that they're hard to read. Merely dense. And tough to speed through since every section feels like it's worth taking time to digest.
But it's an excellent resource for making the rabbinic figures feel both like coherent ideological figures and deeply human people.

Rating this feels weird, somehow.
R. Lau's books remain awesome (also, h/t to Ilana Kurshan for an excellent translation) as an introduction to the people of these books.
This is the first book where my sense of Lau as a literary writer reading character into the events of the narrative truly comes clear. His approach is fascinating and useful and now I want to go back through the book and note down all the sources I want to follow up on to learn more. Most particularly, I want to know what we actually know from a historical perspective and where we are speculating.

I can't believe we're four books in and we've only just finished talking about the mishna!
When's the next book coming out, I want to hear R. Lau's take on Rava and Abaye.
And other statements I didn't expect to be writing about a literary history of the Talmud. Still, this series has dramatically enriched my learning and I highly recommend it.

As with most academics books, you will either appreciate the plethora of examples or not. THe individual chapters, each of which feels like an exemplary shiur in its own right, start to blend together the way that mathematics worksheets do if you do too many at once, but the principles behind the scholarly deduction do become clearer with repetition.
I particularly liked the mini/appendix chapters, especially the ones on magic.
This book expanded my to-read list and there really is no better compliment than that.

This was, for obvious reasons, my Sunday reading.
Slavitt's translation is brilliant because he actually does the alphabetical acrostic in English and it doesn't look like a child's second grade assignment.
The focus on finding the right word messes with the sentence structure just enough to defamiliarize and makes me focus on the content of the words. Because Slavitt so often begins with an adjective or adverb to get the acrostic right, each verse is emotionally colored in a way that draws attention not to the object, but to the experience.
The other thing that marked this translation for me was Slavitt's obvious discomfort with a God whose behavior is justified and so he often translates statements that, in Hebrew, are ambiguous in their tone, as obvious questions in English. How can God allow this to happen? Can this be justice rather than this is justice.
It's a valuable interpretive move and intersects interestingly with R. Ruti Regan's Eicha live tweets.
The meditations at the beginning were not precisely new to me, but Slavitt's use of history as poetry (which, as they say, does not repeat itself but does rhyme) was also a kind of defamiliarization with the historical events that Eicha and the kinot commemorate. It seems strange to consider that the authors of these texts didn't always think about a world where their tragedies were unknown and required context. Slavitt's meditations, with their careful citations and their open-ended questions, provide the context for the day.

Recommended to me as an excellent literature review on the state of academic Talmud study, which is totally was.
The rest was also fascinating and I'm enjoying this chance to shift the way I think about what's going on in the sugya.

When inspiration fails to motivate, spite is a heck of a motivator.
But of course, they thought of that too.
Although I would argue the deep drive to prove oneself an intellectual equal and capable of achieving knowledge in the realm of Torah is less spite than a fury at being denied the ideal religious relationship with God. (And if you don’t think it’s the ideal, stop acting that way.)
This review is clearly less about the book than it is about me. But what else would you expect from an orthodox woman who learns Torah full time?
Fascinating, helpful, mindbendingly frustrating and proof that while I know which Chabad rabbis are which, I will never be able to keep the Teitelbaums straight - I’m glad I read this piece of my own history.

This was, in so many ways, more like a series of references than a coherent narrative or claim and I didn’t care in the slightest. It was delightful.

That was definitely a book I read.
A lot of it was not really within my area of interest, but Fishbane and Stern were both extremely helpful and the overview, as a whole, was good. Not an introductory work, but that’s not it’s fault.