I'm not entirely sure what I wanted out of this book, although I'm pretty sure I didn't get it. It was fine, I enjoyed it. I think my problem was that there were all these extremely interesting women in this book and we did not get to spend enough time with any of them because the focus was on the relationship with this guy. And, yes, it's a romance novel, the main characters should take stage, but it should also feel like I want them there rather than that all the interesting people are having conversations in the margins while the main characters pine.

Wait, didn't this come out today?
It's amazing what you can get done while stuck at home waiting for covid test results to come in. (And, God willing, in the future, we will have little recollection of these times)
Awwwwwww! I am such a sucker for gruff and damaged with a gooey center. (I'll take "descriptions of male leads that can also apply to a signature bake in GBBO" for 400.) 
I really want a descriptor that can define what makes a romance fluffy and what doesn't, especially given how many fluffy romance novels I read that involve murders (seriously, what is UP with that?) because there is a specific style/emotional response called from the reader that is true of some books but not others and I'm not sure if I can identify it.
I'll have to think about it. Dangerous marshmallows indeed.

Well, this was adorable. Exactly what it says on the tin. 
So one of the interesting things about Romance, as a genre, is the way it has a number of conventions that are not strictly part of the genre, but which constitute a violation of the contract between reader and author if not followed. Mystery is the only other genre I can think of that works this way. (There is no rule, for example, that if a magic system is introduced, it must be explained.) And, interestingly, both of those genres are caught up in questions of morality. 
One of the rules of the romance novel is that you don’t succeed by violating your principles, you succeed by standing up for your principles and then you will be gifted a new opportunity by doing so. 
Which means that every romance novel is also a moral argument that, at least to some degree, reflects the morality of the author and presumed audience. (Am I implicitly arguing that the continued success of tall, dark and assault-y is due, in part, because a subset of society finds that behavior excusable and morally acceptable under certain circumstances…apparently. Is that extremely beyond the scope of this book, which has no such character in it? Yep.)
So the moral arguments in this book about what is owed and what is acceptable “selling out” are super interesting and, especially coming off of listening to RENT over the weekend, different (but also familiar) than this musical that came out 20 years ago. Because it’s precisely a story about where the right to make money ends, comparing it to its inciting narrative of “You’ve Got Mail” raises questions of the role in generation shift and the immigrant experience in determining how we understand what we owe. 

This one was harder to get into than the previous one. I think perhaps the “less mystery, more keep running” was not entirely my thing and also I still really like the characters and the world building and just the general sense of the future that Palmer has created. 

There’s this niche subgenre that I think of as…emergence through futility set against the backdrop (and foreground) of a specific subculture. Skippy Dies is the paradigmatic example for me. 
This fits into that genre and I really enjoyed it but also feel very close to the material. The second I heard where the main characters were moving, I knew which…neighborhood was being referenced. Also, the world of orthodox high school students at a prestigious private school is not unknown to me. So it was less learning about and more…these guys
[yip, yip yip]
Which is a good sign. Perhaps also a sign of my age and the company I keep that, rather than yelling at the teenagers for their life choices, I was yelling at the educators. 
Anyway, I thought Hopen did an excellent job striking the balance between the delicate and the sledgehammer with his storytelling. And he’s not afraid to break things and withhold answers. 
The rabbis of the Pardes would be proud; I’m just not sure if it’s R. Akiva or Acher.

OBVIOUSLY Jane Eyre should be rewritten as a lesbian gothic romance. Just...obviously.  It works so incredibly well and it invites so many options to comment narratively on the original text.
This book is an exploration of female power(ful|less)ness and the ways in which a woman can lose herself and regain herself. It's about female anger and it's also—despite being set in the 19th century—a post-holocaust book in the way its Jewish characters think about death and revenge and what it means to live.
The book forces you to look at what Rochester did, in a way similar to what Jean Rhys did, but with a very different lens because it is also a contemporary romance novel and must play by the rules of the genre.
Which means it's also a book about two women falling in love.
———
Anyway, so about theories of romance novels. Friends and I were discussing the lack of fluffy wlw romance novels and...this is definitely not a fluffy story.
And it's not like being gay was a walk in the park when this story was set and it's not like there isn't a happy ending, but somehow...threats to gay men in historical novels are fundamentally systemic. They are in danger if someone finds out. They're rarely personal. There's never a person — parent or guardian or suitor or spouse — who has power as an individual to make their life a living hell. It's always the power of the state amorphous that is the threat. For women, the threat is always individual This man. This father. This fiance. Not to ruin, but to utterly control. Which means lesbian romance novels are somehow always about breaking control and that's not particularly...fluffy, I guess.
Anyway, taking recs of books I have not already read that are fluffy f/f romance, preferably not YA. And also I have to think about this more.

I'm honestly shocked it took me this long to end up reading female Christian theologians. (I've been on exvangelical tiktok for months now so IDK.) Anyway, Held Evans was wonderful, she never quite calls what she does second naïveté, but that gestures towards what's she's doing in returning to these stories as meaningful.
If you're Jewish and not a completionist, feel free to skip the Jesus stories in the last third of the book; if you're fascinated in comparative theology, feel free to read on.
(There's a really interesting comparison to be done between her Christian insistence on the need for a God who becomes human and the Jewish (well, from a Levinas perspective) emphasis that what is utterly extraordinary about the covenant is that we CAN be in relationship with a God who is other.)
The way she thinks about stories and faith, though, is both deeply based in midrash (arguably this books is what happens when a Christian writes midrash) and deeply speaks to me as a Jew obsessed with narrative. 

I am clearly not the right audience for this book.
Which, to be fair, irritates me because I don't...LIKE to think that I'm a pretentious little brat about historical accuracy. And I'm not.
Apparently I am a pretentious little brat about worldbuilding, though, and this book does not give a flying house about the logic of the world. It's a book that does not take very much seriously, which is not strictly a bad thing, except then it expects you to take the main characters and their concerns seriously. There's a lot of swashbuckling and thievery and assassin hire-ation and, again, not a bad thing, but no one in the book acts like it's remotely a problem or serious and then suddenly we're supposed to be concerned for the heroine? But why? Why have the rules suddenly changed?
Anyway, internal consistency people!

This was a fascinating book that I was probably too tired when I read most of it.
As usual, the specific claims about how to read the sugyot are the most interesting parts and the way that she approaches specifically "l'mafre'ah" was more interesting to me than the larger argument—which was interesting, and/but not what I was reading it for.

I wish I could write like Tolkien. Wish both in the sense that I think he is EXTRAORDINARY in his use of language and in the sense that, even if I could pull it off, I don't know if anyone would read it. The elevated style and the pull of the language just grabs me and listening to it is a joy.
Tolkien writes myths. He doesn't update myths to make them less mythlike and fill them out with more rounded characters - a thing I also love - he writes actual myths with archetypes and high language and grand deeds. They do the things that myths do and I need to spend more time thinking about what it is that myths DO to us as experiences. Tolkien is evoking a very specific experience (he's probably call it either eucatastrophe or the possibility of evangelium) in the way he stays in the mythic and only slides momentarily into the specific. The paragraphs where Earendil is on stage as a child are good examples. He turns up and is a kid in moments of grand foreknowledge.
Look, honestly, I just want to be able to start every tweet with "and it came to pass".
I love this world so much. Part of me is deeply excited for more media in it and the rest of my is waiting to be extremely disappointed.
Also, I just love the fact that the narrators are a father and son team and that the son takes JRRT's part because it's the ageless narrative voice while the captures the elderly Christopher Tolkien.