Steven > Recent Status Updates

This previous chapter was the best one yet. "He's dying for you." I'm intentionally taking a long time to read this book, because I don't want it to end. This is the first work of fiction that I've read in a long, long time that has bled into my thoughts outside of my reading time.

This author is very informative, but unfortunately the information presented in this book mostly focuses on criticisms opposing Albert and Lucy Parson's ideology rather than the ideology itself. Surely, if this author can recite in minute detail the criticisms surrounding the Parsons' violent rhetoric, then she could also stand to outline anarchist ideology in detail rather than simply spewing historical data

Books like these remind me just how much we don't learn about in American history class. The Guilded Age was one of the most consequential periods of time in our nation's history, and yet we learn virtually nothing about it. Nobody outside of socialist/anarchist circles knows about the Haymarket Affair or why it happened. It might get a passing mention in a textbook, but it rarely ever receives more than that.

This book is a bio of Lucy Parsons, who was an influential American anarchist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was a former slave who married a white man, and she refused to publicly comment on her private life or origins. The first section of this book is about her life in Texas, which was an especially brutal place to be living during and after the Civil War. We can see the pervasive racism even today

Okay I'm almost at the end, and this author has managed to thoroughly annoy me. She barely spends any time at all naming notable feminists or successful women, except in one section that I just read. Who do you think she mentions? Is it Emma Goldman? Is it Sojourner Truth? Is it Harriet Tubman?

No. She writes a short sentence on Serena Williams. And then she spends a paragraph on Taylor fucking Swift.

This author keeps saying the word "hierarchy," but it remains unclear as to what she would actually like to do about socioeconomic hierarchy in the first place. I think it's obvious that she would like to eliminate it, particularly in the case of gender, which I agree with. But thus far, she has provided no solutions to the fundamental problem, and keeps dancing around it.

I actually liked the first portion of this book and I think most of the author's points about male supremacy are correct. However, I'm starting to get worried that she's not going to correctly identify the object of negation which will fix supremacy altogether. She can't seem to make up her mind about whether gender or hierarchy is the real problem. The answer is that hierarchy is the problem, not gender itself

The saga of terrible people continues. Interestingly I feel sympathy for most of them even though none of them deserve it, because they all got themselves into their own messes

All of these people are horrible people lol, although I can't say I particularly blame Heathcliff for acting badly because everyone is so racist towards him

I still have so many questions. Why the hell does Mr. Earnshaw take Heathcliff home in the first place? Why is Lockwood renting at Thrushcross Grange? Why does Heathcliff hate his daughter-in-law so much? Why is everyone so racist? How did the Earnshaws and the Lintons end up in the Moors, or are they from there originally?

My main questions about why the narrator is even renting this property on the Moors in the first place still haven't been answered. I'm guessing that this narrator basically just serves as a plot device to reveal the backstory of the family that owns the estate, but maybe I'm wrong.

I can already tell that I'm going to adore this book. Emily Bronte's command over language is very impressive, and it seems to me that the gothic setting is a direct reflection of her depressing and hopeless Victorian upbringing in the Yorkshire Moors. How fun!

I am actually really enjoying this so far, but I'm going to put this on pause, because I am going to read Wuthering Heights instead. I was trying to choose between the two when I started my annual dive into classic fiction, and although Tolstoy is very accessible, this book is very long, and might be better for the fall/winter time (in Tsarist Russia, snow no fall on you, you fall on snow)

The novel to end all novels! Or maybe that's War and Peace. They're both Tolstoy though, so that's saying something