Book review: First Impressions by Sarah Price

The twenty-fifth book I read in 2017 was First Impressions: An Amish Tale of Pride and Prejudice by Sarah Price, and it's exactly as awful as you'd expect the unholy union of Austen fan-fic and Amish romances to be.  I have nothing to blame but my own morbid curiosity.

Spelling vanquished!

About six years ago, Faith started her spelling book.  There were three words to learn and one sentence to write: "See the moon."

Looking ahead to the end of the book from such humble beginnings, I quailed.  How would we two ever get to the point where she could write the last dictation in the book, including punctuation?

Well, as of today, she has finished her spelling book, including that meandering, clause-ridden, eight-line question from The Spectator, archaic "ere" and all.  It is a 1908 speller, handed down from a schoolteaching great-aunt, and from it the kids have written excerpts from Dickens and T. H. Huxley, letters to their children by Victor Hugo and William Makepeace Thackeray, poetry by Wordsworth and Longfellow, lists of "Largest Cities in United States" that are now mostly Rust Belt ghost towns and of American authors who are largely forgotten today, and many words that are uncommon now but if they run across them in old books, they'll know them.  (Did you know what a quire is?  We do now. Win at Scrabble!)

Book review: "When You Were Gentiles" by Cavan W. Concannon

The twenty-fourth book I read in 2017 was "When You Were Gentiles": Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence by Cavan W. Concannon.  This book began as a dissertation, and it reads like it. The academic prose is heavy and repetitive, with extra padding: first Concannon tells you what he's going to tell you, then he tells you, then he tells you what he just told you.

The jargon might be worth hacking one's way through if there were anything interesting on offer beneath the verbiage, but all this sound and fury, at base, comes down to speculation.  The recipients of the epistles may have been this or that; they may have practiced some or another occupation; they may have had picnics in graveyards.  There's no facts at bottom, no documentation, only some snapshots from the author's vacation in Greece.  The one thing Concannon seems to be sure of, based on his repeated pledges of allegiance to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, is that the Corinthians definitely disagreed with Paul and that the apostle's white (oops) male interference in their community was unwelcome and officious.

Hammock!

Best delayed-gratification Christmas gift ever.