What To Expect Before You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

What to Expect Before You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I didn’t totally hate this, even with all the mealy-mouthed cutesy bullshit (I say this solemnly and with purpose: if any of you ever
catch me unironically using the phrase “baby dancing” instead of just saying sex, do us all a favor and insert bullet into brain post haste, please and thank you). I didn’t even hate her complete aversion to showing her work and, you know, citing like a fucking professional. I
didn’t even hate the entire 50 words she devoted to noticing that,
ohmygosh, there are people planning to get pregnant who aren’t
heterosexual, monogamous, and married! Or even how thirty of those fifty words were misleading as to law and facts. (They didn’t even get in the same zip code as my circumstances, let alone the same ballpark, but go figure.)



Really though. If you’re writing a book to educate people about
pre-conception health, and I come stumbling along, fresh and blinking
and largely uneducated from a life of avowed childfreedom with all my
childfree friends, and your book on pre-conception health only manages to teach me four things I didn’t already know? You’re doing it wrong.






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Reamde by Neal Stephenson

There, treewishes, are you happy now?

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


You can learn a lot from a Neal Stephenson book. He’s that kind of dude. World War II cryptographics, currency systems, network key encryption, pianos – at the end of one of his thousand pagers, I always know more than I did when I started.



From this book, I learned that Neal Stephenson would like a movie deal, please.



I kid, I kid. Mostly. This is, in fact, a ridiculously engaging transnational techno thriller (not specfic), with that Stephensonian touch for the hilarious, and a gentle, affectionate mockery for everyone from the hipster urban geeks to the ultra-religious survivalist types. The last two hundred pages is one long, tongue-in-cheek joke at the expense of a particular stripe of American conservative post-terror mindset, but it's not at all scathing. There’s a lot of mockery to go around, actually. It’s one of those books that’s a silly, improbable summer blockbuster by way of making fun of silly, improbable summer blockbusters, but it does it with so much zeal and fucking cheek, I just went sure, okay and rolled with it.



I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing you write to chill out. If you’re the sort of dude who writes a thousand pages to chill out. Which, let’s be honest, Stephenson clearly is. It’s a grand good time, and geeky, and gleeful. But it’s ultimately insubstantial. The sort of book that sustains itself while it’s happening (…and happening …and happening) but that starts to lose some vim on reflection.



It’s no Cryptonomicon, is what I’m saying. But it'd make a pretty good action flick.



Oh, and he still can’t stick a fucking ending. He knows he’s supposed to have one now, at least there’s that?





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