Books Potpourri Volume 1
Date: 2025-03-31
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman (1949) - Finished 3/19/25
I suspect most peoples' assumption when coming to a Neocities page of a lady whose primary interests seem to be like, anime, retro gaming and other sorts of nerd stuff is that I'm agnostic at least and an atheist at most.
I'm Episcopalian! And proudly, happily. I suppose I should be incredibly honest and say that I care much more about my personal faith and relationship with tHe LoRd than I do with the label of "Episcopal", but suffice it to say my wife and I are both very involved in our church. We've made some of our closest (also gay) friends through church and our church is a bright shining light in an otherwise dark world we're finding ourselves in so far through 2025.
I say all of that because I'm regularly enriching my spiritual life through reading these inspiring thinkers like Howard Thurman, and with Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman has written a genuine masterpiece of basically, "how can we live in this world which hates us?"
I'm as white as driven snow, and to be clear, Thurman's primary object here are black Americans, both of his time but also beyond and before his time. But as the forward of my edition says--as does Howard himself in the work--"the disinherited" are any of those who Christ calls us to welcome: immigrants, the poor and the misfit toys of the world.
When I'm reading a physical book I'm the sort of reader who will circle and make notes, and my copy of this text is just bursting with my thoughts.
In this book, Thurman has given me renewed energy to look inward and to look to my community in these dark times.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (2024) - Finished 3/12/25
Well, there's a blurb on the back of this book that describes it as readable, and I fully agree! This is a book that if you're a fan of Starcraft or WoW or Diablo or whatever--and you're in your late thirties like me--you'll probably enjoy flipping through the pages of.
I know I probably shouldn't, for about a billion reasons, but the god's honest truth is that some small part of my wishes I coulda' worked in one of these game companies in that wild west era of the early 90s. I watched this anime a couple years back about this gal who loves Ero Visual Novels who gets transported back in time to like 1994 and they all make a game, and the way the office is depicted in that--the basically-living-there, the close bonds, the working towards a goal in a field you're so passionate about? That honestly sounds awesome. Of course it obscures the complete lack of any other kind of social life, the low pay, etc etc but I think what appeals to me in that anime and in what's depicted in the early days of Blizzard in this book is how much they just loved doing it.
On the whole the book plays out like a hardbound, very detailed Wikipedia page. I'll leave it to you to decide whether I mean that in a good or bad way.
The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson (2024) - Finished on 3/25/25
I honestly couldn't put this one down! My wife and I have this joke that I'm a thirtysomething lesbian with old dad interests, and that's hard to disagree with. Amongst them is this fascination with the Civil War--well, with all history, really, but I do love me some Civil War. Impossible not to trace it back to a love of the Ken Burns doc, which regardless of your thoughts on Shelby Foote taking up like what, 80%+ of the talking head time, is just a really...soothing? compelling? sort of thing to watch.
I always love, when I finish reading nonfiction, to end up thinking, "wow, how did I not know that?" and I was filled with that kind of thing throughout this book. Demon of Unrest is an almost day-by-day walkthrough of the months leading up to the surrender of Fort Sumter and thus the beginning of the Civil War. We follow Capt. Anderson who commands the Union garrison at the Fort, we follow our guy Lincoln as he wins the election and gets inaugurated and we follow all sorts of other clowns and morons from the South--particularly in Charleston.
If you're remotely interested in this era of US history, or in Lincoln or in the Civil War or anything like that, you owe it to yourself to check this out
