If you are looking for a quick, bite sized book that will tell you all about Wonder Woman in big, broad strokes this....is not the book for you. Are you looking for an incredibly detailed, well researched, and interesting book that gives you the real long game about the creator of Wonder Woman, the huge influences on him who made Wonder Woman who she is and more? DING DING. Here is the book you are looking for!
So, the man who created Wonder Woman was....uh...a renaissance man of sorts. Yeah, that's it. He invented the detector! He got fired from almost all of his jobs! He was not classically handsome but must have had a pretty magnetic personality or something because the women in his life put up with A LOT. And yeah, that plural is indicative of lovers and wives...which he usually had one of each for many many years in a polyamorous scenario.
Have you heard the rumors about the reason that there are so many chains and cuffs and ropes and Wonder Woman being tied up is because her creator had some BDSM tendencies? That is not a complete untruth. Though lots of times it serves as a metaphor for women being shackled to traditional gender roles. (And by that I mean, it was 1932 if you were female you went to high school, you got married, you had kids, that's it. Any deviation from that path and you were getting eyebrows raised and people tittering about you. I would never have guessed that: birth control, the women's suffragette movement, and so many other things would have contributed to a comic book!
A thing that this book mentioned in passing that got me weirdly angry is that there were so many women who did work on comic books of the time that were given no credit for their work because they were women. And that's just all kinds of bullshit. Where's a book about the unsung women of the comic book world?!
This was picked for my work book club. I had heard a lot of buzz about it but couuuuuldn't actually have told you what it was about. True crime is not generally what I find myself reaching for as far as nonfiction is concerned, but it turned out to be a really interesting read.
The author went out of her way to tell you about the community where the story takes place. This is one of those books where the setting itself is a character, and if you didn't get a feel for the place the rest of the book wouldn't make as much sense.
There's a main couple in this story and I feel like everyone who has gone to a bar, or lives in a state that has a strong drinking culture - for better or for worse- (#DrinkWisconsinbly!) has seem a version of the main couple in the story. I think that was one thing that kinda of made me chuckle at this book. All of the people in this book were interesting, well thought out/fleshed out people. (I mean, it's nonfiction, these people are real but I feel like you got a whole person, not just a weird snapshot, 2D version)
Also, learned so so so so so much about how volunteer fire departments worked! I've never lived in a place that didn't have a city/municipal fire department so that was interesting to me as well.
This very well researched and through book read really fast and kept me hooked until the end, which is quite a feet considering you know who committed the crimes from about the first 10 pages onward!
So, I struggle with poetry. I want to like more of it. There's some that I really like. I like the Romantic poets, like Blake and Coleridge. I like some Tennyson. I can be down for some Shakespeare sonnets. (Though if I am reading Shakespeare it's Hamlet or Macbeth, let's be honest.)
I keep saying I'm trying to get more into TS Eliot because I like the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland.
But when I try to get into more of his poetry or, you know, literally any other poetry I feel like I don't know where to start. I know I probably can just jump in anywhere and that's fine (like there's no wrong way to read, we all know that) but I always feel like I'm starting at the wrong place. Apparently I need chapters and chronologicalness to make me confident in what I am doing bookwise.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Poets? Poems? Poetry for Dummies?
I will say, poetry that rhymes or is more lyrical in nature is the most appealing to me. I feel like that's my only parameters.
And because the internet is full of whatever you need at your fingertips I found one of my favorite pieces of poetry. I thought it was a Longfellow, and it kind of is, but it's actually "his" because he translated it into English.
