Books, snippet (snippet hidden, I promise)

Books:
I've been reading like a mad person lately.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman's Spirits that walk in shadows was great - it made me want to immediately pull out sketch books and draw; it also convinced me absolutely of the magical ability and collegiate confusion of her protagonists.

John Taylor Gatto's new book Weapons of Mass Instruction was interesting and engaging (especially for the biographical and historical snippets) but I thought the author's disdain for psychology (developmental and behavioral especially) was a bit heavy handed - his distaste for the people who helped create the systems he's describing blocked out some great research that could have supported his argument.  For one example, I was shocked that neither the Milgram experiment nor learned helplessness entered his narrative at all.  I don't know how persuasive this book would be to someone that didn't already think school was deliberately designed to hurt kids.  And I feel as if there's an incomplete or not fully coherent engagement with class and race in the story.  Of course, it is a personal essay rather than an academic or analytical book. 

I read Suzanne Brockmann's Dark of Night and Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife: Horizon.  Those are both the kind of book that I know going in I'm going to like (for different reasons and tastes, obviously) and so I rarely write about them - I don't tend to have an intellectualized response unless I force it to books by authors I already know I always like.

Some manga - I really really love Nana.  I suppose that puts me with umpteen thousands of others, right?

( Self indulgent wankage about own writing behind cut. )