Last week I listened to this episode of Insights at the Edge (transcript also available at the link) where the guest was Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Rabbi Rami was a congregational rabbi for twenty years, and now teaches on being a holy rascal and what he calls "perennial wisdom." Tami, the host, asked him about moving away from Judaism. He describes ( Read more... )

I read either 40 or 44 books in 2016, depending on whether you count unique books read or instances of reading a book. Of those, a little more than half (23) are things I read for the first time. (Methodology note: this only considers books finished; I left out the one I gave up on halfway through.)

Top 5 books/series I read for the first time in ( Read more... )

Stories For MeI got three stories for Yuletide! They are all on the theme of women after they give up on their mother's dreams for them, which is not surprising based on my requests, but still interesting. Also, when it became reveal time, I recognized two of these authors from other fandoms. I recommend them if you're familiar with the fandoms ( Read more... )

Best of the YearHere are the five best books I read last year, alphabetical by author's last name, with first lines. I'm cheating again by including two separate series as one book each, and by including a series whose first book made this list last year. (And which will probably make the 2013 list again if the third book is as good as the first ( Read more... )

I've never watched Generation Kill, but I have read a lot of GK fic, largely because lakeeffectgirl started writing it. (This sometimes causes confusion when I run into GK gifsets on Tumblr; none of them look the way I imagine them in my head.) This is a four-story rec set because I couldn't find the fifth story I was going to rec.

we should do it again (Brad/ ( Read more... )

Jerry/Kramer is my Seinfeld OTP. It's possible that's entirely because of the episode where Kramer gets a job. Some kind YouTube user has excerpted only the Kramer's job bits from the episode, and I'm inclined to think Jerry/Kramer was also the writers' OTP for this episode. The video is not embeddable, but you can watch it here.

I loved Justina Chen Headley's Girl Overboard, so I put Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) on my PaperBackSwap wishlist, and sat down and read it in one sitting last week ( Read more... )

Uh, yeah. I don't really know how I stumbled upon these, but I like them. Like the last set of kink recs, these are long on porn and short on plot.

Strive to Overwhelm (2523 words) by
( Read more... )

If you don't know what knotting is, fanlore has a good overview. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting stories to tell about alpha/beta/omega worlds, but I'm not in it for those stories. I'm totally in it for the porn. Overstimulation/people taking it beyond what they think they can is one of my top five kinks to read, and knotting totally plays ( Read more... )

When I returned Happier at Home to the library, I skimmed the shelf for its call number and picked up The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul - A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire by Noelle Oxenhandler. I love these kinds of one-year books, and the author bio on the back flap let me know she's a practicing Buddhist, which also appealed to me ( Read more... )