A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
I once had a job writing deal copy for Groupon. My coworkers and I were given a seemingly endless queue of discounted offers for laser hair removal and Thai food and stand-up paddleboarding lessons and so on, forever and ever, world without end. Our assignment was to transform the details of the deals into ostensibly […]
The box office success of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey suggests there’s a market for stuff based on ancient epic poems about arduous journeys following the Trojan War. That’s great news for me because it so happens that every August I write something here at Indirect Objects about The Aeneid, an ancient Roman […]
Apparently, college students are no longer capable of reading books. I guess they watched too many TikTok videos or became too dependent on AI summaries, so now they’re morons. I read all about it in The Atlantic. A college professor I recently met more or less confirmed the declining literacy of today’s youth when I […]
Not long ago, I ran out of reading material during an out-of-town trip, so I dragged my husband, Frank, who was with me, inside the next bookstore we encountered. I asked him to pick out something for me, ‘cause I didn’t have access to my Books to Read lists and was therefore incapable of making […]
When I was growing up, my family had a World Book encyclopedia set. This print compendium of knowledge was arranged in alphabetical order across 22 volumes bound in red leather. At the time, encyclopedias were a common sight on living room bookshelves and in public libraries. The primary purpose of the books was to give […]
If the set dresser for the movie of my life had the gall to decorate the coffee table belonging to my celluloid self with the actual books actually sitting on my actual coffee table, I think I’d accuse the production’s art department of homophobia. The books are: The Essential Fan Guide to ‘The Golden Girls’ […]
I’ve been attending Pride parades since the early 2000s. That amounts to a quarter century’s worth of June Sundays spent standing around in the hot sun and squinting at go-go boys on floats. To tell you the truth, I have never exactly found the spectacle riveting. I don’t blame the LGBTQ+ community. Time and again […]
As far as I’m concerned, you can display your books however you like, provided you’re not one of those people who arranges books by color. I hate that. It’s disrespectful to the book and makes you look like the sort of superficial twit who quite literally judges a book by its cover. I’ve divided my […]
Last year I joined a gay book club. The selections are all by and/or about LGBTQ+ people (broadly defined), and the club’s members are all gay nerds (narrowly defined). We usually meet at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square on the last Wednesday of the month. Since I joined in fall 2023, every book […]
I recently read Lord of the Flies for the first time. I know, I know: You read it in ninth grade. Well, excuse me, but I attended an evangelical Christian school. We’re lucky I know my multiplication tables. I found the novel distressing, though I suppose I do agree with author William Golding’s pessimistic assessment […]
