Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Word Power
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
As Jon Carroll has noted, book reviews can spoil you in another way:
The review is so wonderful I am almost afraid to read the book; more than once, particularly with the New York Review of Books, I have preferred the gloss to the text.
I won't go that far about today's main story in Salon, but it taught me the words "orthopraxy" and "frangible," and third page just keeps hitting nails on the head, one after another:
...they will retreat behind the carapace of "faith," which is really their projection of how things should be -- their prejudice. And since there is prejudice enough on both sides, we have arrived at an age of really horrifying division: people shouting across a gorge and hearing only the echoes of their own voices....
And the ending makes me think marriage will be wonderful.
