Came as close as I’ve come in a very long time tonight to just forgetting to post; I got home from work, took a nap more or less against my will and then ate some cereal and started putting my clothes back into the closet. It was only when my son stuck his head into our bedroom and announced that he was going to start getting ready for bed that I looked at my watch and realized what time it was.
I really, really hate daylight saving time. It doesn’t get dark in northern Indiana until after 9:00 even this late in the summer.
Anyway, having ensured my 888th day in a row of posting (no, really), I can go back now to … whatever the hell else I was going to do tonight. Or maybe just go to bed.
The right half is mine, since 95% of my clothes can be hung; the left half is my wife’s, who has more complex clothing needs. She is so excited about all the extra drawers, guys. Obviously we have a bit of trim work to do, that wasn’t covered by the scope of work with the closet people, and I think we might add some subtle lighting to the little gap between the top of the closet and the ceiling, but my week of all my clothes being on temporary racks in the living room is soon to come to a close. And doors! Doors that will close! Doors that will close, and hide my clothing from the outside word! Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay!
WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.
I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.
The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:
The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)
Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.
I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.
One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.
It was another long day— I’m still having a great time with this new group of kids, mind you, but seven classes in a row is gonna take a toll– and I want to play video games. So I’m just going to throw a quick book question at everyone and take the night off.
If you pick up Book Three of a trilogy, and it’s significantly shorter– like, a couple hundred pages shorter– than Book One and Book Two, do you feel like that’s a sign that the author has lost interest in the story? Asking because that actually happened today and my reaction upon seeing the book was “Dude, are you serious?”
You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.
I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?
Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.
Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.
I have spent today setting up spreadsheets, looking at IEPs, looking at 504 plans (not done with either of those tasks by a long shot,) setting up my Canvas classes, editing last year’s How My Class Works presentations, putting together an explainer so that new staff know how to sync grades between Canvas and PowerTeacher, redoing seating charts, planning out next week, and somehow, despite the fact that tomorrow will only be the third day of school, grading. I’m not even teaching until Wednesday, guys, and right now Tuesday in my plans is reserved entirely for physical tasks like “give everyone their workbooks and notes folders” and “name calculators,” which is a real thing all of my classes have to do. There is also a section that just says “Whatever else I forgot about.”
Mental note: I need cotton balls and alcohol to remove last year’s names from the calculators. I’m told that erases paint marker nicely. We shall see.
The overhead light still needs to go, and there are three really stubborn nails that I may just cut off instead of pulling, but we are basically ready for the new closet to go in at this point. This was way easier than either of us thought it was going to be.
Let’s see. I promised a real post today, after several days of brief whines about being tired, only … really, all I did today was clear out my closet. A little bit of shopping for my son’s birthday later in the week. And I put together my parent contact log for this year, which, damn it, I’m going to use, and I’m going to use it because I’m going to be better about contacting parents.
I’ve been saying this for 22 years and it hasn’t happened;I hate talking to parents. This will be the year, though, I swear. I also dug into discipline data from last year and it turns out that my current group of kids had considerably fewer office referrals than either of the other two grades last year, which was an interesting thing to find out. Tomorrow, in between– ahem– some bouts of demolition work, I need to do lesson planning, because it turns out I do actually have to teach this week. And so it goes.
That probably doesn’t count as a real post. I guess it’s good that this is my blog and it’s up to me. 🙂
