An Academic Affair (McAlister)

thistleingrey mentioned that it was a solid depiction of academia and characters in academia, which immediately piqued my interest. I have read Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and enjoyed it, and I know Hazelwood is in academia, but I sometimes thought... well, let's just say that it's a romance between a grad student and the young hotshot professor in her department, and... okay... that part... is totally realistic actually... but I feel like I kind of got stuck a lot in all my feelings about the potential deep pitfalls. Hypothesis was also, I think, much more concerned with primarily being a romance novel and secondarily a novel about academia.

Anyway, this is unabashedly a romance novel, complete with marriage-of-convenience and sometimes even the one-bed trope, but without any particular kinks like professor/student :P But the thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it's at least as interested in both the experiences of the precariat (*) and also familial relationships as it is in the romance itself. In fact, it does not have a conventional romantic Act 3; here the Act 3, as well as the understandable but frustrating misunderstandings that prolong it, is passed squarely on to the familial relationships rather than the romantic ones. Which I personally really like!

The two main characters, Jonah and Sadie, are adorably academics. (**) I laughed out loud when Jonah said, "I'm all for radically revised gender roles in the heteronormative institution of marriage, but I should still pay for my wife's engagement ring," if only because I've never heard anyone else talk that way in a romance novel -- though if you have, please rec it to me. (Their engagement is the aforementioned engagement-of-convenience and the ring is $27.99, I hasten to append, and she pays for his ring.) (lol, I think I actually paid for my engagement ring, because it was an important transaction involving me and an important piece of jewelry -- what?)

Anyway, I rarely like romance novels, but I liked this one!

(*) I did not know the term precariat: the precarious proletariat, that insecure class of unstable work and low wages -- but I was familiar at least by reputation with the academic pre-tenure-track life that the term describes, in the sense that it is one of the many reasons why I did not pursue academia

(**) Jonah likes using footnotes; I guess your mileage may vary but I found it adorable, perhaps inevitably

The Jewish War: Preface

This week: All right! As a preface to Josephus Book Club, I am just reading the preface this week and we will do a bigger chunk starting this next week (see below). The preface is just a few pages long (I'm reading up until what in Oxford is paragraph 30, "All of these contents are set forth in seven books... I shall now begin my narrative as indicated at the start of my summary.")

I'm sure you all will have deeper things to say than I do about this, but wow I am just amused by how Josephus just starts out pulling no punches about how annoying and inferior he thinks the other historians are. (The footnote to The historians of this war fall into two categories... hearsay... or distort the facts namechecks Justus, who featured prominently as a frenemy in Feuchtwanger's Josephus trilogy.) I do like his logic in saying, hey, if you want to make the Romans look good, why make the Jewish side look feeble? Also his logic in saying, hey, actually, it makes more sense to be writing contemporary accounts for which one has eyewitnesses, as opposed to writing about ancient history "as if the ancient historians had failed to give their own accounts sufficient finesse," lol. (Although I guess that is what academic historians do!)

Titus Caesar is also namechecked, lookin' good.

The footnotes also say that historiographical writers generally claimed impartiality, so Josephus talking about his personal feelings of sorrow here is atypical, which I thought was interesting.

In fact, looking over the whole sweep of history, I would say that the sufferings of the Jews have been greater than those of any other nation -- and no foreign power is to blame. Oooooof. I guess that's a good tagline to pique interest in the book, though...

(I'm really glad I read Feuchtwanger's Josephus books first to orient myself, though!)

Next week: We'll start Book 1! selenak advised that we read up to Herod the Great's killing his favorite wife. My Oxford edition has "verse"/paragraph numbers but not chapter numbers as selenak's has, but I think (selenak, please let me know if this is incorrect) in my edition the idea is to read up to paragraph 443/444: Maddened by unbridled jealousy, Herod ordered the immediate execution of them both. Remorse quickly followed rage: his anger subsided, and his love was rekindled. The heat of his desire for her was so intense that he could not believe she was dead...

WELL ALL RIGHT THEN. I can see we have lots of sensationalistic gossip ahead of us!