some books are bad
I keep a list of what I read, which is nice because otherwise I never remember. The only problem is, I only note down books that I actually finish, which leaves a big hole in the record-keeping for those volumes which I find to be substandard. Now, a book has got to be pretty bad for me to abandon it: I read quickly, so it's not a huge investment to push through a tome of questionable quality in the hope that it might get better in the end. But some are just stinkers. For the record, I would like to note that Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream is one of these.
It's not just because I hate women (a sentiment engendered by this Hillary Clinton business) that I don't think that the primary response to the terror attacks of September 11th was that of anti-feminism. Faludi does. In fact, she can apparently think of nothing else, cherry-picking quotes from several years of newspaper articles published across the country to convey, for example, the idea that men reacted to 9/11 by reviving images of the frontier days. In one paragraph, natch. When you have to try that hard it's not really convincing. It's too bad, because I was really hoping to read a thoughtful account of the real national response to 9/11, which was of course to sacrifice a great deal of liberty in return for what has perceptively been called "security theater." Oh well. This book wasn't it. At least I only wasted fifteen minutes on it.