Books, Secretary of State Clinton?

First off, thanks to Darius for the book blog recommendations! I've already checked out a couple of them and I can't wait to take a look at the rest.

If anyone else would like to tip me off to a great book blog or any site involving literature, feel free!

I just finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn's collection of critical essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. I have to say I really enjoyed it. Mendelsohn is a classicist, so many of the reviews either dealt directly with works that touched on the classical world (such as revivals of Medea, Oedipus Rex, or Aristophane's Frogs) or reflected on them in some way. I've studied the Classical world at the college level, but Mendelsohn's enthusiasm in these essays somehow makes it all come alive more than my Professor ever did.

Mendelsohn, who is gay, also has a section of reviews dealing with The Closet, which includes insightful essays on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, and the movie Brokeback Mountain, among others, and a section on War that included an incredible essay on Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and the misrepresentation and re-interpretation of it and of the war itself by modern war hawks like Donald Kagan and Victor Hanson.

I really enjoyed the collection a lot and it's worth checking out.

I just bought a couple of new books the other day. I'm really excited for the upcoming Gus Van Sant movie Milk, so I picked up the biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts. I've also always meant to read Shilts' definitive work about the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On, so I bought that as well. I'm not sure which I'll end up reading first.

On an unrelated note, The Guardian is reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton has accepted President-elect Obama's offer to become Secretary of State! As far as I know, it hadn't been officially confirmed by either party that the offer had even been made in the first place, but the Guardian is usually a very reliable source.

I think Senator Clinton would be an excellent choice to be Secretary of State, so I'm hoping that this turns out to be true.