We'll see what sort of thoughts I have. So far I'm enjoying it, reading six or seven chapters a week.



What period do you feel you most need to learn about?

I love my World War II history, but I knew barely anything about the Civil War. All I knew before starting this was that the north won, Lincoln was president, there were dudes named Grant and Lee, some people disagreed about slavery, and more Americans died than in any other war in the country's history. Getting the details and meeting all the participants is like reading a tense novel for me. I don't know how any of the individual battles or efforts worked out, nevermind the overall strategies, decisions, and reasoning behind the whole affair.



I read X-Men comics as a kid, but grew out of them in my teens. Now I'm going back to read all of them from scratch for historical/mythological/completionist/curiosity-fulfilling purposes. They ain't no Sandman, but I'm interested for reasons other than literary merit.

Any review I tried to do of the X-Men movies would degenerate into me calling X3 filthy, degrading names. The first movie isn't really based on any of the comics. The second is based on a one-off specialty comic that wasn't part of the main series. The third movie was (loosely) based on the Dark Phoenix sequence in the main series, and I say loosely because only the rough basics filtered through and even though the comics were made in the 1970s they make the movie look like the pile of utter ~restrains self~