thank you so much for this. I was born in 1989 and haven't ever really found a way to understand what happened.

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco! I picked it up at a used book store on a whim one day last February, the day he died. I had no idea until the clerk asked if I was buying it in memoriam.

(This was in Berlin, btw. The bookstore had a small refrigerator behind the register and you could buy a beer and retreat to one of the store's leather couches and read. Good job, Germany.)

The plot is all numerology and the Knights Templar and 1980s computing and memories of northern Italy in WWII and it's sometimes hard to follow (UNDERSTATEMENT) but gosh I just love it. Deliciously-named Italian academics can passionately expound on occultism at me for as long as they want.

I haven't read The Name of the Rose yet and I cannot wait.

Oh this made me pine so so very much for the summer off-campus Shakespeare club I was a part of after my undergraduate years. We would drink wine and make pasta and read a play aloud, switching characters every scene. This was while I was at music conservatory, so the inherent nerdiness was high but the love was real and fervent. Got through 3/4 of the canon before everyone went to grad school or got a job or moved away. I miss it immensely.

Hi! I am a lurker.. despite being squarely a Millenial I've had a long aversion to joining/participating in online communities. And even more so, despite the fact that I've read the Toast since its inception and reading the comments has become a regular part of my online habits and all are wonderful. Absurd. Time to plunge, dive in.

I'm American living in Germany, and I've found so very helpful getting my news from the daily BBC Newshour podcast. It blocks out the absurdity and satiates the inner news-junkie while retaining the most important bits. I'm still a relatively recent expat and thus very much in the honeymoon stage of global citizenship, but gosh it is refreshing and to really put US shizzat in context with what is happening in the rest of the world.