Category: Books & Learning

For the first half of this book I thought it was pretty much the best thing ever. Now it ended and I’m in a bit of shell shock. I strongly believe that this novel would appeal to those in the Da Vinci Code set. It’s plot-driven and stretches one’s credulity until it kind of breaks. [...]

I had vague recollections of reading this when I was a kid, and vague recollections of everyone thinking it was really great. I tend not to be drawn in by the recent vogue of children’s books as novels for adults (i.e. I read the first Harry Potter book but nearly fell asleep), however I chose [...]

I took Willa Cather on my trip to Boston because I have found her calming to read and engaging as hell. O Pioneers! was even more fun than My Antonia. I was struck by how much plot there was, and the descriptions of the landscape made the plains states more tolerable as I drove through [...]

This is the only way I can bite off something about the origins of communism and portions of socialism. In comic-book format. This is the only way because my weakest subjects are economics and philosophy, and Marx is both. I grasp it generally now. A quick read and easy. From the late 1970′s, which shows [...]

Here’s a great book where the plot kind of got in the way. The protagonist was interesting, the premise was interesting, but the mystery-crime-double-cross storyline wasn’t what drove me through it. The wordplay around the main character’s Tourette’s Syndrome was pretty compelling. I like Lethem, I really do. I am just not a New York [...]

This Booker Prize-winning short novel was a whirling exercise in arcane vocabulary, beautifully written but with the occasional semantic stumbling block I stubbed myself upon so many times that I actually started keeping a list of words to look up. Here’s a sample of some of the gems (if you look at it that way) [...]

This book makes me realize:a) I make a terrible female, at least in this context;b) I need to work on my social skillsc) I’m glad I didn’t live in Regency England. I would have been bored and frustrated out of my skull.

What I was looking for was something to help me sleep on Sunday night, and what better than a 12th-century French epic chivalrous poem about a noble lord who gets killed in a battle? Yawn. What I got was something that shocked my sense of things, even though I knew the past was brutal. This [...]

I’ve been sick in bed for much of the week and in that time have finished three books (two novels and a nonfiction treat). I’ve put some notes about them on LibraryThing, but because of my aforementioned issues with Google Reader I have been unable to “share” all of them into the right-hand column that [...]

Just finished reading this. Put a review on LibraryThing, which I would make show up on the right side of my blog Web page in the feed slot (Stuff I’m Doing Elsewhere), but Google Reader is not seeing the update in my RSS feed, no matter how many times I hit refresh. Irritating.