Category: Books & Learning

This week I’m saying hello to a couple of new geeky things, and a sort of goodbye to some old favorites. First, I’m frustrated with Delicious Library, the beautiful Macintosh library tracking system. It’s been sort of ridiculous-forever since they released an update, and the software doesn’t do what I consider “basic” Mac things, like [...]

If you’re new to Shakespeare, don’t start here. I’ve read most of the comedies by now but this one was the hardest. It’s deeply vernacular and fully of contemporary wit. I read it almost entirely in the bath–that is, I only read it while I was soaking in the tub, so it took me a [...]

I came away feeling like I’d had a striking nightmare of cannibalistic tinge, but what an easy and engrossing read. Philbrick narrates the true tale of the Essex, a whaleship sunk by an angry sperm whale in 1820 (and spurred the core of the plot of Moby-Dick). If you like Melville, or want to know [...]

I read this novel, originally in German, for my book club, so I’ll refrain from criticism here. I will say, though, that I’m not fond of the translation–too many cliches and stilted statements.

Another day, another book. This one’s a surface-level survey of the madness of various rulers going back a couple of thousand years. You know, stuff about the thousands and thousands of people that kings and queens would have destroyed on a whim. How quaint! It strengthens my resolve that there were no “good old days”, [...]

Oh, good god, go buy this book and read it. I have long felt that McCarthy (of All the Pretty Horses fame) is one of the better writers of English currently alive, but his settings and subject matter (the desert southwest, Texas, the deep south–mostly period works set in the 19th or early 20th centuries, [...]

I recently finished Hesiod’s Theogony, written in Greece in the seventh or eighth century BC. It was only thirty pages long, but as it was akin to the bible’s endless “x begat y begat z” passages, it took some doing to get through. But it was far more lovely than the bible’s version, with mystical [...]

My sister bought a copy of this book for my dad this Christmas, despite my father’s recent leanings towards not reading so much. It looked interesting enough that I picked it up for myself a couple of days later on impulse. Great read! I have often railed that the melding of interesting history and a [...]

Finally. I’ve been dawdling through this book for nearly three weeks, while taking breaks and dallying with Shakespeare’s Sonnets and an annotated version of Thucydide’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Warriors of God is a history of the third crusade, roughly around 1189-1192, and centers on King Richard Coeur de Lion (Lionheart) of England and [...]