Category: Books & Learning

I find that, though decorative, book jackets get in the way. They fall off. Or they get squashed or bent, which makes me all tense. Sometimes I do like to use a book jacket as an ersatz bookmark, but that’s its only functional purpose. Also, it gives me the clenches when the book I’m reading has a book jacket that is starting to migrate, get out of line, stick up above the edges of my book. So I remove them whilst reading. Am I just weird? How do you deal with book jackets?

Don’t worry: You won’t be bored. Thomas Mullen’s sophomore effort combines gee whiz action scenes with the historical pathos of 1930s Americana and deceptively straightforward characters in a novel that ends up feeling bigger than the sum of its parts. The story opens in 1934, the country at the pinnacle of its economic grief. The criminal brothers, Jason and Whit Fireson, have just died. They have woken up in a rural Indiana morgue, riddled with gunshots, with no memory of how they perished.

As an at least nominally educated human, I know this much about ocean tides: They happen about twice a day, get real exciting in places like Nova Scotia and Mt. St. Michel France, and that they have to do with the moon. You want a low one when going razor clamming. You want to get out of the way for high ones. In pursuit of my cyclical madness, I decided to learn a bit more about tides.

Nabokov’s second novel, written in the late 1920′s in Germany, traces the torpid and illusory throes of a love triangle pitting young, mawkish Franz against his rich and boisterous uncle Dreyer. Their joint target: Dreyer’s unattainable, beautiful and manipulative wife. The entire book feels like an extreme closeup, showing us the pores and pustules of humans and their delusions.

Blah, blah, blah, John Falstaff, what a laugh. Blah, blah, blah, the meaning of valor and honor. The prodigal brat son repairs his ways and leads the country to implied future greatness. These are all themes that seem a bit tired in our day, but Shakespeare probably played some role in putting them together in [...]

My Library Thing Early Reviewer book came yesterday afternoon from Random House: The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen. I only have four days to read it and review it if I want to beat its public release on Jan. 26th—and it’s already made an Amazon best-of list! Should I stop what I’m reading right now and try to gobble this up?

Like an automaton without reason, I try to work my way through most of the major annual book award winners as best I can. I follow the Booker Prize, Pulitzer and National Book Award. Others, too. But I’ve found that some—from my selfish perspective—are better than others. What do you think?

Tree stumps are as reliable for recording dates as they are physically sturdy: a year per ring, a simple way to count off the decades. So it must have been quite perplexing for early stump-scientists (so-called “dendrochronologists” in the modern parlance of the discipline) when they started tallying up the rings for the 19th century.

If you look at the stump of any hardwood in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, it will seem that 1816 never happened.

It’s time for Plato. I’m ready. I’m going to leap into the Greek philosophers. Gulp. But I don’t know where to start.

My goals are to get an understanding of the basis of much Western thought and theory, as well as finding a translation that doesn’t make me want to slit my wrists. Help me!

It is a strange thought to consider: what if, right now, it was simultaneously ten days ago in Alaska? Such that if you dispatched a postcard to Juneau, it would likely, in the eyes of the recipient, arrive from the future? Or, to ask an Englishman what happened on the 17th of September, 1752 only to have him respond—truthfully— that the day never happened? What began as a 16th-century Catholic exercise to fix a lagging Easter date became the nearly universally-adopted calendar system to this day.

Photo by counting chest bullets