I saw the movie, liked it a lot, heard good things about the book and figured I might as well. I liked this one just fine. I don’t think it’s quite great enough to recommend, but most good fiction has some oh-yes-that’s-just-like-real-life moments and general snippets of good writing worth sharing. Surely everyone knows a [...]
Just like it says on the label. I’m going to say a few things about what I read more often. I’ll keep the longer book reviews for the ones I have a bit more to share from or say about.
1. Too Big to Fail. This a great, great book that offers a minute-to-minute, blow-by-blow account [...]
I felt pretty torn about this one. I’d been following Gretchen Rubin’s blog about the Happiness Project for a while and wondered what extra stuff would be in the book. I got it from the library, so I’m not sure that it matters as the only cost to me was time. Luckily she’s a really [...]
I like David Byrne, but I feel really ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, there are some great gems and little thought-bits that come out of a curious mind. On the other hand, as the title so clearly points out, it’s diaristic. There’s a good amount of day-to-day humdrum “this is what I [...]
I became impatient with the few Michael Chabon books I’ve tried, never finished one. And historically I have had little patience with memoir. So what do I do? I go pick up Michael Chabon’s new memoir, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. Good decision, it turns out.
On the [...]
This Sotsgorodok was a bare field knee-deep in snow, and for a start you’d be digging holes, knocking in fence posts, and stringing barbed wire around them to stop yourself from running away. After that—get building.
I knew I would love this book when I came across those lines, about five pages in. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes [...]
By now it should be clear that you’ll be most comfortable with my arguments if you fully accept yourself as a fitness-flaunting consumer narcissist who has been deluded, throughout your whole life, into irrational spending habits by advertising euphemisms and peer pressure. In other words, you’ll probably feel uneasy for much of the time you’re [...]
If you like love and/or music, I think you will like Love Is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. Rob Sheffield wrote the book after the unexpected death of his wife of five years, Reneee. He didn’t write it right away—the story came welling up again as he was moving to [...]
My homeboy Steve Reich won a Pulitzer. So did Atlanta author Douglas Blackmon, for his awesome book (judging by what I read when I borrowed it from Mom between holiday meals last winter), Slavery by Another Name. Need to move that one back on the list.
James Tanner’s Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace is a nice parody of the writer’s style. A little absurd but kind of spot-on. Amusing for a little while, just like it always is when you’re watching someone else work. But if you get a chance to read a bit of Wallace (granted, I’m no expert—I’ve [...]
I’ve just started reading the so-far excellent The Lost City of Z, about exploration in the Amazon jungle. The central character was a member of the Royal Geographic Society, and the author goes to the London headquarters to do some research…
In a corridor of the Royal Geographic Society’s building, I noticed on the wall a [...]
The first book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe that I read was the most excellent Democracy: The God That Failed. In the introduction to that book, Hoppe talks about competing social theories and, in face of conflicting arguments about society or politics or economics, how we can decide between them:
The data of history are logically compatible with… [...]
In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage.
American Nerd: The Story of My People covers a pretty good range of history and culture, tying together various forms of the outcast and how this one particular version [...]
You don’t know how to play better just because you’ve suffered. The blues don’t come from picking cotton.
I’ve never read anything quite like Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis. The book collects about four decades’ worth of his life, broken up across a couple dozen interviews that were published in small jazz [...]
Before 9/11, I don’t think I could have named one living person from Saudi Arabia. Afterward, I could name one. So I didn’t know much going into Steve Coll’s book.
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century starts near the turn of the century, with Awadh Bin Laden’s beginnings in Yemen. His sons [...]
Emmet Connolly collected a bunch of worthy quotes from reading Brian Eno’s book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I didn’t figure him to be so cantankerous. My two favorites:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction — imagining a time in the future when kids say to their [...]
I had been meaning to read Robert Higgs‚Äô book for years and I’m very glad I got to it. And I’ve been sitting on my review for a while because I always fear sounding like a shrill, libertarian paranoid.
Crisis & Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government explores the past century of American [...]
I had been meaning to read Robert Higgs’ book for years and I’m very glad I got to it. And I’ve been sitting on my review for a while because I always fear sounding like a shrill, libertarian paranoid.
Crisis & Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government explores the past century of American [...]
The New York Times has a rather negative review of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, Outliers.
Play creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.
That’s Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens.
How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken collects some of the criticism of Daniel Mendelsohn. Books, movies, theatre. Mendelsohn is a Classics scholar so his work is constantly making connections with the old Greek and Roman tragedies and epics.
I didn’t read all the essays because sometimes I just wasn’t familiar with [...]
There are a couple real standouts here, though this collection wasn’t as sharp as some of the others in the Best American series that I’ve read (Science 2007, Science & Nature 2007, Comics 2006). As is tradition, here are my picks:
The Loved Ones is the must-read of the bunch. Tom Junod’s awesome reporting starts with [...]
This year, Emory University’s Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature are delivered by Umberto Eco. I didn’t know much about him before, but he kind of blew my mind. This afternoon I stopped by to hear him talk about “How I Write”. I was *really* impressed with how much he plans out his worlds beforehand, even [...]
Spoiler: Katie Hafner’s book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, is one of the most enjoyable I’ve read this year, a really nice little page-turner.
Glenn Gould was one of the great pianists of the 20th century, known as much for his personal quirks as for his musicianship. Gould’s [...]
I picked up Super Spy at the Decatur Book Festival last month. I was talking with the guys at the Top Shelf Comics booth, asking them to steer me away from ennui and towards something a bit more exciting. This was their pick of the pile, on the genre fiction side of the spectrum. Matt [...]
Looks like a couple people already wrote the book I was thinking about creating: Appalachian Pages, a thru-hikers’ guide for the Appalachian Trail. The real winning idea here, the one that I wanted to see, was having the elevation profile watermarked on each page so you can sneak a peek at the day’s challenges in [...]
The latest MacArthur Fellows got their genius grants today. Among them is one of my favorite writers, Alex Ross.
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