Reading
Reading
Sites to See
July 7th, 2011
Spin Me Right ’Round - (ProjectThirtyThree.com) Cheese With Occasional Bread - (GrilledCheeseSocial.com) Iron Thrones With Club Sauce - (ArrestedWesteros.tumblr.com) Read more »
Reading
Go Pub Yourself
This debut novel is far from rotten, but it feels half-baked
June 30th, 2011
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan write the celebrity-skewering website Go Fug Yourself, which regularly makes me snort aloud, especially when they transcribe imaginary conversations with Karl Lagerfeld (to Claudia Schiffer, while holding an oblong statuette: “You look like a frail wedding cake sneezed on by an eagle, and this dildo bores me. TANGO.”). Read more »
The Librarian Loves
Wench
June 30th, 2011
For an intriguing, eye-opening look at the cruelties and complexities of slave-era relationships between slave mistresses and their masters (and among the slave mistresses themselves), take a trip via Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ novel Wench (HarperCollins, 2010) to an Ohio resort that catered to these peculiar couples. Read more »
Reading
Sites to See
June 23rd, 2011
Reading By Neon (LVReviewOfBooks.wordpress.com)Most Strange Things (EMCarroll.com/comic)A Room Full Of Fred (FreddeGredde.com Read more »
Reading
Close-Up Observations
About Faraway Places Paul Theroux’s new book is a travelogue of travel writing
June 16th, 2011
Travel writing can be tedious in the wrong hands. Someone goes here or there, does this or that and tries to convince you to do the same. The focus of this type of writing is on the destination, when all good students of motivational-poster psychology know it’s the journey that really matters. It feels like a sales pitch. Read more »
The Librarian Loves
Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms
June 16th, 2011
Ralph Keyes’ Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown and Co., 2010) will delight anyone who loves words, their origins and the way that they reflect cultural intentions, subterfuges and biases. Read more »
Reading
Sites to See
June 9th, 2011
Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom (ShitMyStudentsWrite.tumblr.com)But How Does It Scan? (MovieBarcode.tumblr.com)Eat It (SoGoodBlog.com) Read more »
Book Review
The Man Who Stares at Himself
The Psychopath Test pretends to search for meaning
June 2nd, 2011
The amygdala is a region of most vertebrate brains that acts as a gatekeeper to memory, assigning priority to memories on the basis of emotional intensity, and in the process molding our emotional reflexes. Anyone who has been in combat or a car accident should get the idea. But psychopaths, who suffer from a total deficit of amygdalal activity and its attendant empathy, never acquire such searing long-term memories. As a result, we learn in the British journalist Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $26), they have trouble relishing their pleasurable experiences for a sustained period of time. Read more »
Librarian Loves
Not Buried Yet
21st novel in John Sandford’s Prey series is one of his strongest
May 26th, 2011
Buried Prey (Putnam Adult, $28) opens with the construction-site discovery of the bodies of two young girls, murdered 25 years earlier. Davenport was a rookie street cop then, eager to become a plainclothes detective. His instincts told him the schizophrenic homeless man charged with the crime was not the real perpetrator, but he had neither the experience nor the political leverage to make his case. Read more »
Bookini
Demetri Martin conquers a new medium
May 26th, 2011
If you don’t watch cable television, rarely frequent comedy clubs or have great difficulty accessing YouTube, I suppose it’s possible you have no idea who Demetri Martin is. If that’s the case, here’s the skinny: Demetri Martin is one very funny fellow. He’s a cerebral comedian, a Yale graduate who dropped out of law school a decade ago to put his agile mind to work making wisecracks. This Is a Book (Grand Central Publishing, $25), his deliciously loopy literary debut, is a collection of nearly 60 short pieces designed to make you snicker, snort, giggle and guffaw. Read more »
