Here’s another one I picked up from the bibliography of Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari’s book that I love so much I’ve stockpiled copies to give as gifts. I was about twelve pages in before I realized that even for a similar topic the writing and subject matter seemed too familiar; Coontz also wrote Marriage, a History, which I read recently and found the same way. Obviously this book covers much of the same ground, although with an emphasis on the family unit as opposed to […]
So, so close
How odd to read a book where a single, simple change would’ve improved it immensely. The premise – applying economic theory to commonplace mysteries – is an interesting one, but in the introduction Frank shows its Achilles heel even as he shows the reader how he could have avoided it. He discusses the mystery of Braille keypads on drive up ATMs, and posits that the manufacturer of keypad buttons would have to have made two sets of buttons depending on whether they were for drive […]
Anecdotes in search of a science
I think the author forgot his concept halfway through the book. That’s a pity, because I think I’d have liked the book the author was going to write. This felt an awful lot like a collection of interesting bits of data that the author attempted to will into a book, because the stated objection – to demonstrate via data mining sites like Facebook and Google that our public preferences don’t always align with our true beliefs – falls by the wayside midway through. It was […]
Don’t tell him I got it half price
Joel McHale is on the freebies list along with Bret McKenzie and Donald Glover; when he came to a local comedy festival I was 112% in, and was in no way disappointed. I liked him before, but after he made several consecutive pyramid scheme jokes with the local royalty behind Amway IN ATTENDANCE, I can say it blossomed into love. It was a thing of beauty; like the rake gag from The Simpsons it started funny, got tedious, then cycled back to hilarity again. I […]
Nope
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is in my top three favorite books and possibly occupies the top slot, but it took me a full hundred pages to get into it; I spent months trying to slog through the beginning of it and the last three quarters only took me days. For that reason I try to give Michael Chabon books more patience than I would others, but man did reading this feel like a chore. I may have referenced this in another review, but […]
If only there were some kind of adage to warn me
… but damn that’s a beautiful cover. I mean look at it. It’s so pretty. And that title! And it’s about comics and the nature of heroism with the loss of supernatural powers by someone who actually likes comics! (And writes them – I didn’t connect the dots that this is the same Tom King that wrote the truly excellent Vision for Marvel, but once I did it was really obvious, just as he uses Shakespeare as a through-line in that series, he uses Dante’s […]
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