I picked this book up after fellow cannonballer Emmalita mentioned it as an example of my favorite genre: the failure narrative. I absolutely adore reading about fiascos and how they came to be, and my fellow pajiban steered me right in recommending it. The book is an interesting exploration of how the eponymous car came to be a national punchline. I know nothing about cars aside from what Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond tell me, and as I was in single digits during […]
As much of the former as the latter
Whoa buddy, is that title not false advertising. Jillian Keenan goes into great depths exploring her sexuality and spanking fetish through the prism of the bard’s plays, and matches the man in bawdy description. This includes a fairly graphic imagined sex scene with A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Helena. Somehow this dodges being pretentious or twee and skips straight to making the reader blush. Which is impressive, as imagined conversations with any fictional characters sounds oh-so-precious, but the cutesiness is undercut by discussing the various erotic […]
… but don’t stop too long there, Ferris
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did; I’m a sucker for pop culture writing. That said, it falls prey to two pitfalls I thoroughly dislike – nostalgia bias and the sense that the writer was looking for an excuse to write about her favorite movies rather than that she had anything novel to say about them. I knew what I was getting into to a certain extent with the first point; you don’t write a book on what 80s movies can […]
More Than Elementary
I was so taken with The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova’s book on not just why, but how we fall for deceptions, that I immediately added her earlier book – Mastermind – to my Amazon cart, not really caring what it was about. I wasn’t disappointed, exactly, but I doubt many books could live up to the expectations I had for this one based on my effusive review of her follow-up. Mastermind has a similar enough conceit to The Confidence Game, in that it does not […]
I’m missing something
I’ve often irritated my friends unintentionally by poking at them about things they like that I don’t. It’s often mistaken for an attempt to persuade them the things they like aren’t great, when in reality the reverse is true; I want to see the thing I’m missing in the work, to be persuaded of its greatness. If I can just talk it out enough, maybe I’ll see more “Hush” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and less “Beer Bad;” if we have a long enough discussion […]
I Fell For It
“All of us believe, intrinsically and instinctively. We just differ on where we draw the line between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate.’ One man’s confidence artist is another man’s spiritual leader.” To say I loved this book is an understatement, I may have brought it into being by sheer force of will, save for the fact that Anna Konnikova kept surprising me. It’s a good sign when a book arrives and you notice every cover blurb comes from a source you love; not only does Neil Gaiman […]