I just finished The Shadow of the Wind after a full day of reading. Having already read the other two books in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series published so far, I had essentially worked backwards to finish with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s beginning story. At 487 pages it’s a long, glorious read, jam packed with plot, sub-plots and enough twists and turns to keep readers engrossed to the final page. The Shadow of the Wind introduces Daniel Sempere, the son of an antiquarian bookseller, growing […]
Job Hunting Is a Full-time Job and a Not Very Good One
I picked up Bait and Switch when my son was assigned Nickel and Dimed for a summer reading assignment. I wasn’t surprised by what Barbara Ehrenreich learned about white-collar unemployment in America, since I went through a stretch of long-term unemployment in 2011-2012. Even though this book was published way back in 2004, I think the costs, stresses and failures Ehrenreich encounters have only ramped up in intensity after 2009. As she did in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich dropped herself into the trenches and created […]
This was so bad. Like, so very, very bad. I can’t even describe how bad it was.
I’m not sure I can express how much I hated Beautiful You, but I’ll try. I normally take any Palahniuk story with a grain of salt and tongue firmly in cheek, but this was just a bridge too far. I hated all the characters, the entire premise wasn’t smart, funny, satirical or the least bit meta. Honestly, anyone who thinks this book is any of those things is a complete dolt. The really sad part is, I kept waiting for everything to turn around and […]
Women’s Rights From an Academic Perspective
I read From Outrage to Courage for an online course on International Women’s Health and Human Rights I took from Stanford University, which was led by the author, Anne Firth Murray. As a textbook, it was spot on in covering the main material of the course, as one would expect, but as a primer on women’s issues around the world, one could not ask for a better overview of the pressures, problems and political land mines that women face every day, around the world, from […]
File Under: Self Help, Business
Since my local library didn’t have Being Mortal yet, I picked up The Checklist Manifesto also by Atul Gawande, instead. It’s a short read, even shorter since I skimmed quite a few of the anecdotes regarding how to use checklists, but I did manage to pick up a few good tips for approaching projects and managing them more successfully. Gawande writes with an accessible style, which helps make what is essentially a one page outline worth pushing on through for 200+ pages. Gawande’s advice is straightforward […]
A Most Excellent Krimble for Books, and a Holiday Tweet from one of my fave artist/authors!
Opened my Cannonball Read gift today from the lovely Ashlie! Thank you so much! Your choices are excellent (love the buttons too!), and I guess I’m gonna have to sign up for CBR7 now. Also, I got a “Merry Chrimbo” tweet from Grayson Perry (@AlanMeasles) after I tweeted out that I also got his latest book today—a gift from Mr Smith. Smiling from ear to ear!