So, here’s the deal. I was going to try and write a cogent, well-thought out review of exactly why I disliked this book so much, but it’s not working out that way. The more I sit here trying to think of things to say, the more my blood pressure skyrockets and I get more and more retroactively angry at the book. At first, I wanted to give this book two stars, because there are a couple of essays in here that felt valid to me, […]
A little slice of Savannah.
I’d been looking forward to reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil for quite some time. Ever since I read Capote’s In Cold Blood, I’ve been really interested in well-written true crime books, particularly ones written in the form of a non-fiction novel, a form that Capote pioneered. What I ended up getting was one but not really the other. This book isn’t really true-crime, although it has elements of that genre, and there is a murder at the heart of the narrative. But that’s not what […]
Taking the Romance out of the Victorian Era
I picked this book based on a recommendation from NPR’s Book Concierge for 2014., under the category For History Lovers. It’s a very long, very detailed book. I did some research on the author afterwards and learned that she did live the life of a Victorian for a BBC show called Victorian Farm. So when she talks about what it was like to wear period clothes and use a scythe, she had that experience for a year. The book discusses everything from the morning wash […]
Enlightenment, yogis, Apaches, oh my!
Is internal bliss at the expense of outward oblivion desirable? If we lived in a world reminiscent of that which Keanu Reaves faced in The Matrix, are we better off living in ignorance? And why does it seem that there is a fine line between religious fervor and religious fanaticism? Are they even mutually exclusive? these questions and more are tackled in A Death on Diamond Mountain, the story of several people’s search for enlightenment under the auspices of Tibetan Buddhism. Carney’s background as an […]
For The Love of Self (but not self-love)
I haven’t ever considered myself much of a collector. I had things I collected, but I’ve never been really obsessed with having or collecting (well, except once but I think that had more to do with sibling rivalry than anything else). And the idea of “collecting” things just to have them never really occurred to me as a possibility. And yet I still own books from when I was a very small child, and have spent a fair amount of time hunting down the Dragonflight and Harper […]
The Man behind the Discworld
I just learned Terry Pratchett died today. I’m trying to process that grief and it feels like I’ve lost an old friend. The world is a worse place without him there is no doubt. I wrote this review a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t posted it yet. Now is as good as time as any. Thank you, sir. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Not an autobiography, but still pretty close to it, A Slip of the Keyboard is a collection […]
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