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A lousy buck is all that a short story collection goes for these days, I guess if your marketing strategy involves urinals in the cover art then you’re probably not going to get much more than a buck.  A bargain shopper like myself is happy to throw out a buck and see if there’s anything worth reading.

The book is billed as “ten short stories about being a guy”.  Most of them qualified as very readable, I can’t say that I’d call any of them masterpieces but yes readable.  There were two that rose to be what I would call memorable.  … Continue Reading

I attended my first town hall today in Nashua, Paul Hodes is running to be one of New Hampshire’s senators.  I don’t know how they got my name, I’m a registered Democrat and I contributed a small amount to the Obama campaign so it could have been from either of those sources.

It was a nice event, about fifty people turned up, the crowd skewed to the older side.  I decided to wear a shirt and tie and was pretty overdressed.  A couple of people asked if I worked for the campaign.  I sat in the back, which is … Continue Reading

This is the must read for anyone that’s worked in a restaurant.  Anthony Bourdain, also the host of the Travel Channel’s show No Reservations writes a tell all about the restaurant industry.  It’s not a tell in the style of an expose on what really happens to your food, it’s a tell all about the characters who tend to inhabit restaurant jobs and end up making careers of it.

I loved this book because it echoes truth.  I worked in restaurants for about ten years after high school and the cast of characters that make up the core crew … Continue Reading

This book is about disconnecting from the fast pace of life that has taken over in modern times and taking control of how you spend your time.  Carl Honore is a journalist by trade and he writes in a journalistic style which I found disconcerting until I’d almost read the whole book.  The problem with a journalistic style is that you write as if you are presenting a group of facts to shed light on a topic that the reader may be unaware of or misinformed about.  The trap that Honore keeps falling into is that … Continue Reading

According to the foreword in Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel, and it was terrible.  So he decided to use what he could of the carcass and mix it in with some autobiography and the result is Timequake.

The premise of the timequake is that for some reason the universe contracted and everyone went back 10 years in time.  What makes this a particularly devastating event is that everyone is conscious, but unable to change anything about the events that they travel through.

Honestly I don’t know how a novel like this could have ended up as anything less than spectacular, especially … Continue Reading

So this book is another loaner, this time from Doug Aldridge.  I guess the universe really wants me to be familiar with Einstein’s theory.  David Bodanis explores the science that led up to the famous equation and explores each of the pieces that make the whole and gives a great scientific history of what led up to Einstein’s discovery.

Energy is the first topic, the book goes over the story of Michael Faraday and how he discovered that energy is a universal phenomenon, how energy was discovered to be an immutable and unchangeable property, when you start a reaction … Continue Reading

Te of Piglet is Benjamin Hoff’s sequel addition to the Tao of Pooh.  Te is a concept of the virtue of the small and as in Tao of Pooh Hoff uses the stories of Pooh and his pals to show different Taoist concepts.  Te is about seeing how small things and small acts are just as important as the big acts, in fact the small and the large come from and define each other.

This book is one that I read years and years ago when a girlfriend had suggested the Tao of Pooh and last month I did a re-read.  … Continue Reading

I went into this book expecting to hate it.  No writer is more symbolic of the Oprahfication of our culture than Mitch Albom.  Oprahfication is the process of massaging your broken feelings with material goods and platitudes and the ultimate Oprahfied good is a book full of platitudes.  I decided to give this book a spin because it was free, and it was short.  I love low commitment levels when I’m trying something new.

Tuesdays with Morrie is the story of Mitch Albom visiting his old sociology professor as a grown up man and spending time with him as he dies … Continue Reading

David Sedaris wrote or at least published the essays in this book after he had become fairly famous.  Some of them are actually about his notoriety, one essay is the story of him telling his sister that one of his books will be made into a movie and her discomfort about having the family portrayed onscreen.

I love how well he handles the topic of his fame and fortune, he seems to take it in stride.  I like how people who become famous later in life seem to be a bit more fully baked than those that were shoved out into … Continue Reading

The Straight Dope was one of my favorite reasons to go to the laundromat when I lived in downtown Salt Lake City.  They carried the Straight Dope column and it was always exciting to learn something new and obscure.

Cecil Adams is the pseudonymous author, possibly a team of authors, that created a weekly column in the seventies.  People would write in and ask obscure questions and Cecil would find the answers.  Everything was in play from what happens if you carry a glass of water into space to why is there on channel one on television.

As you can see from … Continue Reading