Caffeine Free Since 2005
I’m so tired lately. A lot of people have been saying they’re tired. It’s hard to get up every day and read about what horrible new thing has made “normal” move another step towards “intolerable”. We’re all frogs in the pot at the moment, aren’t we? (Cue Bruce Cockburn: The Trouble With Normal Is It […]
I just realized I never did a books post for 2014! Ah well, better late than never. Goodreads did this nice summary for me (click through the graphic for a full-size version which links to all the books), which shows that apparently I gave lots of books 4 stars and didn’t give any books only […]
I just got back home after being on the road for three weeks. I was in Jordan in the Syrian refugee camps, the United Nations, I was signing books in Norway and in Sweden and in Spain. And I got home, and waiting for me was the board copy of “Chu’s Day,” which they’d just […]
Books! According to Goodreads, on which I track the majority of what I read, I read 114 books (give or take) in 2013. This year I diverted more time into reading magazines, since the TPL started carrying e-versions of such, and I also spent a chunk of time doing time-consuming things with my hands such […]
Around April last year I thought it might be interesting to join one of the more interest-based forums out there since it’s a mode that’s really taking off. The cooking ones are scary and the craft ones are even more scary-intimidating so I picked Goodreads. Books, I can do. If you’d asked me how many […]
At dinner the other night a number of people were surprised to hear of the absurd phenomenon of digital (and DRM’d to boot) books being more expensive than print versions — not just paperbacks, but hardcovers. So here’s one example. This looks like an interesting book. A bunch of folks I know on Goodreads have […]
So, yes, I caved in and asked for a Kindle for my belated birthday. Before this I read the first Book of Thrones volume on D’s Kindle, to see if I liked it: hell yes. I can hold this little thing in one hand and flip pages with a slight touch of a finger, vs. […]
While I love them, physical books have a few practical issues for me at the moment. One, it’s trivially out of my way to pick them up at the library. It’s only a few blocks but it has to be either on my way to work (unlikely, since the library doesn’t open until 9, and […]
M: I have a new book for school — Anne of Green Gables. Me: Oh, that’s a good one. I like that book. M: That girl talks way too much. She’s like [friend’s name] when she’s tired, all talk talk talk talk talk talk blah blah blah. Me: Well, hon, you have been known to […]
I had the feeling I wasn’t actually reading much nonfiction lately, but looking at the piles on my floor and the history of my library borrowings that isn’t actually true. I didn’t read any nonfiction in the first few months of this year since I was working really insane hours to do 36 projects at […]
A while ago I was chatting with someone about books and bookstores and all that sort of thing and the question was asked: so, what do I read? I answered rather stupidly — “um, not bestsellers” or somesuch — but it did remind me that I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting about books, […]
Drive: A road trip through our complicated affair with the automobile by Tim Falconer Falconer talks about the history of automobiles, Detroit then and now, car culture, the quirks of traffic, urban sprawl, and much more, all structured around a long road trip of his own. Somehow he manages to treat all the various viewpoints […]
These are great words! It would be a shame to lose them, even if they are obscure. Abstergent: Cleansing Agrestic: Rural Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration Caducity: Perishableness Caliginosity: Dimness Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else Embrangle: To confuse Exuviate: To shed Fatidical: Prophetic Fubsy: Squat Griseous: Somewhat grey Malison: A curse […]
7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs. — from Richard Wilson’s 10 books not to read before you die, a list extracted from his […]
Mighty Girl’s blog post Eight Books That Changed Things For Me got me thinking. Thinking, really, less about what books have changed things for me than whether it was far too embarrassing to publish such a list. So many of them are shallow and rather silly. But what the hey. In rough chronological order: 1. […]
I just listened to the unabridged audiobook of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic, and how it changed cities, science and the modern world. It is the summer of 1854. Cholera has seized London with unprecedented intensity. A metropolis of more than 2 million people, London is just emerging […]
LIT 101 CLASS IN THREE LINES OR LESS. 1984 WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats. They’re all pretty good — I’ll only quote the one, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost are also excellent.
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/challenge-5-mother) I cheerfully tossed Andrea Buchanan’s Mother shock : loving every (other) minute of it and (perhaps less cheerfully) Susan Wicklund’s This common secret : my journey as an abortion doctor on my library hold list, intending to review one or the other. Neither of them has yet turned up, but coincidentally the library coughed […]
(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/challenge-4-beauty/) Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery by Alex Kuczynski The initial tone of this book is wildly uncritical — she skims quickly past the notions that half the American population isn’t comfortable with their looks and are subjected to a constant barrage of images of surgically-sculpted perfection and gets right […]