(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
Category: Books
Neil Gaiman on Douglas Adams
From an introduction to a biography: After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas. I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist,
Book a Month Challenge #3: Craft
I thought I’d read about the craft of writing for this month’s challenge. Quotation of the Day for March 19, 2008 “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as
The book
Thursday evening I excavate M’s backpack and pull out two Magic Tree House books which she has chosen to bring home from the school library. Stories! We’ve had week after
Book a Month Challenge – Heart
The February challenge was to read and review a book about “heart”. I intended to flake out with a fluffy and enjoyable romance but Telling Tales: Living the Effects of
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
By David Rakoff Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a series of Rakoff’s essays on the simultaneous pleasantness and embarrassing excess of modern American life — as it says on the
29* things to be happy about
If Mark Morford can come up with 29 things to be happy about, I imagine I can too. Central heating and a non-leaky roof. I’ve spent enough time living in
Book a Month Challenge – Time
(I’m a bit late with this review, but I plead work-related travel.) The January challenge was to read & review a book on the theme of time. I rather randomly
Book: Rule the Web
by Mark Frauenfelder At TPL At Amazon.ca
Book meme
From Try Harder  1. Hardcover or paperback, and why? Paperback. It’s too hard to hold hardbacks in one hand. Plus, they hurt if you fall asleep and drop them on
Where’s my jetpack?
Wide-eyed children of the eighties watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard
Outside
I always end up reading Outside magazine on airplanes. I compulsively buy it in airports. Is it just because airport newsstands have a terrible selection, forcing me to choose between
Animal, vegetable, miracle
Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. It’s a simple premise for an experiment: what does it look like
Doodles!
Yesterday I bought myself this book, which is 400 pages of doodly goodness: The concept is that there’s a little something on each page and an idea (“draw the people
Book #31 – Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
By Mary Roach Surgery practice. The Body Farm. Embalming practice. Crash tests. Transplants. Food. It’s not the most appetizing collection of eventual ends to which one’s body could be put,
Book #30 – Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women
By Susan Fox Rogers, ed. Once, on a canoe trip that turned out to be more vigorous than some of the trippers were prepared for, when we finally got to
Book #29 – Virtual Clearcut : Or, The Way Things Are in My Hometown
By Brian Fawcett Brian Fawcett co-taught some required course or other that I took in grad school. There was a lot of reading — maybe two books a week —
Book #28: Mirror Mirror
By Gregory Maguire After some reflection, I’m not sold on Maguire’s stuff (Wicked is his biggest success). I don’t mind some darkness in my fairy tales, but do they have
Book #27: Biscuit Finds a Friend
By Alyssa Satin Capucilli (Author), Pat Schories (Illustrator) D fell asleep on the couch this afternoon. M wanted to make everything all perfect for him, so she went down and
Book #26: MapArt Metropolitan Toronto Pocket Atlas
I’m crazy tired and not up to books with actual words and plots and characters and things, so today I think I’ll stick to pretty pictures. This is a great