I’ve previously recommended The Oil Drum blog as a resource for all things energy-related, but it also directed me to one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time, Mark Helprin’s 2006 Freddy and Fredericka. I’ll even borrow the blog’s summary of the book’s premise, if you’re not inclined to click over:… Continue reading Recommended Reading: “Freddy and Fredericka”
Category: Reading & Writing
Forgetting J.D. Salinger
The media is filled today with stories about the impact that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made on impressionable [mostly] young readers. For example, the co-hosts of NBC’s Today Show shared their recollections of how the book affected them, with Matt Laurer stating that he remembered being proud that Catcher was his first… Continue reading Forgetting J.D. Salinger
Book Review: “Under the Dome”
Is it just me, or has Stephen King gotten grosser in his old(er) age? I confess that it’s been a long time since I read one of his books (Pet Sematary? The Tommyknockers?) but having recently completed the 18,000 pages* of his latest novel, Under the Dome, I confess that I was shocked – shocked,… Continue reading Book Review: “Under the Dome”
Bird
I see a lot of websites during the course of a week. Many of them are design-related and thus represent what should be the most striking, innovative, and creative examples the profession can build. Still, it’s not often that I run across one that simply takes my breath away. This is one. Andrew Zuckerman is… Continue reading Bird
Amazon.com: Disrupting shared informational heritage since 2009
A writer for the LA Times worries that Amazon.com is amassing too much control over, well, pretty much everything.
Interrobang Character Entity
In which we consider the elusive interrobang
Book Review: “The Metamorphosis”
When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. Thus begins Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, as translated from the original German by Stanley Corngold. The rest of the story is spent describing the remainder of Gregor’s short and painful existence as a… Continue reading Book Review: “The Metamorphosis”
Book Review: “Wandering Stars”
Avid science fiction readers are familiar with several common themes: good-humored adaptation to inhospitable conditions by people who didn’t ask to be there; unfamiliar languages, customs, and alien or inscrutable jargon; the guiding, intervention, or oversight by unseen-but-powerful forces and/or beings; and the triumph against insurmountable odds by those armed with little more than intelligence… Continue reading Book Review: “Wandering Stars”
Book Reviews: “Patriotic Grace” and “Jim the Boy”
I took a break from exploring for forgotten gems in our home library and read two new (to me) books a couple of weekends ago. Peggy Noonan’s Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (published earlier this month) and Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy (published in 2001) are both short, quick-reading… Continue reading Book Reviews: “Patriotic Grace” and “Jim the Boy”
Book Review: “Proust and the Squid”
…the goal of reading is to go beyond the author’s ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text. … The experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally and figuratively, to a changed… Continue reading Book Review: “Proust and the Squid”