Milo and the Calf

Author: seanv2

  • Sibley’s Birding Basics

    Sibley’s Birding Basics: How to Identify Birds, Using the Clues in Feathers, Habitats, Behaviors, and SoundsDavid Allen Sibley David Sibley, is the author of perhaps the most popular guide to birding in the U.S. Sibley’s Guides. Gorgeously illustrated with his own renderings and written in a wonderfully dense, descriptive way, my Sibley is one of…

  • Schultheis Bone Games

    Bone Games: Extreme Sports, Shamanism, Zen, and the Search for Transcendence Rob Schultheis This one is a pretty deep cut in the world of endurance literature. The premise is that extreme sports (mountaineering, ultra endurance events, etc) are a modern, western, form of vision quests. An attempt by domesticated, bored, largely affluent, westerners to reconnect with…

  • Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff

    The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win Maria Konnikova Perhaps the most fun I had reading a book this year. Here’s he premise: Konnikova, a New Yorker writer with a phd in psychology hires one of the world’s greatest poker player to teach her the game with the intent…

  • El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This Is How You Loose the Time War

    This Is How You Loose the Time WarAmal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone A wonderful little book imagining a fight / friendship / love affair (?) between two warriors in a war across time. Written by two top notch SF writers it consists essentially of letters our warriors write to each other across time. The whole…

  • ,

    Nestor’s Breath

    Breath: The New Science of a Lost ArtJames Nestor A clear example of book that should have been an article. There’s some good stuff in here on breath work and its (arguable) importance to health as well as heaping helpings of the kind of anecdotal bro science I tend to enjoy, but don’t take too…

  • Ross’s Wagnerism

    Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of MusicAlex Ross Let’s get something out of the way here first. I do not like Wagner. Even if he wasn’t an anti-Semite (he was, this really isn’t up for debate) his operas would still repulse me – I hate the grandiose and Wagner is nothing if not…

  • Delillo’s The Silence

    The Silence Don Delillo In recent years, Delillo has turned to short works focused on small groups of people and I’m hear for it. Yes, I loved Underworld and it’s expanses of time and characters, but books like the Silence, focused on the actions of an intimate group of people showcase Delillo’s gift for sketching…

  • Mateer’s Aphrodite Made Me Do It

    Aphrodite Made Me Do ItTrista Mateer I don’t know what to make of this book. I truly don’t. It made some best of the year poetry lists, but it is very much not my thing. That said, I’m a forty something year old CIS white dude and I’m pretty damn sure I am not the…

  • Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa

    Dancing in Odessa Ilya Kaminsky Another beautiful collection from the talented Illya Kaminsky, this one more focused on the beauty in the ordinary. I like this collection fine, but Kaminsky’s slightly later work, Deaf Republic, which I read last year is a work of true brilliance and really worth reading. If you’re new to Kaminsky…

  • Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years

    A Journal of the Plague Year Daniel Defoe Defoe’s book, a fictional recounting of one man’s reflections during the plague of London, 1665. It begins with the plague beginning to ravage London and the protagonist weighing whether he should flee to the country as so many people of means are doing or stay and stick…