Category: Books
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Review: Seistad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway Anse Seiestad We’re only two weeks into 2016, but I think I may have my nonfiction book of the year in Asne Seierstad’s story of the Anders Breivik’s terrorist attack/mass murder in Norway. Do you remember that one? Breivik was a ultra-nationalist,…
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Top Ten Book Reviews
I’ve written over 100 book reviews for this site and plan to write many, many more. Here’s a list of the ten most popular reviews: Tani and Sera’s False Nationalism / False Internationalism Coates’s Between the World and Me Mandel’s Station Eleven Fink’s Five Days at Memorial Martin’s Game of Thrones Chopra’s Shapeshifter Levitin’s The…
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Review: MacDonald’s H is for Hawk
H Is for Hawk Helen MacDonald A wonderfully strange memoir of a woman training a hawk while morning her father and reflecting on the life (and failed falconry) of the author T.H. White. Generally, I couldn’t care less about training birds to hunt things, or the life of White, or the joys of the English…
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2016: My Reading Goals
2015 was another pretty good year for my reading. 52 books, half by women. I’ll take it. This year, I have two overarching goals: to dig deeper in a subject matter, and to increase the diversity of my reading further. Here’s how I plan to achieve that: Read fifty two books. I’ve done this now…
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2015: My Year In Books
I set two reading goals for 2015 – to read fifty two books for the year and to have fifty percent of those books be by women. Unlike most of the other goals I set this year, I actually accomplished both of these.I’m pretty happy with that. Now that I’m a dad who almost never…
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Nabokovs Notecards
Research materials for Lolita 138 notecards that make up the as of yet unpublished The Original of Laura . V.N. would write them by hand, often in bed, or at a stand up desk. He would dictate them to his wife, Vera. After dinner, they often played games. Chess and Scrabble were favorites. VN was…
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Review: Brown’s Angels and Demons
Angels & Demons – Movie Tie-In Dan Brown In my attempt to understand America, I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons 1. It is terribly written. There, I said it. Now to be fair, I don’t know if I could have written it. For many reasons. I couldn’t sustain the level of cliff hanger chapters,…
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Review: Lewis’s the Big Short
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Michael Lewis It took the movie coming out for me to finally read this great book on the guys who figured out the subprime crash before the subprime crash. I’m not sure why I didn’t read this earlier, I’m a fan of both Michael Lewis and books skewering…
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Review: Winslow’s The Cartel
The Cartel Don Winslow The sequel to Winslow’s page-turner Power of the Dog, the Cartel takes our tale of the Mexican drug trade to the present day and includes the rise of the ultra-violent new breed of narcos such as the Zetas. In writing and character development, perhaps a better book than Power of the…
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Review: Buettner’s Blue Zones
The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest Dan Buettner The first book in the Blue Zone empire. Though it is at times silly, this is a must read for anyone interested in longevity. If you’ve been living under a rock, let me briefly explain the conceit of this…
Milo and the Calf 