Tag: recommended for the enthusiast
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Review: Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Pablo Neruda The collection that made Neruda famous at a young age. A short book comprised of short poems on love in its many forms. Sexual love, emotional love, love love love love love. A young man’s book.*Beautiful in parts but too sentimental for this middle aged…
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Review: Nelson’s Shiner
Shiner Maggie Nelson This year, I finally came to grips with something pretty fundamental about my reading interests – I don’t really care about prose. I care about ideas, and characters, and plots. I care about history, personal development, and inspiration. But I do not care about a formal experimentation. I don’t care about clever…
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Review: Alacron’s Lost City Radio
Lost City Radio Daniel Alacron She reads the names of missing and disappears people every night on the radio. Across the country, people tune it to hear the name of their loved ones, disappeared during the war years. She has a name of her own, which she does not read. Her husband, a borderline revolutionary…
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Review: Jornet’s Run of Die
Run or Die Kilian Jornet This memoir, written while he was still a very young man, is the story of the world’s greatest mountain runner. Jornet is the perfect storm of mountain athlete. Slight of stature, he was born at altitude, to parents who routinely went on epic adventures with him and his sister. As…
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Review: Lopez’s Story of Buddhism
The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to its History and Teachings Donald Lopez I thought I wanted a history of the central tenets of Buddhism, and that’s exactly what I got. It turns out though, that I think I wanted something a bit different. This history of Buddhism is a serious (if at times…
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Review: Desai’s Marx’s Revenge
Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism Meghnad Desai I’m genuinely surprised I don’t hear this book talked about more. On a macro level, Marx’s Revenge makes the argument that Marx would have welcomed globalization (the left’s boogie man of the day in 2004 when this came out) as the evitable…
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Review: Fitzgerald’s 80/20 Running
80/20 Running: Matt Ftizgerald Fitzgerald is an ace at taking a basic idea about endurance sports and turning it into a useful, if a bit padded book. Racing weight is about, well, weight and racing, and 80/20 is about the very popular (some would say ubiquitous) running methodology of running eight percent of your miles…
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Review — Fitzgerald’s Racing Weight
Racing Weight Matt Fitzgerald A diet book that isn’t a diet book. A straight forward, no bullshit, guide to getting your weight to a level at which you will perform optimally at endurance events. The diet advice here is not revolutionary (eat whole foods, avoid bad shit as much as you can, don’t over eat,…
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Review: Carr’s Bad
Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr James Carr I’ve read scores of memoirs from radical political activists. This one, by James Carr, is among the best. Carr was a career criminal, in and out of jail until he ended up in Soledad prison and befriended George Jackson, became politicized, and became one of Jackson’s top…
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Review: Sinclair’s White Chapel: Scarlet Tracings
White Chapel: Scarlet Tracings Iain Sinclair An odd but of work, this novel by poet, bookseller, novelist and pyscho-geographer Iain Sinclair was one of the main inspirations for Alan Moore’s From Hell. It’s a pretty out-there novel that is part investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders, part fictionalized pseudo memoir of life amongst the…
Milo and the Calf 