Entries in the "Books" Category

July 16, 2010
I came across Lawrence Kuthner and Cheryl Olson’s Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Games (And What Parents Can Do) while doing some research for an article on the psychology of video games. The book is the end result of a research program by the authors, funded...

July 8, 2010
Dan Ariely's previous book on behavioral economics, Predictably Irrational was fantastic. It explored the way that economics work on a personal level when you stop assuming that people are completely irrational and provided a great overview of the many kinks in the human brain that lead us to make...

June 14, 2010
I've always been interested in the psychology of consumerism, along with related topics like marketing and purchasing behaviors. Both for how shameless it is and how readily we (myself included) seem to fall for what really amount to simple psychological slight of hand. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value...

June 8, 2010
Yeah, that's right. A book about probability theory. And actually, it's not bad if you can either shrug off or endure a bit of lecturing on basic mathematics and statistics. Author Leonard Mlodinow sets out to review the history of probability, starting with the ancient Greeks and following the...

May 28, 2010
I first read Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Science of Persuasion when I was in graduate school studying judgment and decision making. I was amazed not only by the power of the psychological levers for influence that the author describes, but how easy he makes them to understand. It...

May 14, 2010
I really enjoyed Audrey Niffeneger's first book, The Time Traveller's Wife, so much so that I named it my favorite book that I read in 2006. So it's kind of surprising to even me that it took me so long to got around to picking up her sophomore novel,...

May 1, 2010
The Best of Dinosaur Comics 2003-2005 AD (subtitle: Your Whole Family is Made Out of Meat!) is a collection of a webcomic strips that by any reasonable analysis really should never have gotten to the point of having enough strips to be collected. Author Ryan North basically took six...

April 20, 2010
The Name of the Wind is the first in a planned trilogy of high fantasy novels by Patrick Rothfuss that follow the adventures of the improbably named Kvothe. At the beginning of the novel Kvothe is a young boy traveling with his minstrel parents and their trope. Ha ha,...

April 12, 2010
I've mentioned before how big a fan I am of the guys who make the Penny Arcade webcomic, so you can imagine that when the book tour promoting their new volume, The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade, came to my hometown I went to see them. And it was...

April 2, 2010
I really liked Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel Dune when I first read it a few months ago --so much so that I named it one of the best books I read that year. But upon finally getting around to the sequel, Dune Messiah I'm pretty disappointed. It's...

March 26, 2010
Men at Arms is Terry Pratchett's fifteenth ...woah, really? This is the fifteenth Discwordld book? And I'm not even HALFWAY done with the series yet? And he's still writing them? That's AWESOME! Anyway, in Men at Arms returns to the metropolis of Ank-Morpork, specifically the Night Watch charged with...

March 19, 2010
With my tepid reaction to recent Stephen King books like Just After Sunset, Duma Key, Cell, and Lisey's Story, I was kind of prepared to be vaguely disappointed by Under the Dome. I wasn't. In fact, it's one of my favorite King books to date, because it harkens back...

March 12, 2010
The full title here is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and between them the two authors, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, can claim a substantial amount of expertise in psychology, economics, law, and public policy. The stated goal of the book is to take lessons from...

February 3, 2010
Unlike Outliers, The Tipping Point, or Blink, Malcom Gladwell's newest book What the Dog Saw isn't an examination of one topic cut from whole cloth, but rather an eclectic mix of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker. In it he examines everything from why it's impossible to...

January 26, 2010
One of the things wrong with the world today (and yes, I'm shaking my tiny fist as I write this, which is one reason I'm typing so slowly) is that you can't use the phrase "it's a vampire book" without some qualifying information. So, I must point out that...

January 15, 2010
Following my recent interest in books on the psychology of decision-making and behavioral economics, I thought it might be interesting to read up on some actual economics. I had gotten some of this out of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, but Tim Harford's Undercover Economist is a...

December 25, 2009
Lords and Ladies is the 14th Discworld book by Terry Prattchett, which is a feat in and of itself, and it's the 4th book to focus on the Lancre coven of witches. I had initially disliked Granny Weatherwax in her first couple of books, but along with her ever...

December 17, 2009
NOTE: The author of this book posted a comment here that provides some interesting context to my review and some counterpoints. It's definitely worth noting, so click on the "comments" link below. In The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, author Mark Barrowcliffe presents his memoir of...

December 14, 2009
The humongous, full title of this book by Ronald Kessler is In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect. And as the title suggests, it aims to tell the secret story of the equally secret service, gleaned...

December 7, 2009
I picked up this "urban fantasy" novel by Neil Gaiman based on the fact that I had enjoyed the author's The Graveyard Book earlier this year, as well as some of his other stuff. Turns out it's the novelization of a BBC TV miniseries from the 1990s, which is...

December 3, 2009
I enjoyed Levitt and Dubner's 2005 book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything quite a bit, so I was excited to hear that the duo had collaborated on this sequel. You can draw a fairly straight line from economics to the field of behavioral economics,...

November 13, 2009
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller technically fits into the science fiction genre and the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, but at the same time it's different from other books that might share those classifications. The closest thing to a a main character that spans the book's considerable timeline is actually...

November 2, 2009
The full title here is Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End, and in it astrophysicist (or something along those lines) Phillip Plait takes on the bombastic topic of global annihilation. Specifically, he looks at all the ways Earth could destroyed by threats from...

October 24, 2009
Small Gods is, what the 13th Discworld book by Terry Pratchett? Like Pyramids, it's more of a stand alone book, with only few of the characters appearing in subsequent or previous books. It tells the story of Om, a god who decides to manifest himself physically on the Disk...

October 16, 2009
This biographical graphic novel by artist/writer Art Speigelman is essentially a story about the Jewish Holocaust, but with the curious twist that Speigelman draws all the characters as different kinds of animals according (loosely) to their race. Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, and Americans for...

October 9, 2009
The full title of this book is The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science and in it author Norman Doidage examines the concept of "brain plasticity." Essentially this has to do with the ability of the human brain (and the mouse...

October 3, 2009
On the Road by Jack Kerouac is often cites as one of the best English language novels ever, but my experience with it suggests that to get that level of appreciation out of it you really need to have lived through the beatnick era to which it's supposed to...

September 25, 2009
Ocassionally I get the itch to read a fantasy novel for the same reasons that other people my age will stop channel surfing if they come across an old Scooby Doo episode. The Black Company by Glen Cook, though, is different from a lot of others in the genre....

September 4, 2009
One of my co-workers and I often joked about creating a television sitcom about a group of twenty-something Industrial-Organizational Psychologists who lived in the big city where they learned about love, friendship, and how to leverage the tools and methodologies of psychology to solve organizational problems. This book by...

August 28, 2009
Sabriel by Garth Nix (awesome name, by the way) is the first in a series of fantasy novels for young adults. It features the eponymous girl, who is the latest in a long line of Necromancers --magicians who deal with death and getting the dead to shuffle around on...

August 21, 2009
The full title here is The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite and in this book former FDA Commissioner David Kessler blends together such disparate fields as biology, psychology, marketing, and sociology to help explain why so many Americans are so fat. The main culprits,...

August 14, 2009
Wait, wait, all right. Dude. Let's take like The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and retell it, but like instead of making it a story about an orphan boy raised by the creatures of the jungle let's have the kid grow up in a graveyard. So instead of a...

July 31, 2009
Dune by Frank Herbert is kind of an oddity. It's mostly science fiction given how it's set on a distant planet and got space ships and lasers and all that stuff. But it's also got a few of the tropes of the fantasy genre --people fighting with blades, a...

July 24, 2009
I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction novels, be they involving zombies, meteorites, natural disasters, or in the case of Pat Frank's Alas Babylon, nuclear armageddon. The book follows Randy Bragg, a man adrift in life and lounging around in the small community of Fort Repose, Florida with nothing much...

July 17, 2009
Hey kids! Do you like writing multiple choice test items that exhibit desirable psychometric properties? You DO? Then Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items by Thomas Haladyna is for you! Glibness aside, I actually did find this to be a pretty useful book and it'll be kept within easy...

July 10, 2009
Not sure what to say about this book. After attending some financial planning workshops I was motivated to learn more about the 401(k) retirement savings plan that my employer was offering and about these things in general. It turns out that my 401(k) plan is actually pretty good and...

July 2, 2009
In this twelfth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, the author sets his satire scopes on fairy tales and storytelling in general, which results in some pretty great meta humor. As you might guess from the title it features the witches cast of characters, including Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and...

June 26, 2009
One of my old psychology professors was fond of saying "If something exists, it exists in some amount and can thus be measured." It's not a bad axiom for a Human Resources professional to adopt, whether they have a background in psychology or not. This book by Jac Fitz-enz...

June 19, 2009
My wife and I actually read this book by Roald Dahl to my daughter, but I thought I'd go ahead and comment on it. James and the Giant Peach follows the same winning "Cinderella" formula that a lot of other writers like J.K. Rowling have used, and which Dahl...

June 12, 2009
Death (with a capital D, or even all small-caps if you're a particularly cheeky typographer) is the only character to appear in just about every one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. And better yet, he occasionally gets to star in one, like Reaper Man. The gist is that Death...

June 5, 2009
The hook in this history of science book by George Johnson is that the author wants to step back from modern megascience with all its massive teams, corporate backing, and global collaboration. Specifically, he wants to can look back and appreciate the simpler times when one man could take...

May 29, 2009
Yeah, I know what you're thinking just from the title: another book about psychology, decision making, and behavioral economics. And yeah, that's pretty much right. Author Jonah Lehrer clomps around at the intersection of rationality street and emotional avenue, trying to figure out what kinds of traffic is best...

May 22, 2009
This novel by Dan Simmons about Sir John Franklen's doomed expedition to the Artic is kind of hard to describe. I guess "historical horror" would come closest. Most of the book is a straight up (though surely dramatized) retelling of how the crews of the HMS Terror and HMS...

May 15, 2009
The full title here is Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Author Lauren Slater reviews 10 famous experiments from the various niches of psychology and attempts to understand them and their participants in new ways. It's really not very good. And that's too bad, because...

May 8, 2009
Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett is the first of his Diskworld novels to make me go "Meh..." The idea is that an evil spirit breaks loose and starts putting ideas in people's heads about how to make motion pictures, or "clicks.". It's got enough good lines, jokes, and parodies...

May 1, 2009
In their book, Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives authors Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau hit on something I've written about elsewhere: making research understandable and meaningful to a wider audience, especially in the context of business. In other words, putting dollar signs in there. After...

April 24, 2009
Like all Terry Pratchett's other Diskworld books, Eric is a lampoon of the fantasy genre, full of parodies, ironic juxtapositions, puns, and good old fashioned jokes. Only this time Pratchett sets his sights at slightly more lofty literary targets, as Eric is largely a parody of Faust, Dante's The...

April 17, 2009
I'm trying to work my way through all of John Steinbeck's stuff, and Tortilla Flat is different from what I've read so far in a few ways. It's shorter, for one, but more incongruently it's genuinely funny. Not something I've grown to expect from Steinbeck. Tortilla Flat tells the...

April 10, 2009
I read and enjoyed Ender's Shadow a few months ago and enjoyed it enough to follow up with the second of Orson Scott Card's "Bean books," Shadow of the Hegemon. Unfortunately just like with the books in the Ender Wiggins series focusing on that hero, there was a precipitous...

April 3, 2009
The Ghost Brigades is John Scalzi's sequel to Old Man's War, and I enjoyed it about as much for some light sci-fi reading. This book focuses mainly on a Special Forces soldier named Jared Dirac. He was manufactured from a cloned body like all of the Colonial Defense Force's...

March 27, 2009
Here's an idea: Let's take William Shakespeare's Hamlet, right? And let's pull out all the key bits: an indecisive and tragic hero, a poisoned father, the ghost of that poisoned father, an accidental murder of a close friend, and an usurping uncle who marries the hero's mother. Oh, oh,...

March 20, 2009
When you get old and reach the winter of your life, you don't generally think about joining the military to go off and defend humanity against horrible alien threats. Well, you don't, but the characters in John Scalzi's Old Man's War do. This is mostly because they get to...

March 13, 2009
Well, here it is only March and we already have a strong contender for the worst book I'll read this year. Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire is written by advertising mogul Martin Lindstrom and if you believe the dust jacket...

March 6, 2009
No, this isn't about the video game. The full title on this one is The Halo Effect ...and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers. In it, author Phil Rosenzweig sets out to take the business press and best sellers to task for a list of flaws in...

February 27, 2009
The Kite Runner is a kind of coming of age (and then some) story by Afghan-cum-American author Khaled Hosseini. It tells the life's story of Amir, a native of Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul. The novel starts with Amir's childhood, predating much of the country's civil and international strife...

February 20, 2009
In The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, author Steven Johnson calls forth a number of players, but if we had to pick out one main protagonist it would probably be Joseph Priestly. You may (or may not) remember Priestly as...

February 13, 2009
The full title here is Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time by Valerie Bertinelli. Yes, that's right. I read an autobiography by Valerie Bertinelli, she of One Day at a Time fame, countless made-for-TV movies, and a marriage to a certain Van Halen...

February 6, 2009
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card is a "companion" novel to one of Card's other science fiction novels, Ender's Game, in that they follow the same events but are told from different points of view with different protagonists. Ender's Game tells things from the perspective of Ender Wiggins, a...

January 30, 2009
Casino Royale by Ian Flemming is the first James Bond novel ever written, and apparently it made a big enough impression to spawn many more books (both by Flemming and by subsequent authors) and the longest running film series EVAR. Having seen many of the movies (including the adaptation...

January 23, 2009
More Terry Prattchett. This time around in Guards! Guards! he introduces a new recurring cast in the Diskworld, the City Watch, and spends most of the novel satirizing crime novels, cop movies, the British obsession with dog breeding, and an orangutan with a thing for books. The book mainly...

January 16, 2009
I became a fan of David Sedaris last year, and when my sister gave me this collection of holiday-themed stories and essays I jumped right in. The pieces range from ostensibly autobiographical to completely fabrcated. One may tell the fictional (not to mention absurd) tale of two rich families...

January 9, 2009
In statistics, there's this concept called "error variance." No, no wait. Stick with me on this for a second. Basically error variance is all the unknown stuff that you can't measure or control, but which still decides to affect outcomes despite all etiquette and social decorum. You may have...

December 26, 2008
Note: This is #65, the LAST BOOK in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. I'm done. Just After Sunset is Stephen King's latest collection of short stories, containing a hodge podge of different tales that with one exception had been previously published in various magazines or anthologies....

December 23, 2008
Note: This is #64 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Terry Pratchett's Pyramids is part of this Diskworld series, which means that pretty much by definition it's an amusing parody of the fantasy genre. But this one differs from the other Diskworld books I've read...

December 22, 2008
Note: This is #63 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler is another attempt to balance out my literary diet with something from the classics buffet, and while I think it fits that bill I wish I had enjoyed it...

December 19, 2008
Note: This is #62 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. You may remember that comedian and minor TV personality John Hodgman recently wrote a parody of reference books called The Areas of My Expertise, which I reviewed. Hodgman's dry wit and ability to generate random...

December 12, 2008
Note: This is #61 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. After frolicking around in a fanciful series about the Napoleonic Wars with Dragons, I decided I needed to balance things out with something from the "classics" section. So I picked up William Faulkner's The Sound...

December 5, 2008
Note: This is #60 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. As far as future utopia-slash-dystopia novels, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is probably one of the better known, as well as the template upon which subsequent entries into that genre were built. The idea is...

November 28, 2008
Note: This is #59 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. After enjoying my first exposure to David Sedaris in When You are Engulfed in Flames, I clicked on over to grab something else by him and decided on Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim....

November 21, 2008
Note: This review includes books number 54, 55, 56, 57, and 58 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I...

November 14, 2008
Note: This is #53 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. I'm a bit of a latecomer to the David Sedaris fan club, which is a shame. I kept seeing his When You Are Engulfed in Flames on best seller lists and decided to try the...

November 7, 2008
Note: This is #52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. DING! Up through about the first three quarters of Stephen King's Cujo, I really didn't care for it. This was mainly because it didn't really feel like a Stephen King novel, much less one from...

October 31, 2008
Note: This is #51 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Much like Predictably Irrational from earlier this year, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman's Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior seeks to educate us on quirks of the human mind that lead us to engage...

October 24, 2008
Note: These are books #49 and #50 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. 100 Things Your Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers & HR and 50 More Things You Need to Know: The Science Behind Best People Practices for Manager & HR Professionals (whew!),...

October 17, 2008
Note: This is #48 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. After reading Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, I decided that while that particular subject left me kind of weirded out and uncomfortable, I liked Roach's style and tone quite a...

October 13, 2008
Note: This is #47 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Thanks to his privileged upbringing, author Michael Gates Gill is handed a cushy job as an executive at a major advertising agency, but he has to sacrifice a lot of time with his family and...

October 10, 2008
Note: This is #46 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. The full title of the book here is Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. In it, author Gerard Jones presents a thesis that exposure to violence --especially fantasy violence-- is...

October 6, 2008
Note: This is #45 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. The Diskworld books I've read so far have been lampoons of the high fantasy genre, and author Terry Pratchett keeps that up in this sixth book, Wyrd Sisters. He does, however, also head into some...

October 3, 2008
Note: This is #44 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Some books work because they take you to new places you could never go on your own. This has, in my experience, included fantastical realms, outer space, periods of history long past, and Canada. Mark...

September 29, 2008
Note: This is #43 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. In The Corrections, author Jonathan Franzen presents us with a meticulously painted picture of a midwestern family as they go through all kinds of strange difficulties in trying to live their lives and get together...

September 26, 2008
Note: This is #42 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex is a book about sex. Well, sort of. It's not erotica. Or a how-to manual. Or an exploration of sexuality in our culture. Or an...

September 19, 2008
Note: This is #41 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. In American Nerd: The Story of My People author Benjamin Nugent starts off with a great premise. He aims to trace the origin of the nerd stereotype, see how it developed, examine how it's depicted...

September 12, 2008
Note: This is #40 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life is Steve Martin's autobiography about how he broke into stand-up comedy during the 1970s. As you might expect from a biography, it starts off discussing Martin's early family life...

September 5, 2008
Note: This is #39 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Well, how to describe Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov? Those in touch with popular culture may know that this book is about a Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is educated, European, dapper, and a pedophile...

August 29, 2008
Note: This is book #38 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, author Jill Bolte Taylor takes us through her autobiographical account of what it was like for her to have a stroke. And not just...

August 22, 2008
Note: This is #37 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I originally picked this book up based on a recommendation from another blog I read, but I'm kind of sorry I did. Belonging squarely in the "Horror" section of the bookstore, Scott Smith's The Ruins...

August 15, 2008
Note: This is #36 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. The full title of this book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, and it sets out to describe how the Internet and other information technology are creating new...

August 8, 2008
Note: This is #35 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants is one of those books I'm kind of split on. Set in America during the Great Depression, the book tells the story of Jacob Jankowski, a young man who drops...

August 1, 2008
Note: This is book #34 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. This book by Jim Collins is one of the most successful books to be found in the "Business" section of your local megabookstore, and given how it purports to tell you how to take...

July 25, 2008
Note: This is book #33 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I'm not entirely sure why I couldn't get into 1776, Jason McCullough's biography of one of the most pivotal 12 months in American History. McCullough writes about major events in the eponymous year, including...

July 18, 2008
Note: This is book #32 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challence for 2008. Ah, another parody of the fantasy genre by Terry Pratchett. This one returns to the Unseen University, home of powerful wizards and Rincewind, one of my favorite Diskworld protagonists. On the Disk, the 8th...

July 11, 2008
Note: This is book #31 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I mentioned a while back how after a few false starts I eventually grew to appreciate Steven Erickson's Gardens of the Moon, the first book in his high fantasy series Mazalan: Books of the...

July 4, 2008
Note: This is book #30 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I've said before that I would hate to be a character in a John Steinbeck novel, but I think it would be worse to be one in a Carmac McCarthy story. Sure, Steinbeck's characters...

June 27, 2008
Note: This is book #29 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. A while back I had tried to read Walter Isaacson's biography on Benjamin Franklin, but just couldn't get through it because the author mired everything down in pointless details. Despite that, I decided to...

June 20, 2008
Note: This is book #28 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I wrote last week about how Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites was a bit of a letdown. Fortunately I didn't let that slow me up and went right into Mort, which is considered by many...

June 13, 2008
Note: This is book #27 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I liked Terry Pratchett's first two Diskworld books so much that I drove forward into the awaiting pile of his subsequent writings with great relish. Unfortunately Equal Rites didn't impress me nearly as much,...

June 6, 2008
Note: This is Book #26 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I'm at the halfway point and going strong! It's only about the middle of the year, but I think Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is a shoe-in for my favorite non-fiction book of 2008. When...

May 30, 2008
Note: This is Book #25 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. In The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, author David Hajdu attempts to examine the birth of the comic book in America and trace its childhood and adolecense up...

May 23, 2008
Note: This is Book #24 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Since I had enjoyed The Road by Cormac McCarthy so much, I decided to pick up what is supposed to be his most impressive work, Blood Meridian or, The Evening Redness in the West....

May 16, 2008
Note: This is book #23 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. This book by Stpehen Colbert (of The Colbert Report basic cable fame) is pretty much what you expect: his TV show in book form. For those of you who don't know, that shtick involves...

May 9, 2008
Note: This is book #22 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Gardens of the Moon is the first in Steven Erikson's gargantuan and oddly named fantasy series, Malazan Book of the Fallen. What's odd about it is that it took me THREE tries to get...

May 2, 2008
Note: This is book #21 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. When science fiction great Arthur C. Clark died a few weeks ago I was moved to pick up something by him to mark the passage. Since I've read his Space Odyssey books already, I...

April 25, 2008
Note: These are books #19 and #20 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Okay, Internet, I've got a bone to pick with you: how come none of you ever told me about Terry Pratchett? Okay, so that's not entirely fair. I'm pretty sure people have...

April 18, 2008
Note: This is book #18 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Part of the idea behind this whole 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge was to branch out into genres and topics that I might not normally try. While I haven't read anything about perky...

April 11, 2008
Note: This is book #17 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. The full title here is Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul by Edward Humes. There are surprisingly few monkeys or girls in this book, but it does tell the story...

April 4, 2008
Note: This trilogy contains books #14, #15, and #16 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. This series by Bernard Cornwell consists of three books: The Archer's Tale, Vagabond, and Heretic. I'm just gonna lump them all together here since there's really not a whole lot...

March 28, 2008
Note: This is book #13 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I guess you could call this book by Alan Weisman a kind of "speculative nonfiction." It revolves around a peculiar thought experiment: imagine that every human everywhere on the plant just winked out of existence....

March 21, 2008
Note: This is book 12 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I think I can pretty say that this book by Steven Johnson isn't going to be for everybody. It tells the story of how several men tried to cope with and understand a massive outbreak...

March 14, 2008
Note: This is book 11 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. As far as ZOMG TEH WORLD IS ENDING! books go, this one by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle was really pretty good. The idea is that about the time humans and chimps were striking...

March 7, 2008
Note: This is book 10 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. In preparation for doing this review of Stephen King's latest, I did some poking around and read some other reviews on the 'net and was surprised to find that a lot of people like...

February 29, 2008
Note: This is Book 9 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I suspect that Lord of the Flies by William Golding hardly needs much of an introduction to anyone reading this. It's the story of a group of young boys (some barely out of diapers,...

February 22, 2008
Note: This is Book 8 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of those books that once you finish it, you toss it down and say "Okay, gonna kill myself now!" It is also riveting, engaging, and beautifully written,...

February 15, 2008
Note: This is book 7 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I have to admit, I enjoyed this book by Austin Grossman. Yes, it's about superheroes, mostly about two of them in particular (one of whom is actually a supervillain) who take turns...

February 8, 2008
Note: This is book 6 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Most of you familiar with American film and popular culture will know A Clockwork Orange from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film of the same name. I've never seen that film, mainly because it...

February 1, 2008

January 25, 2008
Note: This is book 4 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge. Not quite sure what to say about this bit of pulp fantasy from Roger Zelanzy. It's the second in the "Amber" series, the first of which I reviewed here. To recap a bit, there's this...

January 17, 2008
Note: This is book 3 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge. Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 Featuring Scott Kelby by Scott Kelby with a special introduction by Scott Kelby is kind of what you'd expect based on a quick thumb-through. The author,...

January 11, 2008
Note: This is Book 2 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge. In some ways, Max Barry's Jennifer Government is like the inverse of Orwell's 1984. It's set in the near future where things have gone loopy, but instead of an out of control, totalitarian government...

January 4, 2008
Note: this is book 1 of 52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. I'm really not quite sure why Bill Bryson wrote Shakespeare: The World as a Stage. I know that writing his books is Bryson's thing (and God bless him for it), but in...

December 26, 2007
As I did in 2006 and 2005 I thought I'd do a roundup piece on the books I read/heard in 2007. You can always see a list of what I've read since starting tracking in mid-2003, but the 2007 list is: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Adventures of...

December 21, 2007
I guess it's official: I don't like Hemmingway. I mean I don't have anything personal against the guy and I kind of liked The Old Man and the Sea. But a lot like his other supposed classic For Whom the Bell Tolls I just didn't get what's so great...

December 14, 2007
I've never read much of Mark Twain's stuff. I vaguely remember reading A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in college and I think I was probably SUPPOSED to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at some point in school, but this was the first time I had ever...

December 7, 2007
Here's my one-word review of Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays by Stephen Hawking: What? That shouldn't be too surprising if you consider that a) I'm not a stupidly smart theoretical physisist, and b) Hawking doesn't really try to make the material in this collection of essays...

November 30, 2007
Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America by Morgan Spurlock is probably best thought of as the companion book to the author's award-winning documentary, Super Size Me. They both cover a lot of the same ground: fast food is EXTREMELY unhealthy for you, fast food...

November 23, 2007
Scott McCloud's nonfiction comic book about how to make great comics is a bit academic, but the subject matter and presentation keep it in the realm of readable and entertaining.

November 9, 2007
Ostensibly, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen is a book about factual inaccuracies found in a survey of twelve popular History textbooks. That's a good hook, but unfortunately once the hook gets you the place it pulls you into is...

October 26, 2007
John Grisham's nonfiction book about denial of justice in small town Oklahoma has structural problems, but that doesn't keep it from being engrossing.

October 19, 2007
Heinlein's stories about humanity's longest member in residence fails to do or say anything particularly interesting.

October 5, 2007
This is the first book in Roger Zelanzy's Chronicles of Amber megaseries, which I bought on impuls in one supercondensed tome. It's kind of hard to describe the book. See, there's this guy, Corwin, and he's a Prince of Amber, which is this city that's kind of a Platonian...

September 28, 2007
The next 3 books in Robert Asprin's Myth series are still good, but not as charming or interesting as the first few.

September 21, 2007
I had read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut a while back and liked it well enough, so I thought I'd try something else out. Breakfast of Champions, a story about the fateful meeting between an eccentric science fiction writer and a half (and eventually completely) crazy car salesman, may...

September 7, 2007
Stephen King's story about a dystopian future where the downtrodden serve as fodder for deadly reality TV shows is a lot better (and different) than the movie of the same name.

August 31, 2007
Robert Heinlein's book about Libertarian revolution in space is part political thriller, part science fiction adventure. And all good.

August 17, 2007
This primer on executive coaching from HR's point of view is really a bunch of fluff and not much substance.

August 10, 2007
Melville's book may be considered the greatest novel in the English language, but I could do with a lot less talk about whales in this book about a whale.

August 3, 2007
NOTE: This review is spoiler free. Well, maybe some very minor ones are in there. At any rate if you're still reading the book you may want to skip it for now anyway. I wouldn't want to affect your reading even with general discussions. Like every other being on...

July 27, 2007
King's new old book has a few good ideas, but I seem to find myself several feet short of the target he was apparently shooting for.

July 19, 2007
One of Stephen King's earliest works, Rage sets up an interesting premise that the author fails to really make something out of.

July 12, 2007
It's 10% discourse on the erosion of reason, science, and fact-based policy making, plus 90% polemic against the Bush administration, but Al Gore's The Assault on Reason provides a consistent, coherent narrative that make the sum of the President's offenses greater (less?) than their individual headlines.

July 6, 2007
David Bodanis makes the history and legacy of Einstein's famous 1905 equation both educational and enjoyable.

June 26, 2007
Bill Bryson's travel diary about hiking a good chunk of the massive Appalachian Trail intersperses the funny with the educational.

May 25, 2007
Jack London's adventure story of this totally awesome dog is pretty entertaining, even if it does take some liberties with what a dog is actually capable of.

May 18, 2007
T.H. White's retelling of the arthurian legends has plenty of good parts, but the pacing and the multiple tones are distracting.

May 11, 2007
Mattheson's book about a vampire plague and the world's last human is supposed to be a watershed work, but I didn't enjoy it at all.

April 17, 2007
Steinbeck's most ambitious story about good versus evil in Salinas Valley, California is a bit heavy handed in its use of allegory, but it's easily one of the best books I've read in a long time.

March 22, 2007
One of the best Stephen King books provides a new experience upon re-reading 20 years later. It's still one of the best books about childhood (and childhood fears) that I've read, and it's technically complex to boot.

February 21, 2007
Julian Dibbell's account of how he tried to make a fortune selling virtual loot from massively multiplayer online games makes for a fascinating read for the way it combines discussions of an emerging business with a personal account of trying to strike it rich.

February 9, 2007
Max Brooks's zombie apocalypse novel is long on imagination, but the prose and structure keep it from being much more than a quick, entertaining read. But hey --zombies!

February 2, 2007
Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid provides an amusing and nostalgic view of growing up in the midwest during the 1950s. Also, it's funny.

January 27, 2007
Fitzgerald's tale of love, decadence, and class strife in the 1920s holds a lot more than I thought at first.

January 14, 2007
Stephen King's book about a woman handcuffed to a bed has a few really effective scenes, but the super slow pacing and bizarre change of structure towards the end make it hard to recommend.

January 7, 2007
Like I did for 2005, I thought I'd do a round up on the books I read in 2006. Here's the quick stats: Books read: 49 Fiction books: 28 Fantasy: 11 Other fiction/Literature: 8 Horror: 5 Sci-Fi: 4 Non-fiction books: 21 Audiobooks: 33 Paper books: 16 That's down from 61...

January 5, 2007
While not for those unfamiliar with statistics and related subjects to begin with, Salsburg's mixture of history and biography provides several new angles and some new insight into how statistics were born and matured into such an important branch of science.

December 22, 2006
Stephen Donaldson's first book in the Thomas the Unbeliever is unbelievably cliche and unbearable, even with a genuinely interesting antihero to center everything around.

December 9, 2006
This is the funniest book I've read (actually, listened to) in a long time. You may remember the author, John Hodgman, as an occasional contributor to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and as the "PC" character in those Apple computer commercials. This book is basically him just speaking...

December 3, 2006
Bill Bryson delivers another book on linguistics and etymology, but fortunately he packages it with enough outtakes from American history to make it relatively entertaining. Just wish there were more of it.

November 25, 2006
Truman Capote's "literary journalism" masterpiece is really well written and assembled, but he does have a tendency to go off on boring tangents.

November 18, 2006
Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover, sorta, in a series of minimum wage earning jobs to show the rest of us privileged, rich cretins how lucky we are. Still, it's an interesting and often entertaining read.

November 9, 2006
Stephen King's new novel, Lisey's Story, is a small-scale tale that's definitely King, but the horror and suspense factors float on top of a more meaningful tale about a woman and the loss of her beloved husband.

November 3, 2006
Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war novel mixes the absurdity and horror of war with time travel and aliens who look like upside-down toilet plungers.

October 26, 2006
I just can't seem to stop reading fantasy fiction. Robin Hobb is another one of those authors whose name comes up when people ask about fantasy that isn't truely, terribly, unbearably awful, and I guess there's a grain of truth in that. While I was really ready for this...

September 28, 2006
Another helping from the Bill Bryson smorgasboard. This book definitely has a different flavor to it, though, as it's about linguistics, philology, and all things language. This area has actually been a secret interest of mine, as I've always found it fascinating how we learn language, how languages change...

September 19, 2006
The complete title here is actually Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images, and the book pretty much delivers on that. It covers an impressive breadth of material related to digital photography --everything from buying a...

September 6, 2006
Wow, Raymond Feist is really phoning it in here. Feist is one of my guilty pleasures as far as books go, and only one of two high fantasy authors I read everything from any more (the other one being George R. R. Martin). That may have to change, though....

August 18, 2006
Ironically, looking in to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system has been bouncing around in the back of my head as something to do for quite some time now. This approach to maximizing productivity is popular among the nerdegalian, probably because of its minimum bullshit approach to actually processing,...

August 7, 2006
One of my most childhood (well, teenagerhood) possessions is a pair of graphic novels based on Robert Asprin's "Myth" series, illustrated by Phil Foglio. I also read most of the books themselves and enjoyed them nearly as much. When I recently decided to re-read the first three books (Another...

July 20, 2006
The full title here is Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements. I co-worker of mine used to get flabbergasted every time the topic of unsolicitted commercial e-mail, or Spam, was brought up. Not because it annoyed him, but because he...

July 13, 2006
Ah, good ole' Stephen King. It's nice to know that he's always there with a ripping good yarn to give me a break from the steaks of heady non-fiction that I sometimes find myself in. Needful Things is the last of his stories set in the the town of...

June 20, 2006
Again, I love Bill Bryson. I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away isn't really a travel diary like many of his other works, but it does deal with the interesting case of culture shock wherein an American returns to his homeland after...

June 13, 2006
The world is flat, but this book is not. It's Thomas Friedman's ginormous examination of globalization and the forces that drive it, starting with the end of the last century and continuing up to about 2:15 yesterday afternoon. The book traces the antecedents and consequences of global communication, outsourcing,...

June 2, 2006
The full title of this book is The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, The World’s Most Astonishing Number. Now, I know you may not believe me when I say this, but despite this being a BOOK about a NUMBER, it's really not as exciting as you might expect....

May 25, 2006
Hrm. I'm still not quite sure what I think of this book, which is subtitled "The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West." It's a radical reimaging of Frank Baum's Oz books, focusing on the life and times of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West....

May 12, 2006
House of Leaves is really a weird book. So weird, in fact, that any discussion of it pretty much has to be dominated by its structure. Basically, there are 6 “layers” to the story, each of which the reader is directly or indirectly exposed to: Layer 1: Photojournalist Will...

May 2, 2006
Bill Bryson is one of my new favorite authors. His spectacular A Short History of Nearly Everything was really enough to cement that position, but I’ve recently discovered his set of travel diaries. Notes from a Small Island discusses the tour of the United Kingdom he takes as he...

May 2, 2006
I loved this book. In it, Ehrenreich explores unemployment and desparation not from the perspective of uneducated and chronically destitute blue-collar workers, but from that of educated and accomplished white collar professionals squeezed out of their cushy positions by downsizing. She changes her name, lines up colleagues to provide...

April 14, 2006
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is often cited amongst the nerdegalian as the best sci-fi series evar. It's set, as you may guess, far into the future where a man discovers that Rome ...uh, I mean The Galactic Empire is fated to collapse and bring about 30,000 years of barbarism...

April 5, 2006
One of the great things about checking out audiobooks from the public library is that I can take a chance on something I normally wouldn't buy, and I end up loving it. And then, of course, there are the times I take a chance on something I wouldn't normally...

March 28, 2006
Man, it would really suck to be a character in a John Steinbeck novel. I read Of Mice and Men a while back, and that didn't end well. The Grapes of Wrath not only doesn't end well for the characters, it doesn't start well and doesn't ...middle well, either....

March 9, 2006
This is one of the most brilliant books I've read in a while. Here, let me repeat that for truth: This book. Brilliant. Totally. But let's back up a second and I'll explain why. In Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson describes a phenomenon he calls "the...

March 3, 2006
I'm still not quite sure what to think of this book, even with the revelations that chunks of it were totally made up. To me, that's not its main problem. Frey's entire work is hamstrung by a half-baked stream of consciousness style that is more often annoying than compelling....

February 21, 2006
No, it's not an hors d'oeuvre cookbook for cannibals. Consuming Kids is a book about the multi-bajillion dollar industry of marketing all kinds of things --clothes, hair care, food, violence, lifestyles-- to kids and teens. Now that my own daughter is old enough that I'm reasonably sure she's not...

February 17, 2006
When it comes to geniuses, a few archetypes generally come to mind. They're often characterized as under appreciated geeks with hearts of gold (think the entire cast of Revenge of the Nerds) or as slightly spaced out but cuddly old men (think Einstein). Or they're quixotic coyotes forever trying...

February 7, 2006
I've mentioned that one thing Stephen King does well is build up a slow burn and then have things explode towards the end of a book. In Cell, he does just the inverse. You open up the book and immediately see that King has his arm cocked way back...

January 25, 2006
Stephen King is like Taco Bell. Think about it. Taco Bell has just a few ingredients that they can combine a hundred different ways to make something new every time: tortilla, beans, chicken, beef, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes. Sure, that Chicken Burrito may have its own line on the...

January 18, 2006
I love me some Simpsons, but I really didn't like this book. Ostensibly it's about The Simpsons television series and after reading the dust jacket I expected to find stories and anecdotes about the show, its history, its creators, and the like. Kind of like an episode of VH1's...

January 13, 2006
Normally, I loathe time travel stories. They're too often cliche and fail to adhere to any kind of internal consistency. However, I loved The Time Traveler's Wife mainly because it's so different from other stories on the subject. In fact, the book isn't about time travel per se. It's...

December 11, 2005
Ah, more Stephen King. This is the second book he's published since he supposedly retired, but like his last it's a bit of a departure from his horror pulp. Instead, he's written a murder mystery pulp. The Colorado Kid is the story of a young reporter-in-training and two aging...

December 9, 2005
George Martin is one of the few authors for whom I'll buy new releases the first day they're available and dive right in. His "Song of Ice and Fire" series is regularly cited as one of the few examples of fantasy that isn't awful. And for good reason, because...

November 17, 2005
I mentioned before about enjoying The Tipping Point, which is the other book by Malcolm Gladwell. It was good, but I think I like Blink better because it has a more coherent theme that I'm more familiar with. Blink is a book about unconscious decision-making and information processing, what...

November 13, 2005
You may know Neil Gaiman from his fairly popular Sandman comics. Or you may not, I don't know. Either way, he's been writing novels as well, and Anansi Boys is better than the other one of his that I've read, American Gods. Gaiman is definitely trying to channel the...

November 7, 2005
I'm really not sure why I didn't like this book. It's got all the right ingredients for a page-turner: war, sex, drama, betrayal, gruesome executions, tragedy, explosions, politics, dead communists, gypsies, and bull fights. It's the story of a group of guerilla fighters during the Spanish civil war and...

October 28, 2005
I told myself that I'd take a break from Stephen King, but then found myself listening to this book. The main issue I have with Christine is the pacing. The first half is really slow, with all kinds of buildup that I suppose serves to deepen the relationship between...

October 16, 2005
This book is kind of hard to explain. It's nonfiction for sure, as the authors use economics to explore and explain everyday problems like crime, cheating on standardized testing, and getting parents to pick their kids up from daycare. Though it has a few themes that keep popping up...

October 11, 2005
Every once in a while I get the urge to read a high fantasy novel instead of something more highbrow, much like people get cravings for hamburger over steak or a desire to punch themselves in the groin instead of having a nice cup of coffee. Since Tad Williams's...

September 24, 2005
The Tipping Point was one of those books that had been on my radar for a long time, but I'd just never gotten around to reading it. It's often shelved under "Marketing" or maybe "Business" in your local megabookstore, but after reading it I'm not quite sure that's right....

September 23, 2005
Okay, this is the last of my Stephen King books for a bit. Again, this is one from early in his career, and I once again have to comment on how much more I like it than his later stuff. It's just a ripping good adventure that starts off...

September 15, 2005
I'm on a bit of a Stephen King bender again, and after Doloris Claiborn I'm surprised again at how much better King was earlier in his career. The Dead Zone is ostensibly about a guy who comes out of a coma in possession of the ability to tell someone's...

September 9, 2005
Does this book count as a biography? It's the tale of glam rock pioneer Motly Cru (I'm not going to bother looking up the HTML code for the umlauts), tracing the childhood and adolescence of each band member all the way through the formation of the group, their stellar...

September 2, 2005
Here's another example of King trying to stretch his literary muscles and do something different, as there's only a smattering of the supernatural and horrific in this book. It's also a great example of how King can get away with hanging a bunch of pointless prose on the too-thin...

August 26, 2005
I'm pretty sure that, like most other kids in my generation and my part of the world, I read this book as part of a high school English class. I remember liking it, but surprisingly I recalled very little of it. Upon reading it again now I enjoyed it...

August 18, 2005
I went on a bit of a Philip K. Dick bender, reading a handful of his books in quick succession so I'll just combine them here. In addition to The Man in the High Castle which I talked about earlier, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The...

August 11, 2005
I picked this one up at the SIOP convention two years ago and finally got around to reading it. I honestly don't know why I keep buying books like this. It's just kind of this loose glob of papers related to some aspect of personality in the workplace, tied...

August 10, 2005
I've only recently become interested in science fiction, and I find it particularly fun to read the "classics" like Clark and Heinlein because of the way these they end up imagining what their future, our present, will be like. I'd been aware of Phillip K. Dick for a while,...

August 5, 2005
What a great book. If I had read this book as a high school student, I'd probably have been a physicist. Probably a POOR physicist given my average mathematical aptitude, but this book makes the topic just that much fun. And the author, Bill Bryson, actually tackles much, much...

July 24, 2005
Like just about every other non-illiterate out there, I snatched up the latest Harry Potter book. Not surprising, since I think I read somewhere that enough copies of this book were sold in one day to fill a football stadium with cream corn for a whole week. The book...

July 24, 2005
Like a lot of people, I enjoy Lewis Black's comedy on The Daily Show to the point where I told TiVo to keep an eye out for his standup routine. Having seen the latter, I can say that most of this book is essentially "Lewis Black's Standup Comedy: The...

July 21, 2005
There is, of course, a new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie just out, but I've actually been meaning to read this book for years. I absolutely adored the 1971 movie based on the same book, and it was fun to see all the same characters and scenes. I...

July 1, 2005
For the life of me I can't remember where I heard about this old, rather obscure book or what prompted me to track it down and buy a used copy on Amazon.com's Marketplace. But I'm glad I did. One topic that has always interested me and prompted me to study...

June 28, 2005
This is the first --the shortest-- of the three books I came back from SIOP with. I had been looking for a good overview of cognitive ability testing, as it's one of the more wide spread and important topics in my profession. I know about how intelligence is conceptualized...

June 23, 2005
The "His Dark Materials" trilogy seems to invariably come up when people are asked to recommend "good" fantasy. Indeed, the series has many of the trappings of the genre: epic storyline, magic, prophecy, adventure in a far-off land, and a protagonist who starts off as low born and eventually...

June 16, 2005
I consider myself fairly well read (fun fact: I minored in English Lit in college) but oddly enough I don't think I've read any Hemingway beyond a short story or two. I started remedying that with The Old Man and the Sea, the original fish story about the one...

June 11, 2005
If you picked this book up at the store and thumbed through it, you'd probably conclude that it belongs in the "Humor" section of the bookstore because it's a kind of parody of every dumb thing that victims in zombie horror movies always do. But once you actually start...

June 6, 2005
You know what zen gardens are, right? Like those little desktop trays containing sand, a few pebbles, and a rake that you can use to arrange the "garden" in any way you like, leaving it for the next person to appreciate but ultimately remake according to their own tastes....

May 30, 2005
I'm changing the format of my "now reading" bits to be more "just finished reading" so that I can actually talk about the books. As I've mentioned before, Raymond Feist is one of my guilty reading pleasures, along with Stephen King. Feist is a prolific high fantasy writer whose...

May 24, 2005
I vaguely remember reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe back in grade school, and I think I enjoyed it. With the new Narnia movie coming out at the end of this year, I thought now would be a good time to read this whole series. They're written...

May 21, 2005
I actually have a small stack of books and magazines on photography that my buddy Rhys (hi, Rhys!) lent me. I figure I take so many pictures for this website that I should at least make a token effort at improving myself there. I've also been kicking around the...

May 13, 2005
Normally, I wouldn't include something like this in my "Now Reading" section. But Bone: One Volume Edition is kind of special. It's the marvelous collection of the entire 13 year run of Bone comics, all between two covers. I started to read the Bone books way back in the...

May 10, 2005
This is another one of those books that I know nothing about, except that it's supposed to be a classic. The kind of thing I may have very well been asked to read at some point in high school, but I didn't because I was too far in the...

April 29, 2005
What the heck, I thought I'd keep the Stephen King audiobook momentum going and go from Carrie straight to Rose Madder, since I've had this one sitting around for a while. I think I picked this one up ahead of time because it supposedly had links to the Dark...

April 29, 2005
Coming off a HUGE brick of sci-fi fiction, I thought I'd break it up with something educational. As you can see by virtue of this site, I can build websites. I've built several. But I've never really harnessed the full power of cascading style sheets (CSS) for the web,...

April 26, 2005
I'm still on a quest to read and collect (in hardback) every Stephen King novel. It's like those people that climb Mount Everest or unlock every secret in a video game. Or something. This is actually King's first book. I decided that since he wasn't putting out any more...

April 19, 2005
Popular literature is something that's usually missing from my diet. I tend to oscillate between pulp like Stephen King or Raymond Feist and classics like Steinbeck or Rand, with the periodic nonfiction and/or technical book thrown in for good measure. To remedy that, I picked up Yann Martel's Life...

April 12, 2005
After plodding through Atlas Shrugged and Guns, Germs and Steel, I needed something light. Something fun. Something written with a child's intellect in mind. So I turned to the "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" books. They've been compared (favorably) with the Harry Potter books, which I like...

April 8, 2005
I'm actually halfway through this book already. I'm glad to be reading something other than Atlas Shrugged, but MAN --I really didn't think it would be possible for a discussion of wild cereals to be this boring. I mean that. This book contains an attempt to answer the riddle...

February 7, 2005
I remain skeptical about large chunks of Rand's Objectivism, but I enjoyed The Fountainhead enough to pick up what's supposed to be her mangum opus, Atlas Shrugged. It clocks in at around a billion pages long so I expect to be gnawing on it for a while. From the...

February 2, 2005
Another book that I really don't know anything about, but that I picked up from the library because I recognized the author and the title. The title is apparently a play on "Pilgrim's Progress," the old classic about Christianity by Paul Bunyan, so I think it has to do...

January 22, 2005
All I remember about Franz Kafka is something about turning into a giant bug. I don't think this is that book, unsless the bug is a lawyer, judging from the description below. I'm not sure why this kind of dystopia world gone mad kind of thing appeals to me,...

January 21, 2005
I think this book is about a pearl. Or robots. But not both. It's another endeavor to break out of the sci-fi/horror/fantasy rut that my reading has fallen into. The Pearl strikes me as one of those books that everyone was forced to read in high school, except that...

January 18, 2005
I think this is a book about an immortal frog. At least that's what I remember from the movie based on this book that Geralyn talked me into watching. Also, if I had had my druthers, Samantha would have been named "Winnifred" after one of the characters in this...

January 5, 2005
I don't really know much about these books (Red Mars is the first in a series) but I do hear good things about them. They're something about the colonization of Mars, but the emphasis is supposed to be on the characters and their schemes, relationships, and politics. I thought...

December 30, 2004
The concept of "emotional intelligence" has been bandied around for a while now, usually offered as an alternative to traditional intelligence as a way of explaining/predicting success in life. I had always kind of scoffed at the concept, mainly because it came across as born from the same unscientific...

December 27, 2004
This is the final book in the overly long Otherland saga by Tad Williams. It's the only book in the cyberpunk genre that I've ever enjoyed, though I have to admit to only trying the classics like Stephenson and Gibson. Williams has really created a rich cast of characters...

December 5, 2004
This is the third book in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I'm kind of bummed that Martin won't have the fourth book, A Feast of Crows, out by the time I finish this one. I had hoped not to have to wait too long for him...

December 5, 2004
The biological and evolutionary basis for human behavior has always fascinated me. It's part of the reason I went into the whole psychology thing in the first place. This book's subtitle is "Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule" and it came pretty highly recommended...

March 30, 2004
The other day I finished reading Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brian. If the title sounds familiar, you may be thinking about last year's movie staring Russle Crowe. I liked the movie quite a bit and had heard good things about the books upon which it was based. It was...

February 21, 2004
Tonight I finished The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein. Man, that was dense and a decided pain in places. For those of you unfamiliar with this work, it's basically the mythology of Tolkein's world, starting with the creation of the universe and ending (at a very general overview level) with the...

February 6, 2004
Below is my 30-second summary of Ayn Rand's Anthem, a coming of age story for a mad scientist. It helps if you imagine this being read by The Simpsons's Sideshow Mel: I hate my life angst angst angst angst angst angst angst angst angst look we made a flashlight angst...

January 20, 2004
I'm a Stephen King fan. I've currently trying to collect and read every novel he's published (current score: 25 out of 52), and recently finished up the latest in his Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla. I didn't like it at all. I had originally wrote "hated it" in...

January 8, 2004
Recently I finished George Orwell's Animal Farm. I'd read it before, but have been familiar with the story for a long time. When I was a kid, cable television was brand new. Most of the channels were wanting for content, so they repeated what they had, over and over again....

January 2, 2004
I recently finished "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck. It's a short novel about California ranch workers in the early 1930s, but packed with good stuff right up until the very sad ending. On a purely mechanical level, Steinbeck's capture of the workers' dialect is amazing. They sound like...

December 15, 2003
Every now and again, I come across something that reminds me how powerful the written word can be. There's a handful of books (and the occasional movie) that have really affected the way I see the world and the way I think about certain topics. I recently finished All Quiet...