Entries in the "Books" Category

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
Note: This is book 5 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge I think it's official: I hate Neil Stephenson. I hated his so called cyberpunk classic Snow Crash --a fact that sets me apart from most of the nerdegalian-- and I really hated Quicksilver. Quicksilver is kind...

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...