Wingman, by Manus Pinkwater The 3rd book I’ve read in the past week to make me cry. Too short to write too much about, save to say that Daniel Pinkwater (yes, he used his middle name as his first on this book) is an author who can tell a heartwarming tale I can believe in, …
Tag Archives: books
600 Books (not really)
This book made me cry for democracy. In both the transitive and intransitive senses. Since I first began tracking my reading after getting all of my books catalogued in a database a little over five years ago, I have treated comics and graphic novels almost as bastard stepchildren, not counting them fully in my ‘Books …
Monday Book Report: R Is For Rocket
R Is For Rocket, by Ray Bradbury The short story collection R Is For Rocket is designed to appeal to young adults (our current nomenclature for children who read), especially young boys growing up in the dawn of the Space Age. Reading it now made this once-young man cry several times, both for the limpid …
Monday Book Report: 3 Civic Voices from the Crepuscule of the Before Time
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. How to Overthrow the Government, by Arianna HuffingtonShrub, by Molly Ivins & Lou DuboseStupid White Men, by Michael Moore I have said before that reading political works years after their publication is an instructional exercise. The intervening years make plainer the ingrained biases of both the …
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500 Books
I have finally finished reading my 500th book since I started tracking such data back in June of 2015. This half-millennium mark was crossed by the completion of the sociological study of consumer habits of the lower-class project dwellers in Manhattan, The Poor Pay More. I received this book in error thinking instead to receive …
Monday Book Report: The Lies That Bind
The Lies That Bind, by Kate Carlisle (A Bibliophile Mystery, #3 in the series) Kate Carlisle is no Raymond Chandler, and her book—The Lies That Bind—is an affront to his project of raising mystery fiction to the level of literature. If anything, the author of this, the third in the series of so-called ‘Bibliophile Mysteries’, …
Monday Book Report: Journey To The Impossible
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Banality of Feeble Dept. Journey To The Impossible: Designing an Extraordinary Life, by Scott Jeffrey This is perhaps the worst book I have ever read in my life. I was sorely tempted just to let the above sentence be my entire report upon this piece …
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Monday Book Report: The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories
The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, by Horacio Quiroga To master the short story is to possess the ability to tersely describe the critical moment, the veritable crux of events, ideas, and emotions—and to capture that moment so that readers can contemplate and appreciate the revealed profundity in these smallest of prose packages. Hector Quiroga—a …
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Book Note: Photo Quotes
Monday Book Report: Sea Of Grass
Sea Of Grass, by Conrad Richter (1936) This very brief (just over a hundred pages, in the edition I read) narrative is a prose poem, a threnody for a lost time and place, New Mexico when it was new in the American imagination. As well, it is a meditation on the mystery of marriage and …