An old roommate of mine worked for a company that organized trade conferences, and one day he came home from a publishing conference with a pile of free books. “You like books, right? Here…” I sold some of them on Amazon and gave others to Goodwill, but one I hung on to was Heavy Rotation:… Continue reading Twenty Soundtracks to Twenty Different Lives: A Review of the Essay Collection Heavy Rotation
Tag: books
An Assortment of Colorful Words: Peter Richards’ Nude Siren
If any of you read my last book review on James Tate’s A Worshipful Company of Fletchers, you know that I’ve readily admitted that I don’t do a lot of recreational reading. I won’t go into every reason why, but predominantly it’s because I spend a whole lot of my time writing, favoring a hands-on… Continue reading An Assortment of Colorful Words: Peter Richards’ Nude Siren
Not Your Mainstream Novels: The Anomalies and Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel
Way back in another life, I worked at a children’s publishing house in New York City. One of the perks was people who worked at other publishing houses would trade review copies of books with us, and people would put the ones they didn’t want in boxes around the building. The books inside were free… Continue reading Not Your Mainstream Novels: The Anomalies and Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel
Great Minds Think Alike (And They Don’t)
As a follower of (too) many atheist Facebook pages, I heard about the book The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer last year. This book’s purpose was to explain why some people believe in God and some don’t. As someone who decided at the age of five that there was no such thing as a god,… Continue reading Great Minds Think Alike (And They Don’t)
Dancing with a Giant Book: Review of Martin’s A Dance with Dragons
North of the Wall, a skinchanger enters a wolf’s body and gorges himself on human flesh. Thousands of miles to the south, a fourteen-year-old queen tends to three ferocious dragons in the hopes that they will win back her ancestral empire. In between, a beaten populace has more immediate concerns than wargs and winged… Continue reading Dancing with a Giant Book: Review of Martin’s A Dance with Dragons
The Other Underground Scene
As much as I love reading, most of my time is dedicated to textbooks as I unwisely earn degree after degree. One book that I was able to sneak in that has haunted me ever since is The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth (1993). The author… Continue reading The Other Underground Scene
Book Review: Shock Value
“The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the filmmaker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of propriety and decency.” Wes Craven It is with this quote that Jason Zinoman opens his book, Shock Value: How a few eccentric outsiders gave… Continue reading Book Review: Shock Value