Archive for Books
I loved Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale when I read it circa 1990, so I was disappointed to later learn that he’s a conservative commentator. His 1996 short book A City in Winter has been sitting on my bookcase for a couple of decades now; part of my delay in reading it has been hesitancy […]
I’m thinking about what the difference is between an amazing major revelation late in a story (I’ll call this a Big Reveal) and an annoying Surprise Twist Ending. Here are some of my thoughts. Some examples of good Big Reveals of the sort that I’m thinking of (no specific spoilers here, but I suppose that […]
My pick-a-random-unread-book system recently picked Joanna Russ’s reviews-and-essays collection The Country You Have Never Seen. I’m not normally a big reader of reviews—I don’t hate them, they’re just not something I tend to be super into. But in this case, I laughed out loud half a dozen times in the first couple dozen pages. Partly […]
I’m continuing to read/skim Fernand Braudel’s 1980(ish) The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (volume 1 of his three-volume work Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century). I continue to find it a mix of fascinating and annoying—there’s a wealth of information here about what Braudel calls “material life” around the world during that […]
More books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Also some VHS tapes. (At the end of this post.) This list contains about 50 new items since the previous list I posted (in November). A total of about 260 items here (minus however many have been claimed since […]
Short version of this post: I’m looking for recommendations for books to read aloud that feature more character diversity and less wince-inducing prejudice than my longstanding favorite read-aloud books tend to have. (But I have more criteria than that; see below.) Longer version follows. I’m looking specifically for books that meet all of the following […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Also some VHS tapes. (At the end of this post.) This list contains about 60 new items since the previous list I posted (in July). A total of about 230 items here (minus however many have been claimed since I […]
Back in 2010, I posted about classic works of literature reworked as movies set in a modern high school. Comments on that post led me to expand my definitions a bit, and I’ve seen a couple more such movies since then. So I thought I would post the updated list: Movie Year Original What I […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Also some VHS tapes. (At the end of this post.) This list contains a bunch more items than the previous list I posted (back in November). About 375 items here (minus however many have been claimed since I posted this). […]
I don’t remember when I first encountered Gödel, Escher, Bach. The book was published in 1979, but I don’t think I ran into it until about five years later. I suspect that my father had a copy, and that that was the one that I saw. But not sure of that, either. I know that […]
A while back, I posted a chronological list of Le Guin’s major books, mostly put together by my friend Chaos. But lately, I’ve been wanting an expansion of that list that includes the original publication dates of short stories and essays. So here’s a fuller chronological list, ordered by publication year (and alphabetically within a year), […]
Just noticed that it’s been a month since I posted here. I guess that means it’s time for another status-update post. A little less avoidant than last time I posted here. Have made progress on various things; for example, finished the ebook of Mary Anne’s cookbook, and continue to asymptotically approach being done with the […]