QaQ [duh]-Klingon for Well, duh from on online Klingon translation program. I found a wonderfully odd little book called In The Land of Invented Languages. It’s the story of about nine hundred made up languages and the sad fate that all of them have befallen. Well, all of them except Klingon. Of all the high ideals and noble goals of such silliness as Esperanto and Vela, whose inventors want nothing less than one spoken tongue for all mankind, Klingon is as close to a living language as any of them have come. Not to say that we will be seeing…
Category: book review
Beatrice and Virgil
Read Beatrice and Virgil first. I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. Oscar Wilde I’ve never been a huge fan of super stylized novels. I wasn’t impress that noon fell in the exact center of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I never understood or agreed with the countless interpretations of Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. The Road was nothing but style and didn’t impress me all that much. Having said that I really loved Life of Pi-a book that filled with…
That Old Cape Magic
The only other Richard Russo book I have read is Empire Falls-a rather depressing bit of business where the bad guys go unpunished and the hero is a total wanker. But it was still a good read. That Old Cape Magic is also set in the Northeast with a few references to the mid-fucking-west. The heart of the story is about summers spent on Cape Cod and time spent in Maine. It’s about a son who hates his mom and dad and how they hate him. It’s a story of adultery, betrayal, and one man’s failure in all the parts…
To Kill A Mocking Bird
Harper Lee’s novel about a small girl named Scout, her father Atticus, and her brother Jem set during the glory days of the Great Depression in the small, and small-minded, Alabama town of Maycomb. We follow Scout through three eventful years in which we get to know the bigoted, ignorant, and downright hateful white trash, the often martyred and noble population of African Americans, and handful of people like Atticus and his children who don’t hate everyone they meet. The audio book is read to perfection by the brilliant Sissy Spacek. Her soft Southern accent giving just the right feel…
The 4-Hour Workweek
Having been a self help junkie for the better part of my life, I meant to read The 4-Hour Workweek when it first came out, but somehow missed it. So I recently ran across the Expanded and Updated version and I have to admit that I am both excited and skeptical about the whole idea. First the excited part. Here is the story of a man living his dreams, traveling the world, surfing, doing martial arts, living Like A Millionaire as he likes to put it. He pays for his lifestyle by running a company that only takes four hours…
The Demon in The Freezer
I’ve always been a fan of End of The World stories. My favorite style of these are called cosy catastrophes, in which the world’s population is dwindled down to just a handful of people who inevitably try to kill each other. The Demon is the Freezer is not a cosy catastrophe, it’s the true story of the greatest killer in human history-Smallpox. Not as glamorous as Hantavirus or Ebola and saddled with a down right silly sounding name, Smallpox is a mind numbingly nasty bit of business whose sole job in life is to kill people in the most horrible…
Born Round
The story of Frank Bruni-former food critic for The New York Times-and his love/hate relationship with food. It is often funny and occasionally serious with a few too many sides of Frank’s tumultuous homosexuality. Frank wants to make it clear that ever aspect of his being is profoundly effected by his relationship with what he eats, how much he weights, and what his waist size happens to be at the moment. I read Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires a few years back, in which the hyper-uber-super-foodie talked about being the Restaurant Critic for the New York Times and how she…
Ten Thousand Hours
Outliers:The Story of Success is an amazing and a very profound book. On the one hand the argument is simple and easy for anyone to see and understand. Standard issue Nature vs Nurture stuff-if you do something often enough, say ten thousand hours, than you are more likely to be good at that something than someone who merely does for, say seven thousand hours. The interesting bit is that he tosses out Nature altogether and tells us flatly that it is all 100% nurture. I remember being great inspired after I read Think and Grow Rich-one of the original self-help/self-made-man…
Bad Dogs Have More Fun
This audio book is a double blast from the past for me. First the reader is Artie Johnson-for me he will forever and always be that dirty old man that Ruth Buzzi pounded with her handbag on Laugh In. And second, John Grogan does such an amazing job of channeling Erma Bombeck and her obsessions with The Burbs that I felt like checking the cover from time to time to check the author’s name. Bad Dogs Have More Fun is a brilliant bit of business, full of fun, silliness, seriousness, and all those days in the life anecdotes that make…
A Long Stone’s Throw
Listening to Alphie McCourt’s audio book I have to wonder if John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway had any siblings and if they were asked to write books. Frank McCourt was a brilliant writer with a magnificent style that brought you into his tragic story and made you feel as if you were there with him. Malachy McCourt also pales greatly when compared to Frank. And sadly, as with Malachy’s books, I couldn’t finish Alphie’s rather dull story of his uneventful life. . The Audiobook version is read by Alphie McCourt and he does have a quite lovely way of speaking.…