The Dumbest Generation

There was this rant the other day on NPR from some snot nosed kid whining about what a bunch of losers Baby Boomers are and how they dropped the ball. Nothing new, the same old Your Day is Over and Our Day is Just Beginning crap that every generation delivers at some point to the generation preceding it. The world will be a perfect place when all these old bastards are dead. But a funny thing happens, a whole new crop of old bastards shows up and takes their place. Only to be told by the new kids how much…

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Lost by Gregory Maguire

Several years ago I was reading a book on writing. I used to do that rather a lot. This particular book had a series of exercises in it. A writing book that tells you to actually do something is the best kind in my experience. One of the exercises was to tell a story from the point of view of the villain, to make the villain a sympathetic character. I wrote a story about The Wicked Witch of the West. As is the case of many writers such as I myself, I did not follow through on this story and…

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The No Complaining Rule

I have been a self help junkie for a long time and I am not too demanding of my self help books. I expect them to keep me interested and hopeful while I am reading them. This can be a bit of challenge with old warhorses like Think and Grow Rich, which is baffling in it’s ancient histories and team building strategies. But most modern self help writers have followed in the footsteps of Kenneth H. Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager and several follow up books-all of which cost about twenty dollars and were about twenty pages long.…

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Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner

Reader Laura Hicks gives Julie Kenner’s Carpe Demon a light and airy read. She was clearly more impressed with the comic aspects of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom than the more serious ones. The story was a bit silly, would it have been better with a more serious reader? AudioFile seemed to think so. I think a good reader can improve a book, but in the end, it still comes down to the written words they are reading. I always liked Buffy The Vampire Slayer-I was not a fan of the movie, but the television series. I loved the whole set…

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Armageddon’s Children by Terry Brooks

Armageddon’s Children by Terry Brooks is a prequel to the Sword of Shannara and the many other Shannara books. Once your a successful writer, like Terry Brooks, you don’t have to bother with stuff like plot logic and story structure and character development-you can if you want to, but why bother? I read The Sword of Shannara when I was right out of High School, and I wasn’t that crazy about it then. Terry Brooks is one of those writers who inspires non-writers to take up the craft of fiction writing. If this guy got published, so can I. So…

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Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel is a challenging book. The story of a Father and Daughter who move around the country a lot and have the richest, fullest intellectual lives this side of Professor Higgins chatting away with a second, younger, female Professor Higgins with side commentary provided by Sherlock Holmes. If I had not listened to Emily Janice Card’s brilliant audio book version, I doubt that I could have plowed through this baffling and brazen bit of business. I used to read a lot of books on writing. Mainly on writing Science Fiction. I whipped out…

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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die

As with all such lists, it is purely a matter of taste as to which 1001 Albums You Must Listen To Before You Die. Flipping though the dense and heavy tome I found that I had already listened to a good number of the 1001 Albums, but was shocked by the albums that I had never even heard of. I like to think of my taste is a bit eclectic and kind of with it-at least up until about 1985 when music took a hard turn which throw me into a ditch. It should be possible to pack all 1001…

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The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella

I really like this The Undomestic Goddess-though it is as predictable as it is possible for a book to be. Like a mystery or a romance, it is predictable in a good way. We start out with our hero, Samantha, not being able to sew on a button or cook anything beyond toast-and she is a bit iffy the toast.But Samantha is a whiz bang lawyer who can do complex math problems in her head. She is about to be made Partner at Carter-Sphinx, when she finds a bit of paper buried under the mess on her desk-she has not…

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Geoff Dyer-Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered

One of the stores in Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it is about a trip to Cambodia. I have read this story several times, and yet, each time I read it, it is shocking in its details and how pointless it all seems. Geoff Dyer is a dead brilliant writer-reading him makes me both want to write, and to give up writing as I will never be as good at it as he is. He sprinkles his writing with quotations and speaks as if he was there when Auden decided to say that Sunsets…

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Going Postal-Another Disc World Book

Terry Pratchett is a very funny writer-but to honest I like the audio book versions of his Discworld books better than the paper ones. While it is true that they both contain, more or less, the same exact words-the audio books have the considerable talents of Stephen Briggs-who does a really good job of bringing those words to life. I am a great fan of accents-all kinds of accents-I can speak in a vast multitude of funny, odd, silly, and often totally incomprehensible voices. I have been told that I ought to have an audio edition of my blog and…

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