I’m not a fan of Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen her show and I missed the season of Last Comic Standing that was her breakout moment. But I do like memoirs, even pretty bad memoirs can have one or two good moments. I love the title of The Girl With Lower Back Tattoo. That is pure fucking genius. By the way, Amy loves the word fuck. And the word fucking. And the words clit, cunt, pussy, vagina, asshole, cock, dick, penis, shit, bastard, and pretty much any other word you have ever heard that might in any way make you uncomfortable.…
Category: book review
The Big Fat Surprise
Carbohydrates are bad, refined and processed carbohydrates are evil incarnate. Nina Teicholz covers the history of food recommendations in American history. Along the way she talks about fad diets, popular trends, myths, misconceptions, and outright lies designed to line the pockets of the people who benefit from a fat and lazy American population. Nina Teicholz goes out of her way to give the benefit of the doubt to these people who actively grew rich while we all grew fat. I would send them off to The Hague for crimes against humanity. Like Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, Nina tells the…
Dracula
[easyazon_link identifier=”B007B7GOYQ” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Dracula[/easyazon_link] by Bram Stoker. Performed by Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Simon Vance, Katherine Kellgren, Susan Duerden, John Lee, Graeme Malcolm, and Steven Crossley. I read Dracula many years ago, about the same time I read Frankenstein,The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. A bit of overload on the Victorian novels. So I found this audiobook with Alan Cumming doing most of the heavy lifting and thought I would give it a listen. I have to say the cast here did an amazing job. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Dracula, whereas…
Eat Street
The ManBQue Guide to Making Street Food at Home Any fan of Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern knows that the best food to be had is street food. The good folks at Manbque know this as well. I had never heard of Manbque, but that didn’t stop me from reading their cookbook. I’m a bit of a cookbook junkie. I pick up just about every one I run across and flip through the pages. As a photographer I look at the photos, as a foodie I check out the recipes. Both are pretty good. I like the writing style used in Eat…
The Truth
I read The Game not long after it came out. It’s a fun, crazy, bizarre story about the world of pick-up artists. It’s not really about how to pick up women, but about the loose collection of losers who charge other losers a high price to share their secrets. Neil doesn’t really fit in with these guys, but he does end up getting pretty good at getting women’s phone numbers. He doesn’t seem too interested in calling most of them though. In The Truth, we find Neil a few years later. He’s a sadder and wiser fellow now. He realizes that it’s wrong to want to have sex with…
Dead Ice
Laurell K. Hamilton wrote the first Anita Blake book in 1993, so it is a bit odd when Anita mentions how old she feels, now that she’s 31, instead of the 46 she should be. Of course, being the Human Servant of a Master Vampire, she’s not aging much anyway. Dead Ice starts off like an old fashioned Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book. There’s a bit of zombie raising that doesn’t go exactly as planned followed by a call from the Authorities that they need her help on a case. Be still my heart, monster and slayer action! Then we…
The King’s Justice
I’m so used to waiting ten or fifteen years for a new work from Stephen R. Donaldson, that I was totally shocked to see The King’s Justice. There are two novellas here, The King’s Justice and Augur’s Gambit. Both are set in magical worlds where the use of magic takes its toll on its users. These are stories with big words and often bothersome names. The cast of Augur’s Gambit includes Inimica Phlegathon decry the Fourth, the Queen’s Hieronomer, and her daughter Excrucia. Geez Louise. On the flip side, the hero of the King’s Justice is named Black. The stories…
Ready Player One
That 80’s Nerd Book. Ready Player One tells the story of the future, told through the eyes of a man forced to relive the 1980s. In the future, VR has taken over. Everyone spends most of their time jacked into the Matrix, here called The Oasis. They use Virtual Reality Headsets and gloves, and the richer folks use full body systems. Our hero, however, is not a rich guy. He’s a poor schmuck who lives in a stack of trailers outside of OKC. The creator of The Oasis dies, after becoming very rich, and he proclaims he will leave it…
The Soul of an Octopus
A lion named Cecile was killed by a lowlife dentist not too long ago. This was big news. Pro-Lion and Pro-Hunter formed groups. He was Evil! He was just thinning the Herd! It was a hot topic on the Morning Shows. The gang at CBS Morning News were all outraged that this great cat was killed. A bit later, they talked about a new restaurant. A fun place where you picked out the fish you wanted to eat from a live tank. The fish was then killed, cooked, and served right in front of the customers. The very same self…
Brain on Fire:My Month of Madness
I grew up with a bit of madness around me. My older brother was bipolar, my older sister was also a bit nuts, but she was never officially diagnosed with anything. Over the years I’ve had plenty of moments when I felt a bit crazy myself. I’ve read a lot of books on the brain and it’s usually a scary bit of business. As one doctor put it, we are all one head injury away from being someone else. Susannah Cahalan is a reporter who discovers that she is slowly loosing her mind. At first she is able to notice…