Kaeta got me this book for Christmas. We watched the movie as a family, and now I can say that the movie definitely captures the spirit of the book. Not everything in it is strictly true, but mostly it is.
In the 1940s, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) needed human “computers” to help scientists and …
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Simon Rich was still a Harvard student when he published this book in 2007. He had been president of the Lampoon and went on to write for SNL. This book reads just like many pieces in the Lampoon; everything is short (1-2 pages), built around some comedic premise, and whittled down to the absolute minimum required for the joke. Loved it!
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Spoilers follow. This starts out feeling like a horror story, and it has that category on the copyright page. Yet even though you spend the first half of the book expecting to meet a serial killer at any moment, no one dies, and the story is ultimately about mothers and fathers, loss, and trying to heal your own wounds. The end of the …
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Daniel’s been wanting me to read this for a while, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s an original fairy tale about the Kingdom of Cornucopia, whose king (Fred the Fearless) is vain but harmless. Fred’s advisors Spittleworth and Flapoon, however, are wicked, and they convince the King to tax the people heavily to protect …
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Ethan Nicolle (until recently of the Babylon Bee) has started a couple of Chesterton reading groups, and people ask him what GKC work they should read first. So he collected these 14 essays to help introduce people to Chesterton’s work.
Nicolle added an intro and footnotes to each essay. The footnotes are not …
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The tale of Gamestop. This would have been more interesting if I hadn’t been following the story initially. And the book includes some personal stories that don’t seem to go anywhere; there’s no “what happened to them later,” so it feels like filler. Short and interesting enough, just not as good as other …
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“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
I have had trouble reading sci-fi in recent years (see my notes from Startide Rising). Flipping through Dune before starting to read, I expected the same thing. It’s hard for me, out of the gate, to care about Bene Gesserits, Harkonnens, Guilds, Dukes, etc. Like the comedian Pete …
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[Jefferson asked Washington] over breakfast why the President had agreed to a two-house Congress... Washington replied with his own question: "Why did you pour your tea into that saucer?" And when Jefferson answered, "To cool it," Washington said, "Just so. We pour House legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it." …
Here are all the books I read in 2021:
January 2021
February 2021
April 2021
June 2021
Pastor recommended this, and I wanted to read it before reading Lincoln in the Bardo.
He often wept in public and recited maudlin poetry. He told jokes and stories at odd times – he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. As a young man he talked of suicide, and as he grew older, he said he saw the world as hard …
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