Aunt Laurie once recommended this book to me, and sometime after she died I picked it up at a used book store. I didn’t make any plans to read it until one day stumbling across a really good blog post, looking into the author, and learning that it was Robin Sloan, author of this book. I think the blog post was [this one, …
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I bought this having never heard of it, because the cover said it contained “18 previously unpublished letters by C.S. Lewis.” It was one of the best books I read this year. This is an autobiography/memoir, largely about how Sheldon Vanauken (Van) met his wife (Davy), their love and marriage as pagans, how they became friends with …
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Gilson describes two “spiritual families” (philosophies of theology) of the Middle Ages. “The first… was made up of those theologians according to whom Revelation had been given to men as a substitute for all other knowledge, including science, ethics and metaphysics.” (5) “Since God …
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Did not finish. The style is doing most of the heavy lifting here. If this same story were told in a straightforward way, it would be sappy and melodramatic. It made me think of The Intuitionist, but that book was more subtle, artful, and had other points to make and more of a story to tell.
I gave this one 100 pages, but I have other …
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Excellent. My favorite by McCarthy. Blood Meridian was probably better as an opus, but this was a lot more fun and compelling. The movie is VERY true to the book. The book has more of Sherriff Bell’s inner thoughts as he is getting older, interspersed between chapters.
If I’d started underlining things, I would have marked …
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A double rarity for me: reading a graphic novel (er, graphic biography?), and reading a book in the year it came out. The original (French) version came out in 2024. This was highly recommended by Austin Kleon, and I really enjoyed it!
Lots of interesting bits about the early history of photography and film. Niepce created the first photograph in 1827, …
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I often check the humor section of Half Price Books for anything by Simon Rich, and last week I was rewarded with this, his second book (from 2008). A book can be really enjoyable without making me actually laugh out loud, but I did laugh out loud several times as I read this one.
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This book was published in 1977. It is about the 60s drug culture, but it’s set in 1994 with holo-scanners and scramble suits because that’s how PKD writes about his life and experiences. I think this is the best of all the PKD books and stories I’ve read – genuinely Good Literature. Here are things I noted:
Charles …
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What’s good about this book is the magical system, allomancy. Allomancers swallow small amounts of metal, feel them internally, and can “burn” them to get special powers, like strength (pewter), enhanced senses (tin), the ability to push (steel) and pull (iron) metal objects, the ability to detect allomancy in use (bronze), the …
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This book transcribes an hour-long conversation between DFW and BAG from February 2006, mostly about usage. I read it in a couple of hours.
DFW views a “draft” as a complete document. With computers, people just keep changing things until they are happy with it. (31)
Writing as “expressing yourself” …
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