The story of a boy who grows up in a graveyard and learns the many tricks of the trade of being a ghost. We start off with our hero as a baby, his parents murdered and a madman hot on his trail. The child ends up in the graveyard and falls under the care of a rather tall man who has the power to cloud men’s minds. We also met a Russian woman who possesses some interesting powers of her own. Oh, and the whole graveyard is filled with ghosts, who all end up influencing our young hero one way…
Category: book review
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window
Spoilers and such. Basically, this is a book you should read without knowing anything more than the title. The story of a Swedish Forest Gump and how his miraculous luck leads him from one history changing moment to another. The story is broken into two narratives, one that follows the hundred year old Allan Karlsson as he randomly stumbles through a number of adventures dealing with drug dealers and thugs of one sort or another and the other following around a much younger Allan Karlsson as he alters the course of human history. Along the way he meets…
Watching Movies by Rick Lyman
Watching Movies is a collection of interviews featuring famous film personalities watching their favorite movie and talking about why it’s important to them. It’s a simple idea, but the result is often surprising and occasionally shocking. For instance, Kevin Smith’s favorite film is A Man For All Seasons, a movie about Thomas More, while Woody Allen’s favorite is the western Shane. Other surprises include Quentin Tarantino choosing a Roy Rogers film and Michael Bay picking West Side Story. The mind boggles. Of course, I’m not one to talk; my own favorite film is The Matrix. Movies are one of those…
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Spoilers and such-if you haven’t read the book or seen the film, go do so now. Right now. Like countless authors before and since, Truman Capote didn’t like what Hollywood did to his book. F. Scot Fitzgerald walked out on The Great Gatsby, Stephen King hated The Shinning, Anne Rice didn’t want Tom Cruise to play Lestat, and Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holiday Golightly, Traveling. I think she would have been brilliant in the role, just as she was in everything she ever did, but I’m not sure the 1960 edition of Marilyn would have been…
More Fool Me by Stephen Fry
More Fool Me is the story of Stephen Fry’s life, so far. I’ve been a fan of Stephen Fry since the days of Black Adder I and Jeeves & Wooster. He’s a funny fellow with a great deadpan deliver. He’s also a pretty damned good writer. Making History, a time travel book about Hitler, was shockingly good. More Fool Me is what all autobiographies should be. A bit of history, a bit of reflection, and a bit of actual diary from the good old days. I have been a fan of Stephen Fry for lo these many years, but I…
Being Mortal
We’re all going to die. Easy enough to think about in the abstract. But most of us think about it in terms of the Sun going Nova. Yeah, it’s going to happen, but it’s nothing I need to worry about. Until, that is, it is something to worry about. Being Mortal talks about things like Nursing Homes and Hospice Care and DNRs. This is pretty depressing stuff, but Dr Atul Gawande says it really shouldn’t be. Circle of life and all of that. You are going to die, so it’d be best if you had some idea of how you…
The Martian
A staple of old school science fiction is the lone man stranded on a desolate world who had to survive on his wits alone. The Martian by Andy Weir follows boldly in that tradition with a fun tale filled with adventure and ingenuity. Our hero finds himself stranded on Mars when his fellow astronauts leave him behind. They can be forgiven for this since they thought he was dead. And thus we start a long journey into the trials and tribulations of being a human on Mars. This is a fun book filled with bad jokes and hard science, or…
The Wild Truth–Wildly Boring
A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless. Jon Krakauer Foreword to The Wild Truth Into the Wild is an amazing book about an idiot who starved to death in Alaska. Yeah, I’m one of those people that read Into The Wild and had no sympathy for Chris and his mindless vision quest/walkabout. It was a gripping book, but I had the feeling that Chris was a kid with…
The Art of Asking
It’s been a while since I read a book that I wanted to take out into the streets and push into people’s hands and say:’Here, you HAVE to read this!’ I really loved The Art of Asking, but part of that may be my own mild obsessions with twitter, blogging, and the idea that you can get rich online if you find your people. That whole street performing thing is also failry close to what I did when I was taking portraits on the floor of a busy Wal-Mart store at Christmas time. I’d never heard of Amanda Palmer or…
Proof of Heaven
I had a lot of problems with Proof of Heaven, starting with the fact that all of his ‘proof’ is of the ‘because I say so‘ variety. Like any other zealot, Eben Alexander believes that his word is all anyone needs to take everything he says as absolute truth. Instead of taking a scientific look at his near death experience, he jumps right into I Was With The Great God Om mode. He says that he never took NDEs seriously, but now that he has had one, he’s a pure evangelist for the fact that his hallucinations were absolutely real.…