Wild tells the story of a lone woman’s trek along the Pacficic Crest Trail, commonly referred to as the PCT. This is a hiking trail that goes from Mexico to Canada along a range of mountains and deserts and forests. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long, as Cheryl Strayed so eloquently puts it. I’m not a hiker, but I have enjoyed the books about the PCT that have found their way into my hands. Wild is more than a book about hiking, it’s also about Cheryl’s life, the death of her mother, and the hazards…
Category: book review
Not That Kind of Girl
Lena Dunham is the soon not to be twenty-something uber star of her generation. Her book, much like her TV Show, Girls, is filled to the brim with hip and trendy lingo that helps to add a bit of spice to stories of sex, drugs, and illnesses. She is a fan of footnotes, but they are never where I need them. Her footnotes explain how she was feeling and not what the hell JAP means (best google guess is Jewish American Princess) or what Adderall is supposed to be used for when college kids aren’t getting stoned on the stuff.…
Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux
The story of a man who used to be a writer, but takes a job as a hotel manager when he falls in love with Hawaii. It’s a collection of 80 short stories, with a loose fitting narrative that weaves a few of the elements from one story into the next. Some of the stories are fun, others silly, and several are just tragic. Like any good novel, you wind up becoming attached to these people, even though many of them only have walk on parts of a scene or two, they leave a lasting impression. There were a number…
Lock In by John Scalzi
John Scalzi has written a few very fun books, including Red Shirts and Old Man’s War. Lock In covers a lot of familiar Sci-fi territory, but it’s still fun. One of the major gimmicks in Old Man’s War was that old people could trade their used up old bodies in for shiny new bodies that were very tough. This is kind of a foundantion story about how this tech might have come into being. We have a lot of people who got sick with a disease that left them paralyzed, but conscious-thus locked in. So naturally our hero is a…
Cryptonomicon
A few Spoilers All writers love doing research. There’s nothing quite as fun as, say, deciding to write a book about Nazi submarines and then going about the business of becoming the world’s leading authority on Nazi Submaries. The reason to do this is that when you mention, in passing, in one or two paragraphs, that funny looking little shinny bit of metal sticking out of the wall just so is called (Insert Proper and Correct Nomeclacure Here) and not a thingamajig or whatsit. The danger, of course, is that the writer will not just drop a few random Nazi…
Sandman Slim
We start off with our hero escaping from hell. He wakes up on a pile of burning trash in LA. He talks about the hard times he had Downtown, as he likes to call Hell. Turns out his is a Magician, part of a group of supernatrals living among the humans. There are a lot of Angels and Demons and other things that are not quit the normal creepy crawlers of horror stories, but are pretty close. One thing leads to another and he pretty quickly meets an old friend and cuts off his head. He’s good at this kind…
Lies, Inc by Philip K Dick
Published in 1966 as The Unteleported Man, Lies, Inc takes the short story and makes it longer and less focused. Lies, Inc has a number of odd futurisms. We have trans-galactic travel and time travel of a sort, but we also have everyone using magnet tape to record and send messages. It’s also very much a Man’s World in Lies, Inc. We have a couple of women characters, but they are mainly sex toys for the heroes, even when they are smarter than the heroes. Most amazing of all, the villains in the piece are left over Nazis. Wasn’t this…
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Spoilers and such. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Lolita tells the story of a 37 year old man who falls in love with a 12 year old girl. While such a match only happens in cults these days, it was common enough a hundred years ago that the age of consent in many states was a jaw dropping ten years old. But it was not legal, as…
The Calorie Myth
The first person I saw that had this radical idea that everyone in America is sick because of what we eat was Dr Amen with his books about Brain health. People with similar views of the Western Diet followed. People like Mark Hyman (The Ultramind Solution) and JJ Virgin (The Virgin Diet) and Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) and one of my personal heroes Michael Pollan whose written a ton of great books including In Defense of Food and Cooked. Now I can add The Calorie Myth by Jonathan Bailor to the chorus of books touting the idea that…
Editing Made Easy
I’ve been working on a couple of novels over the past few months. The rough drafts are easy enough. The revisions have been more of a challenge. The editing is enough to make me consider employment in either the food service or housekeeping professions. As a blogger, I have never had the luxury or burden of an Editor. With the exception of the on-board spell checker, I’m free to rattle off my thoughts in as random and scatter shot a fashion as I choose. And hence, I have a blog with a readership that must reach at least the teens.…