To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A photographer for the Washington Post has a listicle up called Books for the Ages which includes a book (or a series, or more) for each year of life. It’s a silly list, but it’s an excuse for me to compare what I’ve read against the list. Books I’ve read I’ve put in bold; books […]
Well, I finally finished this book. I read the comic book adaptation of this book last year, and I knew that the comic book adaptation left a lot of things out–I suspect there are panels in the comic with scenes that are hundreds of pages apart in the book. My beautiful wife read the book […]
Perhaps the theme of this year’s reading will be “Clearing out thin books from the shelves and side tables.” This particular volume is an old “juvenile” book about electronics as you can see from the cover. I say “juvenile” in quotes because books don’t really get classed as “juvenile” any more, do they? It’s “young […]
It’s been almost a day since a small business owner came around the counter and put me in a martial arts hold, but we’ll come to that by an by. I bought this book in December at the same time I bought Taekwondo Kyorugi. I don’t consider myself a martial artist, but here I am […]
The middle of last year, I got a couple of high scores at the local arcade. I mused that the scores had been reset recently as they weren’t very high. When we went back last week when our kids were on Christmas break, I discovered how it works: 1984 resets its annual high scores on […]
I bought this book at Half Price books here in Springfield, Missouri, (not the one in Kansas) earlier this year, but apparently I did not mention it in a blog post. I do that, sometimes, when I only buy a book or two at a stop. Like last Saturday, when I stopped in ABC Books […]
The room was blue, a muted blue that was supposed to be warm and subdued, a blue that was supposed to evoke community. The bluer curtains were drawn and offered a contrast to the wallpaper of the back wall. The little shapes, whatever they were, blurred together and made a mosaic with the white space […]
I picked this book from my to-read shelves because, whenever I turned around at my desk to talk to my beautiful wife, the red dot that indicates that it was a dollar book I bought from Hooked on Books once upon a time (probably before this blog existed, werd). I’m very conscious of the red […]
As part of a continuing series called “Brian J.’s Three Quarter Life Crisis” (previous entries include “Brian J. Learns A Martial Art”, “Brian J. Does Triathlons”, and “Brian J. Publishes A Book Of Poems“), I took gift cards from Christmas and my recent birthday and bought an electric guitar. To be honest, it is not […]
I’ve read a couple of things on other blogs recently that I’ve disagreed with. So, here, let me briefly note them: From Hoosier Boy, we get a rip on the classics: To the meat of the matter: Catch-22 is drivel; unreadable schmaltz. So is From Here to Eternity. In fact, many of the so-called classics […]
Yesterday, we got the informational brochure for the upcoming season of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra: Well, now. You might wonder if perhaps the SSO is showing sympathy for the “Resistance” to the current duly elected President of the United States. Artistic types do tend to fall into the liberal camp. But Springfield, and its denizens, […]
I’ve mentioned over and over that I was listening to a lecture series on Chinese history. Welp, I finished it. I also read the guidebook that came with the course, and if you’re wondering if I counted it as a book on my annual list, yes, I did. The lecture series itself was many hours […]
2015 marked the twentieth anniversary of my brief foray into editing and publishing my own magazine. Let me take you a bit down memory lane and tell you the story of the St. Louis Artesian briefly.
As some of you know, I met my beautiful wife on the Internet. Not the World Wide Web: We’re old school and met on the rec.arts.poems newsgroup. She read something that I’d posted and thought it was good, and because my handle indicated I was from St. Louis, she emailed me to ask me where […]
This book is a bit thicker on content than many of the photo-centric books I spend my Sunday afternoons with. The book contains a pretty good history of the Shaker movement, from their leaders being expelled from the Quaker movement to the different communities established in New England and the east to the eventual thinning […]
This book is pretty short, about 130 pages with 30 some pages of introduction. As I’ve recently rediscovered, one should generally read the introduction to classical literature college textbook editions last. So I did with this book. Spoiler alert: Ivan Ilyich dies. The story itself covers the life of Ivan Ilyich briefly, discussing his youth, […]
This book is a collection of short stories MacDonald wrote for various slicks throughout the 1950s. Although some of them feature a crime, others do not, so they show the range of things MacDonald could make interesting. The collection includes: “Hangover”: As a man awakens from a night of overindulging at a corporate function, he […]
As I mentioned, I got this book at the end of December with a Christmas gift card from ABC Books, who were having a half off sale on Folio Society books at the time, which is why I ended up with such a la-di-da edition. But Folio books are pretty handsome editions with heavyweight paper […]
On the Facebook, I said: Have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t have a copy of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. I should get one.”? Because I have. Because, well, I have.. I’m reading a book about Thomism–you’ll hear about it eventually–and I thought that I haven’t read much of Aquinas, even in my Catholic […]
This book almost makes me regret saying: It’s an interesting bit, an enjoyable little read from the era–the middle 1960s through, what, the 1980s? where the future is dystopian and overcrowded and the plots are novel and clever. The book collects three stories, only the third of which I would call novel or clever. The […]