Tag: books
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bonk
I was reading a chapter of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 last night and ran across the name “Adrien van der Donck.” Isn’t that fantastic? He was in New York back when the place was lousy with Dutch people and was known as the New Netherlands and, later or earlier (I’m Read.
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listening
The most frustrating thing about lying awake is having to listen to everybody else sleep. The cats snore, My Darling B purrs, even the house seems to be relaxing as it settles on its foundations, creaking and popping. I’m the only one lying still and quiet. If insomnia’s good for anything, though, I get plenty Read.
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heaven
This is the library of the Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum in Higashi Osaka, Japan. I want to live there for the rest of my life. Photo from the article in the blog Architect Day about the architect Tadao Ando, who designed the library. Read.
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beer
Edwin Layton was a Japanese linguist and cryptanalyst in the Navy during World War Two. As you might imagine, he has a few interesting stories to tell, and lucky for you and me he wrote them down in a book titled, “And I was there,” which I’m reading right now. Favorite story I read today: Read.
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fix
I spent yesterday fixing a book case. I didn’t plan to. It was just one of those things. I happened to walk past it, looked up at the top and noticed that it had walked about an inch from where I wedged it against the ceiling about a year ago. This was no ordinary book Read.
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father’s day
It’s father’s day, a day I can claim entirely as my own to do with however I please. Just waste it doing nothing, or even less than nothing, if I want to. “Less than nothing doesn’t even make sense,” you say. “How can you do less than nothing?” You know how people say, “That’s a Read.
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smashing
A friend at work caught me reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb while I stood outside the main entrance of the office building, read the cover, and said, “Well, this can’t be good. Does it come with blueprints and directions?” Funnily enough, when I bought the book I had the idea that it was Read.
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prize
Here’s what I love about buying the vast majority of the used books I’ve collected over the years from the shelves of the local thift store, Saint Vincent de Paul’s. Each and every day that the weather allows it, I take a walk from the office on East Washington Ave down the Yahara river foot Read.
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Weekend Fun
And so ends a lovely three-day weekend we filled by reading books and watching videos. I’m still working on A Crack In The Edge Of The World, Simon Winchester’s history of the San Francisco earthquake, only he’s so into geology it’s more like a history of the entire planet’s geological past. Seriously, he goes all Read.
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The Path Between The Seas
I enjoy reading about the turn of the century quite a lot. Not the last turn of the century, that one was a cosmic let-down. I’m talking about the ten or fifteen years on either side of the line dividing the 1800s and the 1900s. It’s easily the most interesting history of modern humankind. On Read.
This Is Drivel 