Tag: books
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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.
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Colonel Roosevelt
I finished Colonel Roosevelt two and a half weeks after I started, partly because it’s five hundred seventy pages of solidly-written biography, and party because I put it on pause to read three other books. It’s not that the subject was uninteresting (perish the thought!) or the writing was poor (never!), it was me. I… Read.
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Griftopia
I started Griftopia on Saturday and finished it on Sunday, one book in one weekend. It was that much fun to read. It was also infuriating, but that’s what it was supposed to be, so good on Matt Taibbi. Griftopia is a collection of articles Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone magazine about our current economic… Read.
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Colossus
Dammit dammit dammit! I promised myself I wasn’t going to check out a book from the library yesterday. I’m only a hundred fifty pages from the end of the Roosevelt biography, I can’t start another book now. When My Darling B asked me to drop her off so she could pick up her hold requests,… Read.
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History Nerds
Chatting with a coworker this morning, I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. Yes, of my life! We were discussing the busy examination schedule that day and he mentioned that he had been tapped to step in and give the tester a break now and again, and “wouldn’t you know it, I… Read.
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Lost In Space
In last night’s dream I was looking for a science fiction story by wandering through the collected books in somebody’s house, and he had quite a few. Room after room was crammed with book cases crammed with books, in a house so big I remember driving through the hallways at a pretty fast clip in… Read.
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Shameless plug
The book that I’m currently devouring is The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, an economist who writes articles for media outlets like Bloomberg. I was a little worried this would turn out to be a great big yawner, even while it has a relevance to contemporary times so intimate that I shouldn’t even say how… Read.
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Origins
For months, I’ve been watching the shelves of the local thrift store’s book nook for a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species and getting no joy. Several textbooks on Darwin showed up, and one I even bought because it had excerpts from Origin, but I wanted the real deal. I thought maybe I wasn’t looking… Read.
This Is Drivel 