needs more demons?

I absolutely adored Cohn and Levithan’s Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, a young adult romance partly set in The Strand, with a hefty epistolary component and a dash of screwball comedy.
I didn’t enjoy Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List nearly as much, partly due to mismatched expectations. This was a rare case where I [...]

[Read more →]

Dave Clark’s The Knucklebook was listed in the bibliography of the Tim Wakefield bio Knuckler and I knew immediately that I had to read it.
It’s a marvelous little book, providing a brief, but insightful look at baseball’s oddest pitch from a variety of perspectives: how to throw it, how to hit it, how to [...]

[Read more →]

Soulless is set in a fantasy alternate Victorian era, with vampires and werewolves alongside airships and mysterious brass apparati. It deftly mashes the modern urban fantasy/paranormal romance into the Regency-style historical romance, adds a hefty dollop of whodunnit, and seasons it with steampunk atmosphere and a tiny dash of xenophobic horror.
I liked it [...]

[Read more →]

I can’t remember where I saw Googling Security reviewed*, but the review made a strong impression. It exposed at least a couple of the provocative tidbits in the book, like that even if you personally refuse to use Google’s Gmail service on privacy grounds, as soon as a friend sends you a message with Gmail, [...]

[Read more →]

Reading Between a Heart and a Rock Place was a lot of fun. It was definitely a read-a-lot-of-excerpts-to-my-wonderful-and-tolerant-wife book. Benatar’s career trajectory is kinda unusual in rock’n’roll, given that it doesn’t involve a trip to rehab (or its conspicuous lack). It’s sadly more typical in that one defining characteristic of that career is ongoing disputes [...]

[Read more →]

World’s End felt throughout like a book I expected to like, and I wonder if I might’ve liked it better if I’d encountered it earlier. It’s a heroic fantasy of the magic-returns-to-the-modern-world variety. Chadbourn clearly knows a lot about the myths and legends of the British Isles, and this was what I enjoyed most in [...]

[Read more →]

This was my first exposure to either Cohn or Levithan, aside from seeing the film version Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (without, I’m ashamed to say, even knowing it was based on a novel). But it’s their third collaboration, in which the authors write alternating chapters, “without planning anything out beforehand. That’s the way they [...]

[Read more →]

Future on Ice is a collection of short stories selected circa 1998 by Orson Scott Card representing his take on the best short science fiction of the eighties (it follows the earlier, similarly themed Future on Fire).
It was a strange exercise in cognitive dissonance for me. Many of Card’s selections are terrific — the list [...]

[Read more →]

I’m probably waaay over thinking my reaction to Gunn’s Golden Rules. I was entertained and amused, even a little bit edified. But it still strikes me as an odd, even inconsistent book.
Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some [...]

[Read more →]

I swore I was absolutely not going to read any more books about white, middle-aged, male academics in romantic entanglements with much younger women, and (despite having read several that I liked a lot), I’m currently kind of down on books about white, middle-aged males going somewhat or completely off-the-rails with the assistance of large [...]

[Read more →]