Oh, Mary. I love Mary Roach’s books. She is smart, funny, and asks the questions we all want to know (sex in space: possible?). So when I saw a compilation of her essays, it seemed like the perfect thing to get my squirrel brain refocused for reading in the new year. I shoulda read the fine print. Compilation of essays for Readers’ Digest. And clearly tailored for them. The essays are generic and amusing. A combination of Erma Bombeck, Seinfeld, and Andy Rooney. (Almost wrote […]
Read ALL THE PAGES!
FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative – like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it – but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things […]
He quotes Tenacious D in the epigraph. That should tell you everything you need to know.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Tenacious D. Their self-titled first album was practically the soundtrack to my first year of college (much to the regret of my roommate). If you called “Tribute” the greatest song in the world without irony in your voice, I wouldn’t punch you in the face. I once ate at Zanzibar in Las Vegas solely for the purpose of eating there while thinking of this song (link NSFW . . . trust me, don’t do it). My point is: hating […]
Puritan Prattle
We celebrate them at Thanksgiving, we revile them when we read The Crucible, but what do we really know about that first generation of religious malcontents to reach New England? Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates gives us portraits of these strangers known as the Puritans who came to New England during the Great Migration, in between the Mayflower and the Salem witch trials. It is infused with Vowell’s pop culture references and Gen-X snarkiness. I like her style just fine, some people find it annoying. […]