Are you one of those people who likes to read the book before seeing the movie? I am. So when I found out (around 3-4 years late) that there was a White Queen mini-series, I was excited to jump in. I had also just lost my job and I was really looking for a book to serve as a screen saver for the brain; something that would entertain me but wouldn’t test me. A historical family drama definitely hit the spot. Philippa Gregory’s collected works […]
The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel
After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible. The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]
“The first rule is don’t fall in love”…. guess what happens??
I picked this up this afternoon as a cozy read during a snow day where work is cancelled and everyone is snowed in. How To Stop Time is about Tom, a man who had a medical condition that causes him to age incredibly slowly. He’s not immortal, this isn’t played off as sci-fi or fantasy. He will eventually age and die, but in the meantime he is 439 years old and appears to be 41. The story takes us back and forth between present […]
Coffee Reading Lite
As my CBR handle suggests, I like coffee shops, both for the lattes and the atmosphere. So when I was in Chicago recently, I wanted to try out one of the trendy places as my touristy thing. At Intelligentsia Coffee, I saw this book for sale. I didn’t buy it then. I saw the same book a few days later, this time in paperback, for sale at a publisher exhibit. I didn’t buy it then. I did however, upon my return home, acquire said book […]