Erica Simmons
This book is lovely, kind, and thoughtful - as I would expect from Amy Poehler. Hooray for smart memoirs from smart, successful women!
Like Plenty, this book is a great resource if you are looking for new ways to eat a ton of vegetables. One of my favorite dishes: the crushed lentils with tomatoes and tahini.
This is not your typical celebrity memoir. It is beautiful, sad, and ultimately hopeful, but not in a cloying or cliched way. I am lucky not to have experienced the family trauma Alan Cumming describes, but the way he tells his story gave me a new appreciation for what it means to grapple with such a complicated, traumatic history and to survive.
I listened to the audio book. Alan Cumming's narration is also very good.
I blame my book club for this one. I didn't love this book, but it was fun to listen to on my morning walk to work. (I listened to the audiobook.) Lena Dunham has a great ability to describe her experiences in a way that seem to provide more generalizable insights on what it's like to grow up as an awkward, anxious, and privileged young woman in our culture. The scope of her insights may be narrow, but it is nonetheless informative, and parts of the book made me chuckle or cringe as I remembered the similarly dumb ways that have I navigated similar social and professional pressures.
Chandler's first novel, this book is nowhere near as wonderful as The Long Goodbye. But it is a fun book with some wry moments and bitter lines.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings
After half a year out of college, I have experienced a prestigious but exploitative internship, a few months of unemployment, and my real induction into the working world (as a government employee). These experiences forced me to confront my own neuroses after years at a high-stress university - my inability to handle free time and cultivate a life outside of work and my fears of being useless. And so it seemed like time to read Weber. I definitely identified with this book more than I would like to. Granted, I had to slog through the really dense section about obscure reformation personalities. (I hadn't heard the name Ulrich Zwingli since that reformation history class I had to take in high school!) But I'm glad I'm read it, and the last 10 pages were heartbreakingly good.
I was just in Skagway for work and figured it would be fun to read a contemporary description of the Klondike Gold Rush, in the form of this high-school-summer-reading-list-staple of a dog coming of age and discovering his wild, primordial self through kidnapping, abuse, enforced labor, and eventual freedom in the arctic wilderness. The politics of this book are... interesting? And much of the dog's-eye-view philosophizing is... verbose? But it is a fun glimpse into the crazy world, characters, and brutal exploitation of the gold rush, and what “the last great adventure” in “the last Frontier” meant for a rapidly industrializing Victorian public.
Survival / adventure books aren't really my thing, or, at least, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit but didn't really get much more out of the book. But I guess I should give the book some credit for generating an entertaining movie. I listened to the audiobook of this, which was overall well narrated, although there were some awkwardly bad foreign accents.
This was a fun read - much more entertaining that Vol. 2, which told a fairly repetitive story about Clint Barton's self-destructive tendencies. In Vol. 3, Kate Bishop, his protege (who constantly saves his ass), sets out on her own and gets into her own trouble. I enjoyed the homages to LA noir and plots revolving around the dark side of LA's cult of youth and beauty.
What can I say? Bleak? Depressing? Inspires countless personal crises of meaning? My favorite kind of literature! The first time I ever read Waiting for Godot was in high school detention - how perfect.
I loved this book. A gold-rush-era New Zealand epic, but with a voice that reminded me of George Eliot.
I have such mixed feelings about this book. Mainly, I kept being confused: is this really a book extolling the progress of modern (19th century) life, or a satire of self-satisfied Victorians who think they've figured everything out, when really they're only a few decades away from owning slaves themselves, and will also appear deeply flawed in the long view of history? Or both? I think both, but really I found the narrator so much of an arrogant boor that it was a slog to get through.
I listened to the audiobook, which was very skillfully narrated by Nick Offerman, so I'm giving him an extra star.
This is a charming fable about conformity, individuality, order, chaos, and fear, all in rhyming verse. And the artwork is fantastic!
This book is beautiful and amazing and sad. I read this in an evening, and I was so engrossed, that I missed my BART stop. This is the best comic book I've read in a long time.
Oh, star ratings are hard for me. Two stars seems overly harsh, but then I tend to rate everything I read as a 3 or 4. And as interesting as the subject matter for this book is, for me there was quite a bit missing. I wanted to read this book, because the most of the Plantagenet era was a blank spot for me. I read [b:Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life 111220 Eleanor of Aquitaine A Life Alison Weir https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320538974s/111220.jpg 977136] years ago and remember being fascinated by the unraveling of Henry II's reign as his children dismantled his empire in their competition for its control. (Talk about shooting your own foot.) And I studied Henry VIII in high school. But all of the Henrys and Edwards and other folks in between? I was curious. And the stories of the Plantagenets in this book are fascinating - both the individual events, like the drowning of William Aetheling in a drunken shipwreck that set off a civil war, and the longer narrative of how constant conflict between the Plantagenet kings and the upper nobility of England led to the gradual, negotiated formation of the institutions that came to define the English royal government. But what was really missing was a greater sense of context, both within English society and within Europe. Other things that happened during this time period that were barely mentioned? How about two papal schisms? Or the formation of an English cultural identity and eventual adoption of English as a courtly language? Or what about the Little Ice Age? And throughout this book I kept wondering, how much did all of this intrigue actually affect the lives of everyone else? As captivating as the fights of kings and upper nobles may be, I would get frustrated whenever I tried to think about the larger context. Really, I guess I wish this book was more like [b:A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century 568236 A Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century Barbara W. Tuchman https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403200553s/568236.jpg 227267], which created such a rich portrait of European society during the 14th century. When this book's narrative overlapped with that time period, the shortcomings of [b:The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England 15811559 The Plantagenets The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England Dan Jones https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1366387829s/15811559.jpg 17229073] were particularly apparent.
Question: how can this book have an average rating of 5.18? Isn't the scale from 1 to 5?
As an historic, genre-defining novel, The Castle of Otranto gets one star. It is ridiculous, sometimes (unintentionally) hilarious, and usually tedious.
The novel is probably 90% dialogue, which not broken into separate paragraphs, but grouped in multi-page conversations in a single paragraph, with no quotation marks. This makes it hard to follow or stay engaged with. (It's amazing how much I take for granted the modern conventions of fictionalized dialogue!) Also, much of it is written in faux-archaisms. (This novel is an early example of 18th- and 19th-century Europeans' nostalgia for the middle ages.)
The opening scene of this novel is wonderful for its absurdity: on his way to his own wedding, the sickly son of a false prince is crushed by a giant helmet falling from the sky - one star for that image alone!
And one star for the final sentence: “...and it was not till after frequent discourses with Isabella, of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.”
Let's wallow together.
It took me about a year, with liberal audiobook assist, to get through this book, but it really is incredibly well written and researched. A model of what biography can be, and for me, as an urban planner, a crucial read to understand the histories and hidden workings of the field.