I borrowed the book RATS: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants from my friend Terri a while back, mainly because of this excellent Peter Sis cover. The cover suggests a lot at once, and it looked like it would be a fascinating read. It’s not, really. There are some [...]

US Airways Flight 1549 going down in the Hudson River reminds me, I never talked about the book Outliers I was reading. The connection there is that Outliers has a chapter on piloting dealing with the kind of flying opposite that of Pilot of the Century Chesley Sullenburger, who I predict will be getting a [...]

To close out those thoughts on book buying the other day (like I’m never going to mention “books” again), yesterday I thought a quick trip to the book store would be a good way to kick off 2009. I picked up Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and have already burned through half of it; it has [...]

Maybe it was because we were discussing books here yesterday, but last night I couldn’t get the famous “Time Enough At Last” episode of the Twilight Zone out of my head. Just like the way everything comes to a halt at the studio when we start pondering how to survive in a world populated with [...]

There’s a good piece in the NY Times today about the suffering book market, that is to say, the publisher-retail system. The home-grown out of the garage retailer is doing just fine, and the two are at odds. Once again my practices clouded me to the reality of this- I do order books online, but [...]

Long ago I thought this was particular to me, but over the years I’ve heard numbers of friends admit to the same thing: once in a while I read a book that’s either famous or recommended, invest many hours in it, and then at the halfway or 2/3rds mark suddenly realize “I’m done with this,” [...]

Not a total yay though, since like many I regret that the Harry Potter series is over. I have some problems with Rowling’s writing sure- always too many info dumps at the end of the books and a lot of the mechanics of the plot could be streamlined more to avoid unnecessary convolution. But she [...]

I’ll probably be picking up the final Harry Potter book this weekend, but I’m a little jealous of all the people who went to the midnight releases at bookstores. Mainly because seeing that big a deal made over the release of a book feels like a glimpse into an alternate universe where everything went right. [...]