I picked up a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge from the library this weekend. I really enjoyed it but this quote stood out as particularly wicked and clever: D'you remember how Jesus was led into the...
Posted 06/21/07 @07:52 AM · Feedback (0/0)
After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I'm robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I...
Posted 05/31/07 @08:50 PM · Feedback (0/0)
Bloom points out in The American Religion that Mormonism, in the early days especially, was driven by a dialectic between the need to create the new Kingdom on Earth, but to also remain outside the mainstream. This conflict powered the...
Posted 05/16/07 @06:19 PM · Feedback (0/0)
Harold Bloom in The American Religion (1992): Fundamentalism, the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism [...] is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude, literalization of the...
Posted 04/19/07 @09:08 PM · Feedback (0/0)
There are some books that have chased after me for years. They pop up in conversations with other people over and over. Details of the plot leak into my head and I start thinking about how they work. But I...
Posted 02/10/07 @02:28 PM · Feedback (0/0)
I picked up C.B. Cebulski's Wonderlost and I hope he puts out more issues and everyone buys one. In the first issue he tells six stories, each illustrated by someone different, about teenage love, relationships on the cusp between friends...
Posted 02/03/07 @07:45 PM · Feedback (0/0)
I'm reading Rory Stewart's book The Places in Between about his walk across Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. I laughed out when I came across this entry from his stay in a small, remote village in the Ghor region. A...
Posted 01/24/07 @09:10 PM · Feedback (0/0)
Finished The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan about the Great Dust Bowl and have come away humbled by the scope of the disaster and mankind's tenacity in the face of horrible conditions. There are two parts that seem so...
Posted 01/03/07 @08:54 PM · Feedback (0/0)
The invention of text broke the monopoly that priests had on the collective story. Armed with a 22-letter alphabet, a ragtag bunch of Hebrew slaves went out into the desert and rewrote their reality from the beginning...Douglas Rushkoff I was...
Posted 08/19/06 @10:04 PM · Feedback (0/0)
I've been reading about mathematical geniuses the past few weeks. I read Simon Singh's book "The Code Book" and that sort of got me started. I owned an unread book on Kurt Gödel called Incompleteness that I started reading after...
Posted 05/31/06 @10:29 PM · Feedback (1/0)
I'm frustrated that an overpriced school book for a computer class is written using a crappy monospaced font for the programming examples. The lowercase L looks the same as the number 1. I'm no designer but I do like it...
Posted 01/21/06 @02:49 PM · Feedback (3/0)
After reading Josh's entry about Google book search I wondered if the name Matt Midboe was ever used in a book. I was surprised to see a book personally mention me in the acknowledgments. It turns out I had...
Posted 12/03/05 @04:42 PM · Feedback (0/0)
I'm a latecomer to the Grant Morrison oeuvre. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum when it came out. However, I didn't get around to reading The Invisibles until last year. That one blew my mind apart. Today I read through his latest...
Posted 01/16/05 @10:51 PM · Feedback (0/0)
