Oh no. I've done it again!
Even though I have a huge pile of books on my "to be read" shelf, I've gone out and bought more books!
I went to the bookstore yesterday just to browse.
I saw Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" and said to myself, "I should read this because 'The Iron Whim' has a whole chapter on 'Naked Lunch.' I didn't really understand that chapter and so I should read 'Naked Lunch.' And, while I'm at it, I should get Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' because that's about communication and not about vampires, as I learned from 'The Iron Whim.'"
But then, next to "Naked Lunch" was "In Cold Blood." And I said to myself, "I've always meant to read 'In Cold Blood.' I should pick it up. Or maybe I should get the book of short stories that contains 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.' That would be good."
Then I saw the Small Press section and I really went nuts.
"OMIGOD! I wanted to request a lot of these books for The Show, but never got around to it! Which should I get? Which?"
After spending a lot of time looking at the Small Press books and noting that I already had a lot of them, but hadn't read them yet, I bought two books:
"Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love" edited by Claude Lalumiere and Elise Moser (Vehicule Press). I bought it because (a) it's
Claude Lalumiere who edited it, so it's probably good and (b) because everyone needs some tales of sex and love that aren't Harlequin Romances. I expect it will be weird and disturbing.
"Bowlbrawl" by Nathaniel G. Moore (Conundrum Press). In this day and age where guys like James Frey try to pass off their unbelievable works of fiction as non-fiction, you need a book about full-contact, hypermasculine bowling (in Canada!) to remind you that reality is, in fact, stranger than fiction. I expect that this is going to be really good.
Meanwhile, on my in-progress shelf, I've got: "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell," "Adieu Betty Crocker" (original French version) and "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe." That's just books I started reading and fully intend to finish. The list of books I haven't gotten to yet is too long to list. I've actually started giving some away to friends and family because I'm running out of shelf space and I can't bear to part with books I've read, even if they're crappy.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Friday, March 03, 2006
Fit for the Pit: Think Redux
My mom was pretty pissed off at me for my last post about Think: "That's a really mean thing to write," she said. "The author obviously thought his book was good when he wrote it and someone thought it was good enough to publish, so you shouldn't be mean about it."
My mom was obviously right. Being harsh doesn't really tell anyone anything about the book. All it does is just tell you that I hated it and that I'm a bit fanatical when it comes to books. So I figured I would write a comprehesive review and post that. I wanted to post this ages ago, but couldn't because my computer decided to have a billion issues. But at least that gave me time to cool off and gather my thoughts.
Think is marketed as a case for critical thinking and a response to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, which LeGault equates with emotional, gut-feeling thinking. I read Blink. In it, Gladwell explores the idea that, if you're an expert at something, you can make decisions (many times correct, but also sometimes wrong) in the blink of an eye, before you've consciously thought about it. Which makes sense because if you're, say, an art appraiser, you know what to look for when deciding if some piece of art is fake. To everyone around you, it looks like you made some random, gut-feeling decision, but you actually just know your stuff and don't need a billion years to figure out what's going on (though it'll take you a billion years to write out the report explaining your reasoning).
The unfortunate thing about Blink is that the whole book is a series of anecdotes, giving the whole book a "truthy" feel, as Stephen Colbert would say. So while Gladwell doesn't advocate emotion-based thinking, the book isn't really full of cold, hard research either.
That said, I can see how Think would be a response to Blink. On the other hand, once you start reading the book, you get the feeling that Think isn't going to be doing a great job at hard, unbiased critical thought either (page 53):
I don't know about you, but I never equate something "ringing true" with critical thought. In my universe, critical thinking usually involves picking things that "ring true" apart into little smithereens using logic and analysis.
This inability to stay on message was one of the main reasons why I wanted to send the book back to the publishing house. Think is a poorly-written rant against...something. I can't say that it's a rant against gut-feeling thinking or liberalism or anything really because the book is totally disjoint. The only underlying theme that seems to hold the book together is Einstein.
LeGault keeps bringing up Einstein throughout the book. The author feels (note that I say "feels" and not "thinks") that had Einstein not been a critical thinker, he would never have been creative enough to come up with the Theory of Relativity (special and general) or Brownian Motion (though LeGault doesn't seem to know about Brownian Motion, for which Einstein won the Nobel Prize). LeGault holds up Einstein as this paragon of critical thought and even praises him for questioning authority -- about two paragraphs after getting all in the face of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" for being anti-authoritarian and thus anti-intellectual. From pages 30-31:
Hello convoluted reasoning! I'm not sure what LeGault was getting at in that passage. Was he saying that rock music is bad because it turns people against authority and makes them hate education and be stupid? Or was he saying that it's OK to hate authority as long as you're doing so "critically?" Or is he saying that smart people can be cool cuz they also hate The Man, dude!
LeGault also conveniently omitted the next line of "Another Brick in The Wall" ("No dark sarcasm in the classroom"). I'm not sure where LeGault went to school, but where I was, "Another Brick in The Wall" was the anthem of the alienated smart kids, for whom the whole point of The Wall was how society focused on obedience rather than independent thought. Then again, until I read Think, I never realized how much cherry-picking was involved in critical thought, so what do I know?
The book just goes on from there. LeGault basically decides that anyone who comes to different conclusions than he does isn't thinking critically (like "unscientific environmentalists" who still think that carbon dioxide causes global warming). And you know who the hero of all this is? Managers in large multinational corporations (bet ya didn't see that one coming!). Yes because (page 319):
LeGault just throws ideas like this onto the page without any supporting statements or analysis. OK, my debating and persuasion skills aren't fantastic (which is why I ended up in the mathematical sciences rather than in, say, political science), but even I know that you need to back up your statements with some kind of argument. And, again, I'm not writing books, here. (Though the more uber-crappy books I read, the more I wonder what's stopping me from getting a book deal.)
In the end, it wasn't as if LeGault didn't make good points about society. It's true that most people nowadays don't read and don't really think about what the media feeds them. It's also true that we're over-medicating children with Ritalin instead of just changing the way schools are run (I'll let you put your own reference to The Wall here). But the author jumps around so much and says so many weird things (like lamenting the "feminist agenda") that the good bits get lost amid the insanity.
Finally, as for Einstein, even the real Einstein wasn't the mythical Einstein. It took Einstein 8 years to come up with the General Theory of Relativity. Eight years of learning topology and differential geometry and playing around with equations and proving theorems. To me, that's more of a proof of perseverance than critical thought.
My mom was obviously right. Being harsh doesn't really tell anyone anything about the book. All it does is just tell you that I hated it and that I'm a bit fanatical when it comes to books. So I figured I would write a comprehesive review and post that. I wanted to post this ages ago, but couldn't because my computer decided to have a billion issues. But at least that gave me time to cool off and gather my thoughts.
Think is marketed as a case for critical thinking and a response to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, which LeGault equates with emotional, gut-feeling thinking. I read Blink. In it, Gladwell explores the idea that, if you're an expert at something, you can make decisions (many times correct, but also sometimes wrong) in the blink of an eye, before you've consciously thought about it. Which makes sense because if you're, say, an art appraiser, you know what to look for when deciding if some piece of art is fake. To everyone around you, it looks like you made some random, gut-feeling decision, but you actually just know your stuff and don't need a billion years to figure out what's going on (though it'll take you a billion years to write out the report explaining your reasoning).
The unfortunate thing about Blink is that the whole book is a series of anecdotes, giving the whole book a "truthy" feel, as Stephen Colbert would say. So while Gladwell doesn't advocate emotion-based thinking, the book isn't really full of cold, hard research either.
That said, I can see how Think would be a response to Blink. On the other hand, once you start reading the book, you get the feeling that Think isn't going to be doing a great job at hard, unbiased critical thought either (page 53):
Ultimately, I trust that my libertarian instincts will ring true with the reader.
I don't know about you, but I never equate something "ringing true" with critical thought. In my universe, critical thinking usually involves picking things that "ring true" apart into little smithereens using logic and analysis.
This inability to stay on message was one of the main reasons why I wanted to send the book back to the publishing house. Think is a poorly-written rant against...something. I can't say that it's a rant against gut-feeling thinking or liberalism or anything really because the book is totally disjoint. The only underlying theme that seems to hold the book together is Einstein.
LeGault keeps bringing up Einstein throughout the book. The author feels (note that I say "feels" and not "thinks") that had Einstein not been a critical thinker, he would never have been creative enough to come up with the Theory of Relativity (special and general) or Brownian Motion (though LeGault doesn't seem to know about Brownian Motion, for which Einstein won the Nobel Prize). LeGault holds up Einstein as this paragon of critical thought and even praises him for questioning authority -- about two paragraphs after getting all in the face of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" for being anti-authoritarian and thus anti-intellectual. From pages 30-31:
Rock and roll culture has helped glorify a number of macho, monosyllabic myths about education and intelligence in general. As Pink Floyd sings:"We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control"
("Another Brick in The Wall," 1979)
Multiply the above anthem by a thousand variations and you begin to get the picture. Thinking and learning are for boot-licking conformists destined for lives as cubicle mice.
[...] Or one more common take found in the tough-guy world of many adolescents, including grown-up ones: To read, reflect and think is to be an egghead, a genius. Here we also detect that hint of social ostracization that awaits the unsuspecting egghead: "You're intelligent. That's pretty uppity and pretentious of you, buster."
Yet the consummate egghead, Al Einstein, was neither pretentious nor obedient nor conventionally bright in his youth. In her memoir, Einstein's sister, Maja, writes that [...] Einstein "had formed a suspicion against every kind of authority."
Hello convoluted reasoning! I'm not sure what LeGault was getting at in that passage. Was he saying that rock music is bad because it turns people against authority and makes them hate education and be stupid? Or was he saying that it's OK to hate authority as long as you're doing so "critically?" Or is he saying that smart people can be cool cuz they also hate The Man, dude!
LeGault also conveniently omitted the next line of "Another Brick in The Wall" ("No dark sarcasm in the classroom"). I'm not sure where LeGault went to school, but where I was, "Another Brick in The Wall" was the anthem of the alienated smart kids, for whom the whole point of The Wall was how society focused on obedience rather than independent thought. Then again, until I read Think, I never realized how much cherry-picking was involved in critical thought, so what do I know?
The book just goes on from there. LeGault basically decides that anyone who comes to different conclusions than he does isn't thinking critically (like "unscientific environmentalists" who still think that carbon dioxide causes global warming). And you know who the hero of all this is? Managers in large multinational corporations (bet ya didn't see that one coming!). Yes because (page 319):
Managers at today's companies display a concrete understanding of how reason and the pursuit of self-interest advance the betterment of the whole when they aspire to make their organizations "lean."
LeGault just throws ideas like this onto the page without any supporting statements or analysis. OK, my debating and persuasion skills aren't fantastic (which is why I ended up in the mathematical sciences rather than in, say, political science), but even I know that you need to back up your statements with some kind of argument. And, again, I'm not writing books, here. (Though the more uber-crappy books I read, the more I wonder what's stopping me from getting a book deal.)
In the end, it wasn't as if LeGault didn't make good points about society. It's true that most people nowadays don't read and don't really think about what the media feeds them. It's also true that we're over-medicating children with Ritalin instead of just changing the way schools are run (I'll let you put your own reference to The Wall here). But the author jumps around so much and says so many weird things (like lamenting the "feminist agenda") that the good bits get lost amid the insanity.
Finally, as for Einstein, even the real Einstein wasn't the mythical Einstein. It took Einstein 8 years to come up with the General Theory of Relativity. Eight years of learning topology and differential geometry and playing around with equations and proving theorems. To me, that's more of a proof of perseverance than critical thought.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Fit for the Pit: Think by LeGault
I'm considering buying a bird just so I can line the cage with the pages of this book.
That is all for now. More later.
That is all for now. More later.
Friday, January 27, 2006
I Give Up: Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ten years after I dated the first guy who told me that this book changed his life, I finally picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And after a month of trying to read this book, I've given up. It's going back to where I found it, namely on my aunt's bookshelf, where it had sat half-read since 1983.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the biggest pile of self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, pseudo-philosophical conversation-with-yourself I've ever been party to. The four chapters I managed to read before throwing the book at the wall in utter frustration consisted of the protagonist explaining to the reader that his attitude toward motorcycling is better (more intuitive, purer, etc) than his biking companions'. But it's all a metaphor: the author/protagonist's view on biking is just a way to convey his worldview, which is The Bestest, Rightest Worldview Ever!
I wish I could say that this bit of ego-stroking was at least interesting or amusing, but it isn't. The writing has all the soul of a midlife crisis. It's hard for me to articulate what's wrong with the writing, aside from saying that it's dull, but at the same time, over-done. One might say that the book is full of the author's bloviations.
Take Chapter 3, The Chapter That Made Me Scream. That's the Chapter where the protagonist/author has a "conversation" with his riding companions about the existence of ghosts and spirits. The author/protagonist's view is that spirits are just as real as atoms and "quants" (did he mean "quarks?"). He goes on to tell them (because it's more of a lecture than a conversation) that gravity is also a "ghost." Let me just quote the book:
AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
My head EXPLODES each time I read this!
The "law of gravity" is a mathematical model for describing how gravity works at a macroscopic level. Gravity is a force, it need not have energy or mass. ARGH!
OK, but setting aside the poor grasp of physics this guy has, there are, like, a billion things wrong with this passage. The writing is of the same caliber as a high school student's (I'm not saying my writing's better...it isn't, but I don't write books) and there are enough logical fallacies in that one exerpt to send my CEGEP philosophy prof's head spinning. Moreover, the author has been lazy creating the biking companions because they never once come up with an objection to his ramblings! Neither of them ever says, "Dude, um, just because you don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
That never happens. I mean, if the author had made the biking companions with half a brain, he would have had to construct a strawman to tear down instead of just lecturing to an enraptured audience.
Lazy. That's what this is. Lazy.
But now at least I know where my ex-boyfriends they got their insane ideas from and why conversing with them was like talking to a ten year old. It all makes sense now.
I should have read the book sooner. An ounce of prevention could have spared me several painful dinner dates.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the biggest pile of self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, pseudo-philosophical conversation-with-yourself I've ever been party to. The four chapters I managed to read before throwing the book at the wall in utter frustration consisted of the protagonist explaining to the reader that his attitude toward motorcycling is better (more intuitive, purer, etc) than his biking companions'. But it's all a metaphor: the author/protagonist's view on biking is just a way to convey his worldview, which is The Bestest, Rightest Worldview Ever!
I wish I could say that this bit of ego-stroking was at least interesting or amusing, but it isn't. The writing has all the soul of a midlife crisis. It's hard for me to articulate what's wrong with the writing, aside from saying that it's dull, but at the same time, over-done. One might say that the book is full of the author's bloviations.
Take Chapter 3, The Chapter That Made Me Scream. That's the Chapter where the protagonist/author has a "conversation" with his riding companions about the existence of ghosts and spirits. The author/protagonist's view is that spirits are just as real as atoms and "quants" (did he mean "quarks?"). He goes on to tell them (because it's more of a lecture than a conversation) that gravity is also a "ghost." Let me just quote the book:
"So when did this law start? Has it always existed?"
[...]
"What I'm driving at," I say, "is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."
[...]
"Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind, because there wasn't anyone, not in space, because there was no space either, not anywhere -- the law of gravity still existed?"
[...]
"If that law of gravity existed," I say, "I honestly don't know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. [...] I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton."
AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
My head EXPLODES each time I read this!
The "law of gravity" is a mathematical model for describing how gravity works at a macroscopic level. Gravity is a force, it need not have energy or mass. ARGH!
OK, but setting aside the poor grasp of physics this guy has, there are, like, a billion things wrong with this passage. The writing is of the same caliber as a high school student's (I'm not saying my writing's better...it isn't, but I don't write books) and there are enough logical fallacies in that one exerpt to send my CEGEP philosophy prof's head spinning. Moreover, the author has been lazy creating the biking companions because they never once come up with an objection to his ramblings! Neither of them ever says, "Dude, um, just because you don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
That never happens. I mean, if the author had made the biking companions with half a brain, he would have had to construct a strawman to tear down instead of just lecturing to an enraptured audience.
Lazy. That's what this is. Lazy.
But now at least I know where my ex-boyfriends they got their insane ideas from and why conversing with them was like talking to a ten year old. It all makes sense now.
I should have read the book sooner. An ounce of prevention could have spared me several painful dinner dates.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Three Science Fiction and Fantasy Books I Should Finish
These are three books taken from my Couldn't-Finish-But-I-Feel-That-I-Should-List. It is going to take forever to discuss all the books sitting on my shelf and I'm starting to doubt my sanity for doing this. Anyhoo, here are the three books, in no particular order.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
How I really wanted to read this book! I got about four or fivechapters in and started getting antsy cuz I felt that the story wasn't really moving along. Everyone told me that this was "tension" and "suspense," but to me it was like reading through writer's block. I kept thinking that JK Rowling had something to say, but was having a bit of a hard time of it, but decided to write through it. Then, for reasons I don't understand (probably due to publication deadlines or something like that), the editor left in the flabby writing. *sigh* Anyways, I want to finish reading the book, though, mostly because I want to find out how Sirius dies and because I got the follow-up, The Half-Blood Prince, as a birthday gift.
Humans by Robert J. Sawyer
If you don't know, Humans is the second book in Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series (Hominids, Humans and Hybrids). I read Hominids and I thought it was a pretty good book. The basis of the story is that there's a parallel earth where the Neanderthals beat out Homo Sapiens as the dominant species of homonid and, through a freak quantum computing accident, a Neandethal crosses into our reality. It's a really cool book and while it can be a bit contrived and the Neanderthal world is way too idyllic for my taste (hammering in the "the environment is important, mmkay" message of the book), it kept me interested. But Humans was a whole other story. I got it as a gift and started reading it and could see right away where it was going. I felt even more manipulated by the lesson-of-the-week feel of some parts of the book and I really didn't like the sex scenes, so when I got sidetracked and put Humans down, I wasn't really in a rush to pick it up. But then all my friends read it and told me that it was good, so now I'm going to finish reading it. Eventually.
Island Dreams edited by Claude Lalumiere
Of all the books I've had a hard time finishing, this is the most interesting and well-written of the lot! It's an anthology of weird fiction, ranging from speculative fiction to macabre, by Montreal-based writers. It's a really excellent collection and I have to congratulate Claude Lalumiere for finding such top-notch fiction. I mean, the future worlds don't overpower the stories, nor do they seem like irrelevant contrivances; the future worlds just mesh really well with the stories, making them seem natural and almost commonplace (it's tough to make your spec-fic look like Blade Runner rather than, say, Total Recall). I stopped reading the anthology at a story called "Carrion Luggage" (Claude told me that the anthology was meant to be read sequentially). It was going to be the third or fourth macabre story and I was really starting to get freaked out by them. Already the zombie love story set in the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetary in Montreal had given me nightmares (probably because my psyche wasn't prepared for thinking of Montreal flooded by global warming and corpses rising in the cemetary where the bodies of people I know are burried), I didn't need to know about carrion in luggage. I have a really active imagination and this book was like caffeine and chocolate for it! So I stopped reading the book, despite the fact that I had to interview Claude for The Show. (I justified it as saying that he was the editor and not the author, so it was OK.) Now Island Dreams sits on my shelf, waiting for me to get a grip.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
How I really wanted to read this book! I got about four or fivechapters in and started getting antsy cuz I felt that the story wasn't really moving along. Everyone told me that this was "tension" and "suspense," but to me it was like reading through writer's block. I kept thinking that JK Rowling had something to say, but was having a bit of a hard time of it, but decided to write through it. Then, for reasons I don't understand (probably due to publication deadlines or something like that), the editor left in the flabby writing. *sigh* Anyways, I want to finish reading the book, though, mostly because I want to find out how Sirius dies and because I got the follow-up, The Half-Blood Prince, as a birthday gift.
Humans by Robert J. Sawyer
If you don't know, Humans is the second book in Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series (Hominids, Humans and Hybrids). I read Hominids and I thought it was a pretty good book. The basis of the story is that there's a parallel earth where the Neanderthals beat out Homo Sapiens as the dominant species of homonid and, through a freak quantum computing accident, a Neandethal crosses into our reality. It's a really cool book and while it can be a bit contrived and the Neanderthal world is way too idyllic for my taste (hammering in the "the environment is important, mmkay" message of the book), it kept me interested. But Humans was a whole other story. I got it as a gift and started reading it and could see right away where it was going. I felt even more manipulated by the lesson-of-the-week feel of some parts of the book and I really didn't like the sex scenes, so when I got sidetracked and put Humans down, I wasn't really in a rush to pick it up. But then all my friends read it and told me that it was good, so now I'm going to finish reading it. Eventually.
Island Dreams edited by Claude Lalumiere
Of all the books I've had a hard time finishing, this is the most interesting and well-written of the lot! It's an anthology of weird fiction, ranging from speculative fiction to macabre, by Montreal-based writers. It's a really excellent collection and I have to congratulate Claude Lalumiere for finding such top-notch fiction. I mean, the future worlds don't overpower the stories, nor do they seem like irrelevant contrivances; the future worlds just mesh really well with the stories, making them seem natural and almost commonplace (it's tough to make your spec-fic look like Blade Runner rather than, say, Total Recall). I stopped reading the anthology at a story called "Carrion Luggage" (Claude told me that the anthology was meant to be read sequentially). It was going to be the third or fourth macabre story and I was really starting to get freaked out by them. Already the zombie love story set in the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetary in Montreal had given me nightmares (probably because my psyche wasn't prepared for thinking of Montreal flooded by global warming and corpses rising in the cemetary where the bodies of people I know are burried), I didn't need to know about carrion in luggage. I have a really active imagination and this book was like caffeine and chocolate for it! So I stopped reading the book, despite the fact that I had to interview Claude for The Show. (I justified it as saying that he was the editor and not the author, so it was OK.) Now Island Dreams sits on my shelf, waiting for me to get a grip.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
OK, if I'm going to write about books, I gotta write about the books on my to-read list. Actually, I have four book lists: To-Read-For-The-Radio-Show, To-Read-For-My-Own-Edification, On-Hiatus and Couldn't-Finish-But-Feel-That-I-Should.
Here's an explanation of the lists:
To-Read-For-The-Radio-Show: These are books that I've received from publishers that I have to read so that I can eventually interview the authors. Even if the books are boring as all get-out, I have to finish them or else I can't really do a good interview. Mind you, most of the interviewers on TV or on the radio haven't read the books at all, but you can tell. Or, at least, I can tell. In any case, these are books I have to read.
To-Read-For-My-Own-Personal-Edification: These are books I bought because people have recommended them to me or because I've heard good things about them. I stack them nicely on my bedside table and then I dutifully forget to read them.
On-Hiatus: I have so many books on this list, it's just nuts. What'll happen is that I'll actually get around to reading a book I've bought and I'll be really digging it until I realize that I've totally neglected a book I have to read for The Show. So I'll read the book for the show and then, because I have a short attention span, I'll forget about the book I was reading initially and move on to some other book that caught my fancy. This happens more often than you'd think, which is why this list is insanely long.
Couldn't-Finish-But-Feel-That-I-Should: You know how many people have said that I should read Wuthering Heights? At least 30. I can't finish Wuthering Heights, but everyone tells me it's a great book and I feel I should finish it. This list is full of books like Wuthering Heights.
There you go. A list of lists. At some point I'll elaborate on these lists and bore you to death with more random info that you don't need. Kinda like the guy who listed all the flavours of Jolly Ranchers he had in his desk. Info you need.
So here's the thing with me. I like books and I do this literary show on community radio. I get a bunch of books for free because of this literary show and, because I'm a big nerd, I also buy other books on my own. The result is that I have more books than you can shake a stick at. This blog is partially to keep track of the books I'm reading and have read.
The other reason I started this blog is because I hate book reviews, yet I feel this overwhelming urge to review books. Most book reviews are, you know, pompous and have these snotty attitudes. I want to write reviews for The People.
Does any of this make sense?
The other reason I started this blog is because I hate book reviews, yet I feel this overwhelming urge to review books. Most book reviews are, you know, pompous and have these snotty attitudes. I want to write reviews for The People.
Does any of this make sense?
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