Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a book I picked up simply out of morbid curiousity. I was certain it was going to suck and I could then rip it to shreds. I have to admit, however, that though it was not a good book by any means, it didn't suck as badly as I expected ( Read more... )

Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a fascinating look at what happens to us after we die, from medical experimentation to embalming and burial to more experimental methods of disposing of corpses. Roach incorporates histories of various practices, scientific details, and a clear and humorous narrative voice into her book ( Read more... )

I'm reading Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and, in a passage about why people die in plane crashes (definitely the scariest part of the book for me so far), I found this interesting bit of information, buried in a footnote:Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical ( Read more... )

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Kandy was my best friend through most of high school and college. She died seven years ago today ( Read more... )

Kurt Vonnegut died last night.

Vonnegut was a dark, funny satirist and science fiction writer. His Slaughterhouse-Five is an amazing novel about war, humanity, and the contradiction between the two. Here is one of my favorite parts of the novel, one that takes the horrific monster of war and turns it on its head, makes of it something hopeful:  ( Read more... )

I'm currently reading Connie Willis's novel Passage, which is about near-death experiences and research into the causes of such experiences. Each chapter begins with an epigraph consisting of someone's last words. I liked this one, Tolstoy's deathbed response to being urged to return to the Russian Orthodox Church:Even in the valley of the shadow ( Read more... )

I just found out that Molly Ivins died last week. I don't know how I missed this at the time. This is awful. She was a funny, challenging progressive in a country that needs more outspoken and down-to-earth progressives. She was well-known for her opposition of George W. Bush (her 2000 biography of Bush was called Shrub) and her championing of ( Read more... )