Here's another nutrition/health book worth your time: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health by William Davis, MD.  This is not just for celiac sufferers, but genuinely for all of us living through today's food supply system.  The writing is engaging, energetic and studded with personal anecdotes from the ( Read more... )

Gail Collins of The New York Times is the most dependably funny political columnist I've found since Molly Ivins's death.  Unlike the sharp-tongued, Texan Ivins, Collins's political humor tends to be light-handed and New England-y, gently puncturing foibles that public figures have grossly inflated all by themselves.  She's not as funny or edgy ( Read more... )

Have you ever read Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster?  It's a series of weekly lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1927, and they are a dazzling delight for readers and writers alike.  I highly recommend them.  I've been reading myself to sleep lately on one essay (lecture) per night, and I may, when I'm done, turn back to the beginning and go ( Read more... )

I have not seen anyone else post this news, so it looks like I should.  Baen, the sci-fi publisher, is currently offering the entire "Vorkosigan Saga" by Lois McMaster Bujold for free e-book download here!  The multiple formats cover every e-reader I know of, plus plain RTF and HTML.  This includes Cryoburn, the latest novel in the series, ( Read more... )

I would like to recommend the short story "Anda's Game" by Cory Doctorow (2004).  It's available here in multiple single-file formats (including Kindle and PDF ( Read more... )

I'm still in the mood for short stories, and I've been going through The Golden Argosy, a richly musty-smelling old hardbacked tome, hand-stamped "Free Library" in two places, and "Community Library Center" in a third.  It dates to 1955, and has been through many ways of tracking its times-checked-out over the years.  (I had to look up "argosy," ( Read more... )

I recommend neonhummingbird's Buffyverse fanfiction.  I recognize that this is exceedingly late, from one perspective, but I only just began reading it this past weekend -- what? I wasn't even watching back then! -- so I'm claiming great promptness.  Especially treat yourself to:

• "To Let You Go"
  (angst, adventure, plot, development, canon-diverges-here; Willow, ( Read more... )

Leonard Pitts is my favorite essayist living.  I don't point out his regular essays in the Miami Herald, because he publishes two or three times a week, and they're all good.  What would I say?  "Another thoughtful, well-crafted essay by Mr. Pitts"?  And today's column on a cruel discrimination is not better than his others; in fact, one could ( Read more... )

Okay, so never mind how I ended up at this destination, but just laugh along with me at this Twilight-skewering excerpt from a Buffyverse drabble by nwhepcat:"This word.  It either refers to death by slow disembowelment ..."  Giles leans in, peering at the text. ...  "Or sparkly rainbows."
Naturally, if you laugh, too, you should read the whole drabble and ( Read more... )

I read 39 of the 50 stories in this summer's mcshep_match round.  Of those, if McShep is your cup of tea, I think these (below) are most worth your time.  I must note that I don't know two beans about slash or Stargate Atlantis; I just like Rodney and John interacting, a preference that appears virulently contagious.  But FWIW, I liked:

1. " A Place On The ( Read more... )