Eleanor Rigby, by Douglas Coupland

This is a daring book; there is a fair chance that by the time you finish the first third, you could give up and decide the protagonist is whiny and annoying. In my head, her voice is just like Sarah Vowell's, possibly because I recently finished reading Ms. Vowell's book. Also, Douglas Coupland's characters all ( Read more... )

Short review. If you like gumshoe mysteries, sci-fi that doesn't bother to explain itself (beyond "this is from the far future") and Deus Ex Machina up the wazoo, you might like this ( Read more... )

Sarah Vowell is somewhat of an odd duck. You may know her from her voice-pieces on This American Life. Since I tend to like those essays, I bought her 2002 book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot. (Actually I bought this as a Christmas present for Dan's dad, who also likes her on TAL).

But: in addition to having an urbane and funny sensibility toward ( Read more... )

I'm up because my sweetie has to teach too early in the morning, but since I'm up (and conscious): here's a book review I've been sitting on for a while.

I've been interested in the history of Iran since melted_snowball brought home Persepolis in 2004 or so. (Another plug for Persepolis and its sequel. It's a historical graphic novel, owing some debt to Maus, ( Read more... )

Tonight I had dinner with friends K and J, who just returned from a five month walking pilgrimage through Northern Spain. I missed them while they were gone, one reason being the high quality of conversation we sometimes get to have. Tonight was one of those nights; after dinner we played a quick game of Ticket to Ride followed by a good hour- ( Read more... )

I just read Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, to try and decide whether I want to see the movie ( Read more... )

I've been reading Alison Bechdel's memoir, Fun Home. The woman continues to rock.

I don't think I've previously seen a New York Times review so glowing:

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, ( Read more... )

Today's Globe and Mail Books section has two new books worth noting:

Iran Awakening by Shrin Ebadi. She's just awesome. From the review:

Ebadi was an esteemed judge in Iran when the shah fell, and she was a supporter of the revolution that brought him down. Like many anti-shah protesters, she had no idea that by helping to bring down the shah, ( Read more... )

One thing led to another and I was just looking for one of my kid-books on amazon.

They have Old MacDonald Had an Apartment Building, which has been reissued. (yay!)

But I realized that the author and illustrator, Judi and Ron Barrett, also did two other books I loved to pieces, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and (probably my favourite), The ( Read more... )

I've not read d.'s travelogues today (heck, I've not caught up on his 15-post set last week) so apologies if there's overlap.

Yesterday ( was great )