Last night I finished Garret Freymann-Weyr's My Heartbeat for my young adult lit class. And I think I may have found the closest thing I ever have to a YA novel that deals with sexuality in the way I want to see it ( Read more... )

Most of what has to be said about Darkness Brings the Dawn: Erik’s Story has already been put forth eloquently in this Amazon.com review. I don’t actually have an explanation as to why I took it upon myself to page through the entire thing--but for you, my dear readers.
( Once again, I take on this burden to spare you. )

In Stanley Coren's Why We Love the Dogs We Do: How to Find the Dog that Matches Your Personality, the psychologist and author of The Intelligence of Dogs seeks to provide a fool-proof method of choosing the right sort of companion for your personality by combining research into historic figures and a new breed classification system based on ( Read more... )

What's interesting to me is how the list is such a mish-mash of awesome and utter crap.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. And post in your journal.

( i only did the bold thing )

This isn't my review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I haven't written it yet, and I feel I have to get this out of the way first.

I'm not sure how much I *like* the world of Harry Potter.

Oh, by the way, I know it's only a series of books/movies, and this is a rantThrough six, almost seven books now, we've watched Harry struggle ( Read more... )

PARIS: the Secret History by Andrew Hussey sounds very interesting. According to this NYT review, Mr. Hussey does not have all his facts straight--yet it probably contains lots of interesting (and juicy) info. I mention it primarily for the writers on my flist, but it sounds readable regardless.

( Read more... )

When reading nonfiction, of course, the primary consideration is the subject, along with the author's knowledge and presentation of that subject. It is for this reason that one sometimes finds oneself reading something which offends their literary sensibilties yet which cannot be discarded because the subject matter is of interest. Such is the case ( Read more... )

The problem with a book as funny as Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is that it's funny in precisely the way I want things to be funny. That is to say, it examines terminally unimportant aspects of culture (The Real World, breakfast cereal, Coldplay) in such a maddeningly entertaining way that one is convinced that it can't possibly be useful. Have you ( Read more... )

Hobermen, film critic for the Village Voice, writes about film. A lot. In fact, he wrote such a great book about midnight movies (called Midnight Movies, written in collaboration with Jonathan Rosenbaum) that I now pick up everything with his name on it. I was not disappointed in this case, but this is a different sort of film book ( Read more... )

It’s always a little suspicious when someone asks you to believe something really attractive. I mean sure, Mr. Johnson, I’d love to believe that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” What partaker of that culture wouldn’t? But Johnson gets down to what he’s talking about on ( Read more... )