The Eyre Affair By: Jasper Fforde Wordplay and literary allusions abound in this alternate 1985 Britain where warring factions of Shakespeare authorship skeptics brawl in violent street fights, dodos have been genetically re-engineered and are common pets, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has an unsatisfying ending. Thursday Next, a special...
The Wrecking Crew! (DVD) If you know the recordings of Elvis, The Righteous Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, The Byrds, Ricky Nelson, The Beach Boys, Nat King Cole, The Monkees, Sonny & Cher, or The Mamas & the Papas, then you know The Wrecking Crew. The Wrecking...
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames By: Kai Bird The Good Spy was so good that I read it twice. Actually, I listened to it once as an audio book and read the print book, but that's beside the point. It’s a fascinating biography...
Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies By: Alastair Bonnett [blockquote text='“The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different;...
The Magnificent Ambersons By: Booth Tarkington I hadn't heard of Booth Tarkington until I moved to this area, but now I run across his name on a daily basis, so I thought I’d better read his best-known work, The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s now considered sentimental and somewhat of...
The Book of William By Paul Collins Shakespeare’s First Folio: no printed book has had each copy so obsessively cataloged, studied, and coveted. Scholars study and analyze past owners’ doodles in the margins, and some specialize in examining the stress on the type to determine in which order...
The Road to Little Dribbling By: Bill Bryson If I ever get to assemble my dream team of traveling companions, Bill Bryson will be on the shortlist. His penchant for a good bit of trivia, his snark in the face of the absurdities of everyday life, and his...
Girl Waits With Gun By: Amy Stewart Author Amy Stewart, whose previous works of nonfiction brought a new spin to botany and the insect world, found the inspiration for her first novel in a century-old newspaper article. While researching a bootlegger for The Drunken Botanist, she found a...
The Ugly Animals: We Can't All Be Pandas By: Simon Watt Don’t be put off by the cover of this book. It features the blobfish, the squatty, woeful-looking deep-sea dweller with a rivulet of slime peeking out of his mouth. It may look like a pottery project that...
So You've Been Publicly Shamed By: Jon Ronson After journalist Jon Ronson first revels in, and is later revolted by the nasty comments viewers leave on a YouTube video, he realizes public shaming for ordinary folks is back. Instead of old-school punishments doled out by the local community,...