I wondered why there were so many Nebraska fossils in the mammal room at the Carnegie Museum.
I thought Zadie Smith's White Teeth was absorbing
and fun to read.
Do you like crime books? Ross MacDonald wrote absorbing genre fiction that stands up to rereading, to my taste not sexist or marred by period attitudes. Donna Leon is contemporary, absorbing books set in an Italian police bureaucracy. Fun but I haven't had an urge to reread any.
I really like Goffman's Presentation of Self.
I think I started White Teeth in grad school. Maybe time to revisit it!
You might enjoy Nasty, Brutish & Short: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1096811309/nasty-brutish-and-short-contends-that-all-parents-are-raising-little-philosopher
My teeth are really discolored but I only go to dentists classy enough not to mention it.
2: Tell me about Ross MacDonald
6. He deserves more words than will fit into this little box.
Without reading the link, didn't it turn out to be some kind of peccary?
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Big profile of Saiselgy in the Washington Post. I got kind of bored halfway through, so not completely off topic. Apparently Ronald Klain is a fan.
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The link is a really interesting story.
9: The headline did call it a "boring journey" though.
I enjoyed Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv. I think it might be the kind of thing heebie likes.
I'm sure it warms her heart to see you happy.
9: It is kind of a boring article, but this paragraph is cruel
Perhaps it's instructive to think about two topics that bookend his public life. At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician's case for the invasion of Iraq, because how could the most powerful, informed men on Earth be so stupid? In May of this year, Yglesias declared that Bankman-Fried "is for real," because why else would wealthy people risk their money?
I've come to the conclusion that a non-trivial subset of the wealthy are actively trying to destroy America.
I wouldn't exactly call them unputdownable, but I really liked Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Either/Or. I started college the same time as the main character, and had so many of the same experiences, and when reading the first half of The Idiot I kept having the oddest feeling. It was like reading a journal I myself had written and forgotten about, or discovering that someone had been looking over my shoulder during my freshman year, documenting my thoughts and experiences and email correspondence. The Idiot was also one of the funniest books I've read in a long time. (The second half of the book, when she goes to Europe, had nothing in common with my experiences, and was also irritating and boring.) I didn't have that weird feeling of recognition when reading Either/Or, and it was profoundly sad instead of funny, but it was perhaps a better book.
Kevin Wilson's new novel (Now Is Not the Time to Panic) is only okay, but his previous novel (Nothing to See Here) was fantastic. Also, Baby You're Gonna Be Mine was one of the best story collections I've read in recent years.
16: I enjoyed Elif Batuman's The Possessed and The Idiot. I'm on the library waiting list for the e-book of Either/Or. I think she should have titled it Raw Youth, but I suppose she was ready for a change.
I read Either/Or and actually liked it a lot, and had no problem finishing it. I found the narrator very charming but so damn perplexing, like when she hadn't realized that alcohol is key to small talk. Like, she struck me as very realistic but very different than I was at that age. Maybe I should go back and read the first one?
Recommended previously, the Dortmunder series by Donald E. Westlake totally meet your criteria. A lovable gang of miscreants commits ludicrously complicated heists that go entertainingly wrong. Like the Ocean's 11 series, but in book form.
Most of Westlake's other stuff too.
20: Yes, I find her very charming, but she is so odd, like she may be from another planet.
I'm currently reading "Book of Rhymes" by Adam Bradley, which I'm finding to be excellent. Not sure if you were after fiction exclusively, but this one I'm not able to put down.
I'm currently reading "Book of Rhymes" by Adam Bradley, which I'm finding to be excellent. Not sure if you were after fiction exclusively, but this one I'm not able to put down.
I'm currently reading "Book of Rhymes" by Adam Bradley, which I'm finding to be excellent. Not sure if you were after fiction exclusively, but this one I'm not able to put down.
I'm loving Natasha Pulley lately -- she's SF and some F, so if that's not you, never mind.
Kate Atkinson also, though I don't like her two latest much. Start with Life After Life.
20: If you are charmed by Elif Batuman, I think you will get a kick out of the Longform podcast interview with her https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-297-elif-batuman
Also the article she wrote about "Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry." is fascinatingly bizarre https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry
Also, if you enjoy interviews with writers, I recommend the Longform podcast.
I was mixed on Life after Life. I liked reading each life, but the general premise "what might have been but for a butterfly" feels tired to me.
31: I thought the premise was that you can get a whole lot of chances and mess things up in a new way each time.
I just watched the trailer for Are You There God? It's Me Margaret -- it looks really cute! I don't have an especially strong attachment to the book, but the trailer still made me all sentimental.
29: Although Google tells me that a number of the interview subjects lied to both Batuman and the New Yorker fact-checkers.
34: Wow! Thanks for pointing that out. Fake fake families!
Let me second 21 -- the Dortmunder series is uneven, as one might expect from something that went on for thirty-plus years, but the books are never worse than an amusing trifle. (Unfortunately, my favorite -- What's the Worst that Could Happen? -- hits best if you're familiar with Dortmunder and his usual cast of hangers-on, but you could do worse than starting with the first one, The Hot Rock.
I read Crace's The Melody last year, which is superb but hardly un-putdownable. Maybe Naomi Novik's "Scholomance" trilogy, the final volume of which came out in November? (It's Harry Potter but Hogwarts has an 80% fatality rate, narrated by the girl prophecized to be the doom-bringing Voldemort of her generation who doesn't want to do dark magic because it would disappoint her mum. Gets slowly more pointed as it goes, while still being a YA novel about a snarky teenage girl and the annoying capital-H Hero who loves her.)