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Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found I’ve been flicking through this coffee table book for a long time, and finally made it through to the end. This book is a compilation – by category – of discarded grocery lists that the author has collected. Though I didn’t always enjoy the tone of the …
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Book: The Toddler Owner’s Manual: Operating Instructions, Troubleshooting Tips, and Advice on System Maintenance As it turns out, there’s also a baby owner’s manual (and a pregnancy manual), but as this book was a gift, I wasn’t aware that it’s part of a series. Written by a doctor and a writer of handbooks, this book …
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl. A series of well-written short stories for grown-ups, each with a twist at the end. There is much to be learned about the craft of short-story writing just by observing the patterns that Dahl goes through here. My favourite was early on: the wine-tasting story.
Book: Blindness Jose Saramago has in the past won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and this work (translated from the Portugese original) gives the reader a clear idea of how good a writer we’re dealing with. Though the book – a study in what might happen if the entire population of an unnamed country was …
Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray. It seems fair to count this a reading a book, though I read it on my iPhone. Oscar Wilde composed this novel to be full of witticisms, but they do the book a disservice: were it not for all of this dialogue, the work would run more smoothly. The …
Lee Strobel is a journalist (formerly of the Chicago Tribune) who was once a religious skeptic, and now writes well-researched, highly readable books in defense of Christianity. This particular book works through a number of arguments that various scholars have put up for who Jesus is. By talking to different experts, he is able to …
Book: My Man Jeeves I tried this one out using the free “Stanza” reader for iPhone. Though I’m familiar with the stories of Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse, I’ve never read one of the books through. Though it was a good read, and characters are well painted, I was troubled by the idleness of the lives …
book: Watchmen, though a graphic novel, is on the list of Time Magazine’s top 100 novels since 1923. Tells at interwoven story, subverts the graphic novel genre. A complex piece, with lots of hidden detail for future re-readings. Not for kids, given some of the content. Oh, and they’re turning it into a film, somehow.
book: Soul Mountain A story of a Chinese writer exploring China; complex, well-written, yet hard to read, this winner of the Nobel Prize for literature is worth a look in terms of understanding the mindset of China under Mao.
Don’t waste your life is the best book of its genre I’ve read for a while. A man in his 60’s becomes convinced of the truth of Christianity, and is struck by the awful truth that he has wasted all of his life in secular pursuits. John Piper expertly weaves together a range of other …