The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
I had a few problems with what was otherwise and interesting, edifying read.
The Portable Jung by CG Jung, ed. by Joseph Campbell
Of course, with the drive towards ereaders, the portability of a book might not be of consequence, but it’s fun to carry around a book of Jung’s writing like he’s your own personal guru. Somebody tells you about an encounter or a dream or a movie, and you can say, hang on, let me consult with my colleague Herr Dr. Jung.
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
This is an epic, character-driven, beautifully-written, philosophical, sad, political, morally-ambiguous, expertly-foreshadowed, thematic,hard to get immersed in, dramatic, ironic, difficult, sweeping book.
Strange But True America by John Hafnor
Here are some of the things I learned reading this book: Read the rest of this entry »
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
There are very few books I have never finished. This is one of them. And if that’s not bad enough, the sad truth is that I was not even reading it. I was listening to it on CD in the car. It was that boring.
This is a DNF–a did not finish–for me. Not a did not finish the book, but a did not finish the diet.
The subtitle to to this book is “Creative Thinking for the Speed of Life”. So, I was O.K., when the first few chapters talked about how desensitized we are by media, that we are bombarded with ads all day long. That was just set up, right?
It’s tough when you have a understanding of something to not let inconsistancies or violations bug you when you just want to be entertained. For example, whenever we watch movies about, say, the American Revolution, my husband will point out that they are using the wrong guns. And so, because of my basic knowledge of anthropology and evolution I was often irked while reading this book.
This book was originally published in the U.K as “The Surgeon of Crowthorn: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary”. The U.S. publishers kept the subtitle, but changed the main title to “The Professor and the Madman”, which, I have to say, I kind of like better. Anyways, a rose by any other name, right?
You know how it’s popular right now to name books, the so-and-so’s family member? Like 