Amazon link Official site I’ve liked Colson Whitehead’s previous work, including The Intuitionist (the title convinced me to pick up the book), and John Henry Days. His writing is just wonderfully sumptuous, so rich that I often have to re-read bits to appreciate the language. A few years ago, he published this book, a set […]

A couple weeks ago I broke down and actually did some non-class, non-Economist reading. Crazy, eh? It was a weekend where I didn’t feel up to socializing, but didn’t feel up to homework either. So I looked for something light in my book pile, and this is what I read. Bobos in Paradise, by David […]

I first heard of Chuck Klosterman when the ESPN Sports Guy did an interview with him (here’s part 2). Described as a pop culture guru, the interview made it clear that he spent way way too much time thinking about inconsequential things. And I mean that in a good way. So he was on my […]

Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud I liked Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud a lot, because it had a really thoughtful take on why comics worked, and what the conventions were (representing the dimension of time in space, etc.). When I saw this sequel in the library, I picked it up. I didn’t like it nearly […]

Amazon link and Official book website I read this NYT magazine article about Steven Levitt a couple years ago and thought it was great. Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who spends his time trying to think up interesting ways to sift data to answer hard questions: For instance: If drug dealers […]

Amazon link I’ve meant to read this since the day it came out both because I follow baseball and because I’ve liked other books by Michael Lewis, but never got around to it, because I didn’t think it was worth buying. But I finally saw it in my local branch library yesterday, so I picked […]

Amazon link Most of my readers will have heard of Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor who’s a regular contributor to Fresh Air and the New York Times Week in Review. This book is a collection of pieces from those venues, where he muses amusingly about quirks in our language for a few minutes at a […]

Amazon link Subtitled “How I survived the Gold Rush years on the Internet”. I had seen this book around and had some vague interest in reading it, but never got around to it until a friend of mine was giving away a free copy. So I borrowed it and read it. It was pretty nondescript. […]

Amazon link Several people have highly recommended to me Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest, but I’ve been too intimidated by its 1000 page length (of which 300 pages are footnotes) to try it. But when I saw a collection of his essays in the used bookstore, I figured that might be a way to ease in […]