Amazon link I’ve liked Swain’s previous books, so when I saw this one in paperback at the used book store, I picked it up. Not as entertaining as the previous entries in the series, partially because Swain doesn’t spend as much time explaining various casino swindles. The centerpiece scam isn’t as interesting or intricate either. […]
Category: reviews
Home from Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler
Amazon link I quite liked The Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler’s previous book about civic planning, so when I happened to see this in the library while picking up Infinite Jest, I grabbed it. Unfortunately, because Infinite Jest took so long to read, I had to slam through this book because they’re all due today. Fortunately, […]
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Amazon link As previously noted, I picked this up after reading a book of Wallace essays and enjoying them quite a lot. It’s an enormous book, 980 pages with a further 100 pages of end notes. I’ve been slogging through it for the past six weeks after borrowing it from the library, and finished it […]
Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco
Amazon link I picked this up at the library, because I really liked Foucault’s Pendulum and the snippet I read of the title essay intrigued me. The book is a set of essays by Eco, obviously. Eco is a well known semioticist, where semiotics is the study of signs. These essays were written for a […]
Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff
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. […]
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
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 […]
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, by Paul Rabinow
Amazon link A friend lent me this book, purporting to be “an ethnographic account of the invention of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction” at Cetus, one of the first biotech companies. Unfortunately, I think that the book fails at both of its primary tasks. As somebody who still doesn’t understand a lot of biochemistry despite […]
Seven Seasons of Buffy, ed. by Glenn Yeffeth
Amazon link This is the third book analyzing Buffy that I’ve bought, after Reading the Vampire Slayer and a Buffy philosophy book. This one takes the angle of inviting other authors (the book is subtitled “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show”) to analyze the show. There wasn’t actually a lot of […]
Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich
Amazon link I read a Wired article a couple years ago about the MIT blackjack team, a group of MIT students who used their ability to count cards to beat the system at Vegas and make a lot of money. Millions of dollars allegedly. This intrigued me both because it was about MIT students, but […]
Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
Amazon link I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro series. I didn’t enjoy Mystic River as much, although the movie was well done. So I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, which I picked up from the library. It was okay. Pretty standard psychological thriller. Interesting characters, breezy writing. I should have […]
