Four books in four weeks to kick off the year. But one of those was a children’s book I knocked out in an afternoon, so I’m feeling like I didn’t take advantage of January the way I should have. Also, I’m skipping one book, just because I’m still thinking about how to write about it. It’s the first time I’ve…

I read 55 books in 2013. Not bad. Not bad at all. Here’s the last of the bunch. A Christmas Story – Jean Shepherd You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas – Augusten Burroughs Shepherd’s work is an annual tradition for me. Before I can watch the movie, I have to go back and read the original essays it was…

Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination – Josiah Thompson Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK – Gerald Posner Well, I got a little obsessed around the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Aside from numerous TV documentaries watched and online stuff read, I came across an Errol Morris film that features Josiah Thompson. After…

A full month of books, but also one in which I got obsessed by a specific topic late. So I’ll chop this into two entries: one for the non-obsession books then a second, tomorrow, for the books that haunted my dreams for a couple weeks. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien The Quiet American – Graham Green I began…

A Spy By Nature – Charles Cumming. I read Cumming’s Trinity Six earlier this year. After a slow start, I really liked it. I keep hearing Cumming’s name listed as one of the best young espionage writers going, so dove back in for another. Here, he focuses on a young British man, Alec Milius, who is drifting through his early…

Whoops. It looks like, between our early September travels and the various changes I made to the site last month, I never posted my list of August books. My bad. Here they are, to be followed shortly by my September list. 30 – VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave – Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and Martha…

30 – VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave![][image-1] – Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and Martha Quinn with Gavin Edwards. I knew before reading this, from the reviews, that it wasn’t considered to be nearly as good as I Want My MTV, the oral history of the glory days of MTV I read last year. But that…

You must forgive me. I’ve been on a bit of a reading roll lately, ripping through these five books in three weeks, along with a couple other more technical works I’ve been reading bits and pieces of between. Honestly, I kind of forgot all the details of the first. So shorter comments this time. I’ll try to keep up with…

Watchmen – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I was never a comic book guy. I did have some Star Wars comics1 and dabbled in GI Joe comics in the early 80s, but that was about it. I think because I was never into comics, I was also never into super heroes. So while it has become fashionable in some circles…

The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First – Jonah Keri. It is too tempting, and too easy, to call this Moneyball 2.0&. Where Michael Lewis examined how the Oakland Athletics built a winner on a meager budget through the use of (then) obscure, advanced statistical analysis, Keri details how the…