Reading, Part 2
I finished 2012 with two books about two of my favorite teams ever. Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever – Jack McCallum. This is a perfect accounting of the perfect team: the 1992 US men’s basketball team. The long-time Sports Illustrated NBA…
Reading, Part 1
2012 was an interesting year for me, reading-wise. For the first time since I can recall, I struggled to read. I went an entire calendar month – April – without finishing a book. Where I normally went from one book straight to the next, I had a hard time picking books to read. For the previous four summers I spent…
Reading
How I Became a Famous Novelist – Steve Hely I knew when I picked this up that it was a novel, a satire of our current pop culture where anyone can become famous regardless of how much (or little) talent they possess. But I’ll admit, I just might have been hoping to find the secret to getting published while making…
Reading
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power – Rachel Maddow. I love Rachel Maddow, at least as much as a straight man can love a gay woman. She speaks from a similar political point of view as mine. And I really like her spin on how to run a news/politics TV show: less yelling and screaming and demonizing and more…
Reading
I finished my latest book over a week ago but hadn’t found the time to write about it yet. I sat down to do it this morning, not yet looking at the calendar. When I was at the bank later at saw the date, I realized there was some part of me that had intentionally held off on writing this…
Reading
I’ve hit a wall. I’ve abandoned two books in a row. The first, which got good reviews on Amazon, was so horribly written that I gave up after two chapters. The second, a piece of alternative-history fiction, I gave 100 pages. But I was sure I would get more annoyed and less entertained as I continued. I’m going to start…
Reading
I’ve gotten way behind on updating my Reading page, the little summaries of books that I finish. When I switched over to Squarespace 6, the formatting of that page got jacked up, meaning I have to redesign it. In the interest of killing two birds with one stone, I’m going to wipe out the existing Reading page and begin posting…
Fun With Nursery Rhymes
My nearly eight years as a stay-at-home parent have been filled with humorous moments that come with being the rare dad who is with his kids all day. Random kids who come up and start telling me about their potty habits. Boys who mistake me for their dad because I’m the only guy around. And, my personal favorite, kids yanking…
Lendle And Amazon
I had a nice long rant half-drafted, and then it got shot down. Tuesday, Amazon removed API access for Lendle and several other Kindle book lending services. That killed these services as they rely on access to Amazon databases to facilitate sharing amongst users. Amazon said they removed access because the services did not aid Amazon in its primary mission:…
Reader’s Notebook, Early January 2011
ESPN columnist Jim Caple kicked off his book blog this week. Coincidentally, I just finished the first book he highlights, George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out, a terrific, numbing look inside the world of “grassroots” basketball, the name now used for what used to be called the AAU circuit. Dohrmann focuses on one coach, Joe Keller, and his prodigy, Demetrius…