I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it
was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W.
…
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their strong showing in the New England Math Playoffs! We finished seventh among all the medium-sized high schools in New England. Special congratulations are due to sophomore William Kretschmer, who achieved a highly unusual perfect score.…
Six years ago I reviewed Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer ; I’ve read several other books by Connelly before or since, and I highly recommend them. In recent years I’ve read The Overlook, The Narrows, Lost Light, The Poet, Blood Work, The Scarecrow, Nine Dragons, The Brass Verdict, and The Drop.…
Mark Bittman is not Michael Pollan, though they have some things in common. Bittman’s book, with the deliberately ambiguous title of Food Matters, is quite different from his standard fare. Bittman is best known for his cookbooks (and his appearances as a foodie on television), but here he concentrates on nutrition and the politics of food, à la Pollan.…
As you know, the authentic Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You may or may not know that there are also two different types of Sherlock Holmes stories that were not written by him.
One type — forming a sub-genre all its own — is the pastiche, usually a novel that includes Holmes and Watson as portrayed by Doyle, and usually imitating Doyle’s style as well.…
For our last movie of the vacation, Barbara and I watched How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a British comedy from 2008. Being all about celebrities and Vanity Fair magazine, it is not really my cup of tea, though it was well acted and is certainly amusing in places.…
For the last weekday of vacation, I spent the entire afternoon at the Museum of Science, including watching two IMAX films. The verdict is thumbs down for Tornado Alley, thumbs up for To the Arctic.
So what’s wrong with Tornado Alley, other than being surprisingly boring?…
Spent a lovely morning walking around the Franklin Park Zoo today. I started with the zebra and the aptly named wildebeests, who were running around like…well, like wildebeests, dashing from one end of their huge enclosure all the way to the other end.…
Wow! What an amazing movie! Just don’t see it if you want to be cheered up.
Its tagline — “No children. No future. No hope.” — rather gives that away.
This 2006 film is an impressively well-made dystopian vision of the very near future (2027) as seen through the eyes of P.D.…
This is a rather unusual but definitely interesting book. The full title of Mark Barrowcliffe’s book is The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, and that pretty much captures it. Barrowcliffe grew up as a geek/nerd in England in the ’70s, and he writes about that experience in this memoir.…
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