This book is such a great and eerie read. Hoffman’s work of historical fiction paints a despairing portrait of two lives which become intertwined through a series of odd events. Coralie is a disfigured girl who is forced to perform as a mermaid in her father’s Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island.
Charlie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, reminds me of myself when I was an uber-angsty adolescent. That’s the good thing about reading Young Adult Fiction as a middle aged adult: you have a broader worldview which allows you to appreciate teenage angst in a deeper way. You’ve been there and back. You’ve lived through it. You know there’s a way out. You understand.
Through his organization Edge Foundation, John Brockman asks academics and artists to respond to a provocative question about science that will bring something new to a discussion.
Asterios Polyp is a self-assured, domineering, wind-bag of a paper architect. A paper architect being one “whose reputation rests on his designs, rather than on the buildings constructed from them. In fact, none of his designs had ever been built.”
When we meet Asterios, his Manhattan apartment, where he wallows in self-pity while riding out a mid-life crisis, has just burned to the ground. So he takes the last of his money, hops on a bus, and “give[s] up on the one thing [he] thought defined him.” And it “prove[s] to be a lot less difficult than [he] could have imagined.”
Delia Ephron has written an entertaining group of personal essays that range from the deeply touching to the absurdly humorous in Sister Mother Husband Dog, (etc.) The first essay in the book is a tribute to her late sister, the writer Nora Ephron. The two sisters worked together writing screenplays for several popular movies, including You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Certainly she writes of her sister in a loving way, but she also shares with us the humanness of the relationship – the jealousy and the competition.
The day after Liyana experiences her first kiss, her father announces that he is moving the family from St. Louis, to his birthplace, Jerusalem. Liyana leaves everything she knows behind, and everything that won't fit in a few boxes and embarks on an adventure to experience a different kind of life.
I read Dad is Fat for my book club and, as a group, we reached several conclusions.
- If you have children, Gaffigan is really funny.
- If you don’t have children, he’s just “meh."
- While reading the book is okay, listening to Gaffigan read his work is much better. If you can, choose the audio.
This book is a combination of short stories of Niequist's life with a focus on difficulties having children. She is a woman of faith and relates her stories to spiritual lessons which she realized after each individual experience. Almost every chapter is tied to a specific dish which she cooked for a particular experience and she includes recipes at the end of the chapters. I thought that this book was interesting because it was an intimate portrait of a woman's struggle with being thankful for what she had while wanting a larger family.
This story starts with a bang! Wil Jamieson is grabbed by two guys in an airport bathroom. They stick a needle in his eye, ask him a bunch of questions and tell him if he wants to live he has to come with them. Wil gathers from their conversation that he in an important piece in a war they are fighting. Wars have casualties, and before they escape the airport one kidnapper and Wil's girlfriend are dead. Barely trusting Eliot, Wil takes off cross country as a fugitive, trying to discover what makes him so special.