Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

This article is more a compendium of notes I took while reading this book. It includes citations I found interesting or enlightening of particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation. In others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to... [More]

A fine pickle by Salman Rushdie (The Guardian)

“In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have... [More]”

11/22/63 (2011)

by Stephen King

King takes on the legends surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the context of his first time-travel story. In typical King fashion, time travel is made much more difficult than in other stories. Paradox is dispensed with by assigning malevolent intent to capital-T Time itself. Time has an agenda of its own—maintaining the one true time-line.

A young teacher befriends the owner of a diner, who has been diving into the past to get inexpensive... [More]

I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I’d made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I’d never heard of him. It turns out that he’s “the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, a global intelligence company founded in 1996”, according to Wikipedia. That helped set the context for the book a bit better.

There... [More]

Firstborn (2007)

by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can imagine, flitting from topic to topic and seeming to hurry through the story. It’s quite inconsistent in the way that they kept shuttling people all over the solar system when that’s obviously such a... [More]

If scooping information from the madly bubbling froth of the U.S. media lies at all within your purview, you will no doubt have heard of the latest rage in American literature, called 50 Shades of Grey. A modicum of research reveals that the epithet literature is a good deal more generous a term than the referenced work earns.

It’s more commonly called “Mommy Porn”[1] which seems to be the designator that U.S. culture is going to use to indicate that reading poorly written soft-core pornography... [More]

Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism that Changed the World (2005)

by John Pilger

This book contains the best—or most legendary—articles from the best journalists of the 20th century. They range from Martha Gellhorn’s reports on Dachau to Pilger’s own reports from the Killing Fields to Fisk’s peerless reporting from Iraq in the early 21st century. It’s highly recommended for anyone who cares about history—and getting their news from people who got it right when it was happening.

... [More]

I’ve been keeping track of the movies I watched for a couple of years now, but have only recently been adding mini-reviews[1] to each so I can remember (A) what it was about and (B) whether I liked it.

Since I’m no longer maintaining the old text file in which I kept this list, I’m dumping the list here.

2008 (or so)

1. Monster (2003) — 8/10
2. The Good Shepherd (2006) — 7/10
3. Breach (2007) — 7/10
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) — 7/10
5. Eastern Promises (2007) — 9/10... [More]

1. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) (second half) – Umberto Eco
2. The Great War of Civilization (2005) – Robert Fisk (second half)
3. Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998) – Jon Stewart
4. The Drought (1965) – JG Ballard
5. Drowned World (1962) – JG Ballard
6. Spook Country (2007) – William Gibson
7. Free Lunch (2007) – David Cay Johnston
8. Stardust (1999) – Neil Gaiman
9. Heat (2006) – George Monbiot
10. Unbowed (2006) – Wangari Maathai
11. Grieche sucht Griechin/Mister X macht Ferien/Zeitungswesen in der Steinzeit... [More]

It was the start of the long week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and it was time to start a new book. A quick scan of the book shelf revealed many interesting candidates, but most of those were a bit more challenging than a week of this kind warranted. But look who’s hiding on one of the shelves: good ol’ Dan Brown.

This copy of The Lost Symbol had been obtained from the local Salvation Army secondhand shop for only a couple of bucks. I’d gotten Brown’s two other books in the same way,... [More]

In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another absolutely wonderful essay on the issue of usage and grammar is Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage by David Foster Wallace (a few citations of which are documented on earthli News),... [More]

Heat is a very accessible book on the state of the world’s climate, energy and heating needs today and going into the future. The author sets himself the task of coming up with a plan for our planet that is economically, socially and climatologically viable. His express goal is to keep convenience and freedom as much like it is now as possible while reducing CO2 emissions by 90% across the board—domestic usage, air travel, industrial, transports, construction and so on.

He will not... [More]

1. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) – Michael Pollan
2. Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) – Gregory Maguire
3. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992) – Jeremy Rifkin
4. The Great War of Civilization (2005) – Robert Fisk (partial)
5. Armed Madhouse (2006) – Greg Palast
6. The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007) – J.K. Rowling
7. Rough Music (2005) – Tariq Ali
8. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – Ray Bradbury
9. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004) – John Perkins
10. The Good... [More]