Bookworm on Feb 04 2013 | Filed under: Books
Tweet I first read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in 1976, when I was in high school. In those days, the book was popular, as it has been since its first publication two-hundred years ago (January 28, 1813), but it wasn’t yet trendy. I didn’t care about trends. I fell in love — with an [...]
Bookworm on Jan 05 2013 | Filed under: Books, Second Amendment
Tweet I did a Costco run the other day and, as I always do, I glanced at the book display. This time, they had two books by one of my favorite junk/romance novel writers: Linda Howard. Both of the books were at prices comparable to what I’d pay for them on my iPad’s Kindle app [...]
Bookworm on Dec 22 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet One of the things that makes it very difficult to write a conservative-oriented thriller is that you cannot simply assume that your audience will understand your references. In a standard pot-boiler, written for an American market brought up in public schools and addicted to Hollywood movies and television shows, there are so many shortcuts [...]
Bookworm on Dec 12 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Robert Avrech, who blogs at Seraphic Secret, flattered me tremendously when he asked me to read his e-book How I Married Karen and, if I felt so inclined to write a pre-publication blurb. As it turned out, I felt very inclined, because the book was a pleasure from beginning to end. Or as I [...]
Bookworm on Nov 28 2012 | Filed under: Books, Britain
Tweet For our Thanksgiving drive to L.A., I went to our local library and got several books on CD. Since our small family manages not to have any overlapping areas of interest, this is always a challenge. One wants teenage hero spy books, another wants high school romantic dramadies (half drama, half comedy), another wants [...]
Bookworm on Nov 15 2012 | Filed under: Books, Lefties on Parade
Tweet I have some very exciting news: I have found my long-lost identical twin. It’s amazing, really. Like me, my twin grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 60s and 70s. Like me, my twin went to UC Berkeley and found Leftist antics revolting. Like me, my twin now does conservative commentary, [...]
Bookworm on Nov 13 2012 | Filed under: Books, Culture, Hollywood
Tweet Thanks to a handy-dandy Amazon gift certificate, I just bought myself a Kindle copy of Greg Gutfeld’s The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage. It sounds like a book that is simultaneously important and enjoyable. I’ll be reading it with a close eye, because his ideas [...]
Bookworm on Nov 06 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet I discovered that I was too nervous about the election even to read my usual round of blogs this morning. After I saw a post about shenanigans in Pennsylvania, my stomach did a little slip-sloppy thing, and I closed all the political blog tabs I had open. Until I get my equilibrium back, I [...]
Bookworm on Oct 19 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Although few academics would want to acknowledge this, economics is, at bottom, about human behavior: rational humans respond to incentives and shy away from disincentives. If you understand that, you’re more than halfway to understanding the marketplace. Maggie Larche does understand the human connection to economic behavior, and she also understands that it’s never [...]
Bookworm on Oct 19 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Just a reminder that today is the last day that my book, The Bookworm Turns: A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land, is available for free at Amazon. As one very nice reviewer said: When I stumbled across Bookworm Room in the vast blogosphere of political chatter and rants, I knew I had found something [...]
Bookworm on Oct 14 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet I am very pleased to announce that I have published a new Kindle book called Easy Ways To Teach Kids Hard Things : The fun way to teach your children important life principles ($1.99 on Amazon). In it, I distill the parenting knowledge I’ve acquired over the years as I’ve worked my way towards [...]
Bookworm on Sep 30 2012 | Filed under: Blogs and Blogging, Books, California
Tweet Real Clear Politics, Sunday, September 30, 2012: I’m excited not only for myself, but for Laer Pearce, whose book, Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State – How California is Destroying Itself and Why it Matters to America, is the subject of the post that RCP picked up. It’s a great book, and as many [...]
Bookworm on Sep 22 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet The one good thing about bad books is that they can give rise to brilliant book reviews. Such is the case with Florence King’s review of Naomi Wolf’s latest offering, Vagina: A New Biography. This may well be the funniest book review I’ve ever read. Admittedly, Wolf provides a reviewer with lots of material [...]
Bookworm on Sep 19 2012 | Filed under: Books, Free speech
Tweet I was doodling about on that Folio Society site I told you about, and I came across a book I’ve never heard of: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. Here’s the product description: ‘Well, as everyone knows, once witchcraft gets started, there’s no stopping it’ On a hot spring afternoon in Moscow, a [...]
Bookworm on Sep 13 2012 | Filed under: Blogfriends, Books, California
Tweet Those of you who were lucky enough to have started using the internet a few years ago probably remember Laer Pearce, who blogged at Cheat-Seeking Missiles. Laer was one of my first blog friends, meaning that we corresponded by email and, eventually, we met. He is precisely what you’d imagine him to be from [...]
Bookworm on Sep 09 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet I regularly troll the Kindle book “Bestseller” page in search of free books. Usually, free is more than they’re worth, because they are so poorly edited or written that it’s a waste of my time to read them. The exception occurs when a publisher prices at zero an author’s earlier published work, in order [...]
Bookworm on Aug 26 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Last week, I wrote a post about relationship porn, in which I argued that the sex in romance novels is the least interesting part for romance readers. The most interesting part, I said, is that the heroes like, respect, and support the heroines. I also said that there are few writers who even try [...]
Bookworm on Jul 20 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Jeff Jacoby wrote a lovely column that I’m sure will resonate with many of you, entitled “A Slow Reader’s Lament.” In it, he talks about the ineffable joy of owning wonderful books, and the concurrent frustration that comes with lacking the time to read all of them: But above all there was the delight [...]
Bookworm on Jul 19 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet It took me a long time to read Jonah Goldberg’s latest, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. This is not because it’s a bad or a boring book but, instead, because it’s a deep and thoughtful book. I went into reading it expecting a sort of cheerful factual [...]
Bookworm on Jun 27 2012 | Filed under: Books, Lefties on Parade, Liberal Fascism
Tweet I haven’t yet finished Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, which is unusual for me, given that I’ve had it since Friday. It’s the kind of book one gobbles up — but that assumes time to gobble. Since I bought the book and Jonah signed it [...]
Bookworm on Jun 24 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet Let’s see…. Today is Sunday, right? I ask because being out-of-town for the weekend (which I am) always skews my perception of time. It now seems like a lifetime, ather than something less than two days since I heard Jonah Goldberg talk about his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in [...]
Bookworm on Jun 22 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet We’re planning yet another summer trip, so I did what I always do when I’m trying to learn about (what is to me) a foreign locale: I got one of those DK Eyewitness travel guides. They’re fairly familiar to everyone now, but once upon a time — say, about twenty years ago — they [...]
Bookworm on Jun 11 2012 | Filed under: Books, Military
Tweet Within the last two weeks, I’ve read two Navy SEAL books: Marcus Luttrell’s Service: A Navy SEAL at War and Chris Kyle’s American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. The books have a lot of similarities, separate from the fact that both are books about SEALS seeing service [...]
Bookworm on May 28 2012 | Filed under: Books, Iraq, Military
Tweet I promise that this post will be a review of Marcus Luttrell’s Service: A Navy SEAL at War. First, though, I have to start with the ridiculous, before I can give proper context, not to the sublime (because war isn’t sublime), but to the important and meaningful. The ridiculous is, of course, MSNBC’s own [...]
Bookworm on May 25 2012 | Filed under: Books
Tweet “I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper [...]
|
Caped Crusader on A bittersweet day
Danny Lemieux on The Blue Angels are about to be grounded
Spartacus on Richard III’s death, because it paved the way for Henry VIII, was a pivotal moment in British and world history *UPDATED*
Earl on A bittersweet dayEarl on The Blue Angels are about to be grounded
jj on Richard III’s death, because it paved the way for Henry VIII, was a pivotal moment in British and world history *UPDATED*
Sgt. Mom on Richard III’s death, because it paved the way for Henry VIII, was a pivotal moment in British and world history *UPDATED*
