Category Archives: Reviews

Book reviews, as well as Reads to Reels

Sparkly Hayek

Posted on December 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

Yesterday I finished my last read for 2012, which was…Twilight. Yes, the sparkly-vampires-playing-baseball book. I read it as a joke. It turned out to be a rather mean joke on myself, because it consisted of 400 pages of two lovesick … Continue reading →

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The Great Railroad Revolution

Posted on December 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Great Railroad Revolution: A History of Trains in America© 2012 Christian Wolmar448 pages The United States’ history is one written with novelty: born in the dawn of the industrial age,  America was a blank slate for technologies with the … Continue reading →

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The Hunger Games

Posted on December 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Hunger Games © 2008 Suzanne Collins 378 pages             Once every year,  two teenagers are chosen at random to represent their region in a nation-wide game….the Hunger Games. But they’re not competing in track and field … Continue reading →

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Hamlet’s Blackberry

Posted on December 28, 2012 by smellincoffee

Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age© 2011 William Powers288 pages Getting online used to require sitting in front of a computer terminal and waiting for it to dial in, oh so slowly. It was a choice … Continue reading →

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The Racketeer

Posted on December 26, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Racketeer© 2012 John Grisham340 pages Malcolm Bannister is a largely unsuccessful lawyer who was imprisoned by an overly aggressive government prosecutor when he accidentally turned  his law firm into a shell company for a shady crook who needed to … Continue reading →

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Riding Rockets

Posted on December 22, 2012 by smellincoffee

Riding Rockets: the Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut© 2007 Mike Mullane400 pages Mike Mullane is a shuttle astronaut with a penis fixation. Although Riding Rockets is ostensibly about the opening decades of the space shuttle era in NASA, … Continue reading →

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The Humans Who Went Extinct

Posted on December 21, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived© 2010 Clive Finlayson256 pages Whatever happened to the Neanderthals? Did Homo sapiens drive our beefy cousins into extinction in the first of many exercises in genocide as we … Continue reading →

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This Week at the Library (20 December)

Posted on December 20, 2012 by smellincoffee

Well, the week is winding down, and with it, the year. I’ve recently finished both The Great Railroad Revolution and The Humans Who Went Extinct, so comments for those are in progress.  And what will I be reading this week, this last … Continue reading →

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All Fall Down

Posted on December 15, 2012 by smellincoffee

 Supervolcano: All Fall Down © 2012 Harry Turtledove 416 pages     YellowstoneNational Park is gone, replaced by a vast caldera that still ripples the air with its heat. The momentous eruption covered North America’s great-growing heartland in ash, ruining … Continue reading →

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1493

Posted on December 13, 2012 by smellincoffee

1493: Uncovering the New World that Columbus Created© 2011 Charles C. Mann690 pages Although Christopher Columbus’s reputation as an intrepid explorer doesn’t withstand historical scrutiny,  Charles C. Mann believes Columbus has a legacy still worth honoring. No, he didn’t prove … Continue reading →

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