Category Archives: Reviews

Book reviews, as well as Reads to Reels

The Way to Go

Posted on March 6, 2024 by smellincoffee

Longtime readers here know that I love reading about transportation, and not just Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Ships, horses, bicycles — if it moves, I’ll follow and read books about it happily. A few years ago I delighted in the … Continue reading →

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Troubled

Posted on March 4, 2024 by smellincoffee

Selected Quotations Imagine that your first memory is that of being three years old and seeing your mother, a drug addict who ties you to chairs to get high without interruption, being arrested. Imagine being bounced around ten different foster … Continue reading →

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February 2024 in Review

Posted on February 29, 2024 by smellincoffee

February continued 2024’s atypicalness, with fiction continuing to outstrip nonfiction by a healthy margin. Granted, I was in bed for over a week, meaning novels, comedy sketches, and soup were my fare instead of histories, lectures, and fajitas, and even after … Continue reading →

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How To Stay Married

Posted on February 28, 2024 by smellincoffee

On an ordinary day, a book called How to Stay Married would have never broached my radar, given the dismal marriage prospects of eccentric librarians, but as it happened one of my favorite authors mentioned Harrison Scott Key last week … Continue reading →

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Live, from New York — It’s SATURDAY NIGHT!

Posted on February 27, 2024 by smellincoffee

At the end of 2022, a friend of mine discovered that his former roommate had left a boxed set of SNL’s first five seasons — or at least, season two of the same. He was a teenager when SNL first … Continue reading →

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Lovers and Other Strangers

Posted on February 24, 2024 by smellincoffee

Perhaps twenty years ago now, while looking for modded content for The Sims*, a painting to place in game caught my eye. It was of a man and woman at a train station, the man in a somber grey suit … Continue reading →

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The World’s Largest Man

Posted on February 24, 2024 by smellincoffee

When Harrison Scott Key was young, his father opted to uproot the family from Memphis and moved to an old farmstead out in the country – -the reason being, a boy needed to grow up outdoors doing things. Harrison did … Continue reading →

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Neo Cab

Posted on February 23, 2024 by smellincoffee

This is going to be an unusual review, because Neo Cab isn’t a book. It’s a visual novel that people experience as a video game, a novel set in a dystopia that touches on so many topics — corporatocracy, the … Continue reading →

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The Royal Society

Posted on February 22, 2024 by smellincoffee

Over ten years ago I devoured a history of science series by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser that played a large part establishing my basic adult understanding of science. While reading it, I was particularly fascinated by the role … Continue reading →

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In the Company of Trees

Posted on February 21, 2024 by smellincoffee

In the Company of Trees is a little volume of photos and reflections on trees, a pleasant mixture of science and cultural writing peppered with arboreal quotes — though not, curiously, the classic “I think that I shall never see … Continue reading →

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