Recent Reads

Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber.  This was an interesting collection of short stories largely about characters seeking their fortunes and finding things do not work out as planned (hence the title).  There's some humor (the baseball story is quite funny) and one or two happy endings, but it's mostly bittersweet withe the last story being downright sad. 

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.  You've seen the adaptation, but you've probably never read the book.  We had a book discussion on this at the Myerstown Library a week or two ago and of the eighteen or so of us there only about a third finished the book.  Not that that stopped us from discussing the hell out of it for over two hours which was oodles of fun.  Yes it's Twain and has a good deal of humor, but for the large part this is a dark story.  Out Yankee doesn't just travel through time and space, he decides the Britons are backwards and sets up secret schools to try to make Dark Age Britain into America.  Twain uses a lot of ten cent words in this so keep a dictionary handy while reading.  It's a bit of a tough read, but overall is thought provoking and worth the effort.

John Calvin:  A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine & Doxology.  This is a collection of essays celebrating Calvin's 500th birthday which I picked up one day when it was free for Kindle.  I don't know if it is the Methodism I was raised in or Protestantism in general, but I've never paid much thought to the the theologians of the Protestant movement.  The essays were well written and informative.  Some of the stuff on predestination was like jumping down a rabbit hole, but given the shear volume of Calvin's writings he was bound to over think things at times.  The book wasn't entirely my cup of teas, but was decent.

Einstein's Refrigerator by Steve Silverman.  Another Kindle freebie.  This is one of those books that started as a trivia sort of website that got turned into book form.  The author thinks he is cleverer than he actually is, but that can be said of all of us who write on the Internet.

Asimov's Mysteries by Isaac Asimov.  Short stories combining science fiction and mystery.  Asimov was a brilliant short story writer.  For someone with a thorough  interest in science and technology, he didn't do a very good job of predicting the future, though.

Party Monster by James St. James.  A true story of the death of a drug dealer by a NY Club Kid except it's more the story of the whole Club Kid scene and how it spiraled out of control by someone who was there through it all (later made into a movie with Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin).  It's written in a breezy witty style that lets you imagine how much fun it all was while at the same time seeing that those involved were shallow, filthy drug addicts with few if any redeeming features.  A trashy good time.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith.  It started out promising with a guy falling from a balcony then bogged down into the angsty drivel of a middle aged spinster who is improbably rich and thinks way to much.  When nothing else had happened by page 100, I stopped reading.

Go Down Together by Jeff Guinn. The true story of Bonnie and Clyde which is nothing like the movie (not that the movie isn't awesome in its own way).  Very well researched and informative given the lack of accurate source material (newspapers were more interested in sensationalism than the truth).  It's somewhat amazing that two such totally inept criminals became so famous.

Frankie Pickle and the Mathematical Menace by Eric Wight. I pre-ordered this months ago when it was a free pre-order and had completely forgotten it when it downloaded to my Kindle.  This is junior fiction and apparently part of a series.  Frankie's having problems with math and then has problems getting some studying done the weekend before a quiz.  The story's interspersed with comic book pages (it reminded me of an old cartoon where the kid is daydreaming in class).  I was impressed by the clarity and ease of reading of the comic book pages on the Kindle.   Very well written kid's book with a good message that isn't preachy or heavy handed.  What the heck, here's the cartoon