Category: Books

  • Pogle let me go to a used book sale at the public library.

    This was the craziest book sale I’ve ever been to. I had to wait outside for an hour to even get in! There were people in the line who had been there since 5AM when the sale didn’t even open until 9AM! These are obviously my kind of people. The haul: 5 of those fill…

  • A Mind Like a Clock

    The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. The Fool’s thoughts regarding the Duke in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett

  • Strange and Terrible Things

    She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it. Regarding Granny Weatherwax in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett

  • An apt description of Greek/Roman Myths

    Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don’t? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and…

  • How true…

    No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights. Layard, Richard. Happiness: Lessons from a new science. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. 92.

  • This sounds familiar…

    You did what you were told or you didn’t get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn’t your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn’t your fault, no one…

  • On Children’s Literature

    The great subversive works of children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all…

  • Motive

    Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE –Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (as quoted in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke)

  • A Curse on Book Thieves

    For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony…