Books I've read...
...and opinions, scathing ratings, and memories about them!
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
Stranger in a Strange Land
Read 2017-09-13
Core message of the book: heterosexual sex is the greatest achievement of the universe.
Alien races
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2016
The Soul of Soil
A Soil-Building Guide for Master Gardeners and Farmers
Read 2016-06-26
Super informative, but scattered presentation. It felt more like “fact, fact, fact, fact…” than its
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The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook
Read 2016-04-26
This book gave me a pretty clear picture of what it takes to maintain a farm from the business
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2015
2014
Attached
The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love
Read 2014-04-03
This was a really wonderful book for introducing me to new ways of seeing and talking about
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The Night Circus
Read 2014-02-08
I enjoyed this book, but wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend it.
The circus and magic are intriguing
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My Side of the Mountain
Mountain
Read 2014-02-02
This was one of my favorite books when I was little. Returning to it 20 years later, it still
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2013
Inspiration Sandwich
Stories to Inspire Our Creative Freedom
Read 2013-11-23
Dreamy, playful, and cute. Inspiration Sandwich is exactly that – food for your creative and
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Truth in Comedy
The Manual of Improvisation
Read 2013-10-26
I can’t recommend this book at all. It’s very self-absorbed, full of name-dropping, and narrow in
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The Direction of Play
Read 2013-07-16
Wow! I love Takeo’s writing style. He approaches the game with such a reverence and intensity. I
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Your Time Has Come
Read 2013-07-06
Delightful! A cute and intelligent book of short, witty, and playful poems. They range from
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Graded Go Problems For Beginners Volume 3
Intermediate Problems 15 to 8 Kyu
Read 2013-04-07
A wonderful collection of Go problems! It says 20-15k, but I worked through this as 12-9k or so…it
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Attack and Defense
Elementary Go Series
Read 2013-03-16
Amazing! There is so much to learn in here!
A 5d friend of mine gave me this, Tesuji, and Kageyama’s
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Tesuji
Elementary Go Series
Read 2013-03-03
Amazing! There is so much to learn in here!
A 5d friend of mine gave me this, Attack and Defense,
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2012
Mockingjay
The Hunger Games
Read 2012-12-30
You know how some relationships are really amazing? And then it gets bad, but it was so good before
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Catching Fire
The Hunger Games
Read 2012-12-24
I was a little worried that Collins couldn’t keep up the fantastic plot, pacing, and brilliance of
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The Alchemist
Read 2012-12-13
Bad, bad bad. The tale of it—the plot—wasn’t too offensive, but Coelho’s writing felt artificial,
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Read 2012-12-10
Five stars for droll, absurd style and humor.
Three stars for it becoming old really quickly. I
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The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
Read 2012-12-04
So delightful! I read this in two sittings.
It’s as smooth, enjoyable, dark, painful, and wonderful
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Cosmicomics
Read 2012-11-11
If a book where a narrator uses snippets of physics “facts” and cosmological history as inspirations
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Calling in "The One"
7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life
Read 2012-11-01
This is a fantastic book! Better than I expected, given the title.
It’s easy to read, but pretty
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Kiss the Rain
Read 2012-10-23
I read it despite the cover, by which you can judge this book. The writing, romance, characters,
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Read 2012-10-23
It started with a bang, and shortly after petered away into miniature biographies of dead white men
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The Great Divorce
Read 2012-10-21
I enjoyed this for the ideas if nothing else. It felt a little pretentious and consciously-poised…of
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The Book Thief
Read 2012-10-07
I’m over halfway through this book, and I’m giving it up.
It’s a fine story, mostly well written,
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Curious Wine
Read 2012-09-30
If you want interesting fiction…delightful characters…funny dialog…engaging action…artful
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The Essential Enneagram
Read 2012-07-20
I’ve been interested in the MBTI model for quite awhile, and I’m just starting to look into
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The Sense of an Ending
Read 2012-07-13
While it certainly had interesting, funny, and sometimes even wise moments, thoughts, emotions, and
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Perelandra
The Space Trilogy
Read 2012-07-02
Meh.
After adoring its prequel, “Out of the Silent Planet,” and remembering enjoying this when I was
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Out of the Silent Planet
The Space Trilogy
Read 2012-06-15
Wondrous!
Everything about this Ransom’s adventure to the planet Malacandra is wondrous! From the
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Fahrenheit 451
Read 2012-06-10
My reaction: really? THIS is great “Fahrenheit 451?”
On the plot and idea level, it’s interesting
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Fingersmith
Read 2012-06-05
Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any book that has such a dumbfounding and pleasurably dark
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Adulthood Rites
Xenogenesis
Read 2012-05-27
I found this far less sensitive, sharp, or well written than the trilogy’s first book, Dawn. Dawn, I
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Dawn
Xenogenesis
Read 2012-05-09
Wow. This book captured me!
There are lots of difficult [and potentially troubling] issues this book
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Read 2012-05-03
The idea of the story is intriguing: mute travelers tell stories to each other with a tarot deck and
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The Happiness Project
Read 2012-04-26
Platitudes, banal moralizing, and unimaginative anecdotes from a self-impressed writer. There is
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2011
The Golden Key
Read 2011-12-21
Beautiful and filled with evocative images and ideas, to be sure. Yet, it felt discontinuous and
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Tipping the Velvet
Read 2011-09-07
Beautiful, fun, sexy, wonderous. This book is an incredible adventure, and, rare for a longer work,
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Written on the Body
Read 2011-07-10
Not the most enjoyable plot or characters…they both felt a little vacuous. I couldn’t sympathize
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Spoon Fed
How Eight Cooks Saved My Life
Read 2011-06-10
Light, grounded, and pretty fun to read. I liked her laid back style—Kim seems like someone I’d like
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Away
Read 2011-05-19
The peripheral characters had more personality than the main character. Depressing, but not in a
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The Tao of Tango
Read 2011-03-25
Johanna has a really lovely idea here - exploring and explaining masculine and feminine energies
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Impro
Improvisation and the Theatre
Read 2011-03-25
Oh my god, this book is lovely. It’s “about” how to teach improvisational acting…but it’s really
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Hearts That We Broke Long Ago
Read 2011-03-23
A poetic and heartfelt look at how we often sabotage our own efforts to find love and live out
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2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
Cover to Cover
Creative Techniques for Making Beautiful Books, Journals, & Albums
Read 2004-01-01
No review
