Reading Log: Unlikely Destinations; the Lonely Planet Story
First off, this is a weird book. It fits squarely into my goal of reading more things I wouldn’t normally, making picks from out of left field. It's some mad…
Reading Log (Audiobook Listening Log?): Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please
Celebrity bios are often vacuous, ghostwritten appeals to the voyeuristic spirit of Western civilization as a whole. Amy Poehler’s is not ghost written. I gave the book a shot since…
Beautiful Books: Section Stitching, Doing it Right and our Final Salvation from E-readers
Books are rarely made with great care. Quality isn’t nearly the main concern of modern publishing. Sure, plenty of publishing houses make nods to the kind of craft that used…
Another Successful Trip To Bookhounds
Had some good luck at Bookhounds (simultaneously the greatest bookstore and thrift shop within 80 miles of Bakersfield, CA). All of this for less than twenty bucks. Really loving this…
Reading Log: Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones
Reading diversely isn’t just about reading authors who are diverse in their ethnicity, gender, nationality, or sexual identity. It also includes reading diverse kinds of books or literary forms, books…
Reading Log: Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
Well, now I’m all out of Thom Jones books. Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine is the last of Jones’s three published works. He’s got a couple loose stories…
Linguistics, Literature in Translation and my Attempt to Learn Spanish
I took two years of Spanish in high school, so I can speak it about as well as most Americans who took any foreign language for two years (somewhere between…
Reading Log: John Cavanagh’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn (A 33 1/3 Book)
Yup, more rock journalism. I’m not tired of it yet. Cavanagh sights in perfectly here, focusing on the album itself and only touching on the tumultuous events that followed (the…
2015 Reading Goals: January
I read 11 books this month and I’m happy with my selections. Well on the way to my goals for 2015. http://seanvansickel.com/2015/01/19/2014-revisited-with-metadata/
American Football, “Not a Fan of Sports” and Not Being an Asshole
I’ve spent the better part of the last 18 months trying not to be an asshole. I preface statements with modifiers like “I really don’t want to be an asshole…