Annalog

My book this week is I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President. The author Josh Lieb is a writer on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, perfect credentials for a book meant to make you giggle. (more…)

I get the not-so-cute joke in the title of P.J. O’Rourke’s little book Peace Kills. It didn’t take long to get O’Rourke’s point. He made some astute observations about wartime culture and the absurdity of conflict, but nothing warranting so many pages of sarcasm and poorly-executed jokes. Some of his rants are funny, but more often than not O’Rourke ends up beating a dead horse. (more…)

I remember the front page of The Washington Post when the Clinton-Lewinksy scandal first broke in January 1998. I was nine years old. Twelve years later—hard to believe it’s been so long—I can still remember those front page images and headlines, the torrent of articles and TV broadcasts. All news about domestic and foreign policy was cast to the back pages of newspapers. The sex scandal dominated newspaper issues and television broadcasts. (more…)

A.J. Jacobs has a gift. He may not have accomplished his goal of being the “smartest person” in the world, but he sure knows how to wile away a year and compose an entertaining account. This week I read The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.

Jacobs writes freely about his own neuroses, including his feeling of intellectual inadequacy which prompted him to read the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He set himself to the task of reading 33,000 pages of encyclopedia entries and cramming his head fill of enough facts and tidbits to outsmart the modern Einstein. (Funny thing, after reading the Encyclopedia in its entirety Jacobs got on the TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and did rather poorly.) (more…)

And my second resolution of 2010? Finish a book a week. A modest goal for now, but the real challenge will begin when midterms start and papers come due. But I am resolved. And I resolve to stay resolved.

The first up is Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse Five published in 1969. It was an anti-war book of a new variety, not the sort that glorified violence or the sacrifices of the babies—as Vonnegut called them—who fought and died on the battlefront.

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