Wow.

I had the oddest experience reading this book; I didn’t realize until I was almost a quarter of the way through how bad it is and how much it is not a book I would ever like. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before.

A trifle overlong, but very visually appealing and definitely compelling. It’s very interesting that Daniel himself (Daniel of today, anyway) appears in the film so little, considering that the filmmakers had a lot of access to him (his parents are interviewed a lot, and he lives with them—there are two or three short clips of Dan talking, but mostly he only manifests through old tapes, videos, and other people’s stories. I’m not sure whether that’s because his interviews were incoherent or boring, or because the directors wanted him to exist in a kind of frozen state, lost in the past.

Anyway, it was worth watching. I forget why I put it on my Netflix list, but I’m glad it got there.

Um, hello. Hands down the mostest awesomest documentary I have seen in a long time. And I love documentaries.

Sarah, find this. Now.

I enjoyed this, but Landsburg is oddly didactic and condescending - you get the feeling he thinks many people are unutterably stupid, which is a perfectly fine opinion to have, but not one you want your reader to feel you have about them. The final chapter in the book, entitled “Why I am Not an Environmentalist,” is particularly high-handed in its tone. It’s also interesting to be reading a popular economics book that’s 15 years old now; I’ve read a lot of similar, more recent books (and several economics textbooks) and some - certainly not all—of the analyses in Landsburg’s books seem almost simplistic to me in comparison. Clearly the field has deepened in sophistication a great deal since then.

My first Gould; isn’t that terrible?

I love this book—statistics never made so much sense.

Slight, but pretty much up my alley.

A bit frustrating, since the second half is all about an incredibly intriguing neurological disorder on a remote island that no one has been able to figure out and which is probably all but disappeared now, so we’ll never have the answer (the book was written in 1993 and the disease had stopped affecting anyone younger than 40 or 50).

Oh well.

Bookmooch recommended this to me based on my wishlist, and I was pleasantly surprised—it’s not one of my favorite reads of the year, but its odd premise and rambling, episodic quality are rather my style. I thought the alternation between first-person and third-person references to Edgar was an unnecessary affectation, but c’est la vie.

Another reread, which was much moodier than I remembered it. I also didn’t remember being quite so disappointed with the ending, which doesn’t feel organic and doesn’t quite live up to the epic promise of the rest of the book. Still and all, I can’t resist a good fairytale retelling, and Elphaba is a wonderful protagonist.

This was a reread—I’d given it to my brother-in-law a couple of years ago and found it at the house when I was visiting and had run out of books. It’s funny how impossible it is to hear any other voice but Sedaris’s when you’re reading it.