It’s baseball season! And we’re celebrating by welcoming our friend Ben Lindbergh to the podcast to talk about his new book (coauthored with Sam Miller), The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 62 Listen to Ben and Sam’s interview with Stompers alum Santos Saldovar on their podcast Effectively Wild. This is Lil Sebastian West. I’m calling him that because he lives in the western part of…
3 CommentsReading the End Posts
Before I get into Bellweather Rhapsody, let’s conduct a quick poll amongst the viewing audience. Hands up everyone here who loves The Westing Game. Okay, yes, that is what I assumed. Well, your luck’s in because Bellweather Rhapsody is pretty much The Westing Game for grown-ups, except instead of a murder, they’re trying to solve a suicide; and instead of a block of rental flats, it’s a hotel people are staying at during a statewide musical convention for musically talented youths; and instead of an inheritance they’re all competing for, it’s the potential for a full and happy life. Twenty…
25 CommentsI read Pandemic author Sonia Shah’s book The Body Hunter a few years back and was not satisfied with the quality of her citations. While I totally stand by that (the endnotes in that book were a mess), and I was all set to think ill of Pandemic also, actually the endnotes in this one were way much better sorted out. I conclude that she had better copyeditors this time around. This book’s about the spread of infectious diseases, and Sonia Shah herself admits that she’s not sure how to tell the story she wants to tell. Much of her…
19 CommentsHappy Tuesday, friends! The Broke and the Bookish are, as ever, hosting a Top Ten Tuesday, and I love the question for this week: Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed (less love, more love, complicated feelings, indifference, thought it was great in a genre until you became more well read in that genre etc.) I couldn’t think of ten — my initial responses to most of the books I read continue to hold true on rereads — but here are six, anyway! 1. Emma, by Jane Austen – I think the problem here is that I…
64 CommentsTIME TRAVELING PIRATES. This book The Girl from Everywhere is all about time traveling pirates. The Girl from Everywhere is about TIME TRAVELING PIRATES. Just so you know. At sixteen, Nix has sailed everywhere from the lands of the Arabian Nights to present-day New York to eighteenth-century Calcutta — if her crew can find a map of a place, she and her father can sail them there. But all her father truly wants is to find a map of Hawaii in the year that Nix was born, so that he can prevent her mother from dying in childbirth. As long…
42 CommentsHappy Hump Day to you all, beloved listeners! It’s time for another seasonal book preview (the most wonderful four times of the year) (except for Christmas, Christmas is still the actual most wonderful time). Whiskey Jenny and I also answer some listener mail, update you on what we’re reading, and review the fluffy, fun Dear Emma, by Katie Heaney. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 61 What We’re Reading City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg The Summer before the War, Helen Simonson…
4 CommentsJack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical (hat-tip to the fabulous Kim for the recommendation!) isn’t a history of the American musical — a thing about which I would not care at all1 — but rather a dissection of what goes into making it. Viertel breaks down an array of musicals, from Gypsy to Hamilton, into their component parts to explore what makes their engines run. Some of this I was already familiar with, like the not-a-rule-but-sort-of-a-rule that the protagonist has to sing an “I Want” song early on, to get the audience on board with whatever the stakes are…
25 CommentsNot that I am bitter. (I’m not.) But since I wasn’t able to make it this year1, please pop by in the comments and tell me one lovely thing that is happening at BEA. Or if like me you couldn’t go this year, tell me only lovely thing that has happened to you this week. Also, this is your final notice that today is Friday the 13th. Take all reasonable precautions. or any year, thus far? I mainly care about meeting bloggers, and I can do that fine without actually being inside of a convention center ↩
50 Comments