Andrew > Recent Status Updates

My prior impression of zombies was that they're brainless and hungry for brains. The zombies in this book are more like vampires. They have brains, and they just want to bite people wherever is convenient.

This book could use a map. Maybe I'll make one.

Although they are very different books, I am enjoying The Interestings on the same level as The Night Circus.

"'Could there be a bigger oxymoron than the Walt Whitman Mall? Maybe only ... the Emily Dickinson Waterpark.'"

Regarding my 2013 reading challenge, Goodreads tells me I'm "on track." Add "the right" and you have a song from Pippin. Also, the action in the book I'm reading now begins in 1974, two years after Pippin was first produced on Broadway.

A haunting pre-AIDS crisis description of AIDS.

"If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?"

Having difficulty concentrating on this book because my brain keeps going off on science tangents.

Delightfully unsettling when the reader's morals and the narrator's morals are at odds.

I had to take a break to read the wikipedia article on Venus.

"They've come under assault from those who would subvert them for the convenience of geography."

Hooray for diagrams.

I have plotted Point A on a map with the help of a degrees-to-decimal converter: 25.673889, 25.168333

"robed and beatific and drawn with a dotted line"

I laughed out loud at the Christmas taunting of the youngest sibling.

I can relate to the narrator being embarrassed and paranoid when he screws up the words to a song he's singing along to when he's alone.

"Spike Lee Major Tom Dick and Harry Connick, Jr. Mints"

The 9-year-old psychoanalyzes the 22-year-old. Did I miss something?

"I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers."

"American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets."

Some essays are stuck in 2002, but others are delightfully timeless.

This is the second book I've read this year with a chapter titled "California as an island."

"Democracy and Things Like That" is a compelling story.

Reading Vowell's 2002 musings on a future Bill Clinton Presidential Library less than a month after the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library is a little trippy.

Let's see if I can finish this before falling asleep (my edition is actually only 245 pages).

Narrator has warped sense of priorities.

Wordy

Finishing this book tonight so help me god.

"No matter that the rest of the world regards them as one orc short of a moondance." The author on D&D enthusiasts.

"He's called me various names, including 'a nest of vipers'. Exactly how I personally manage to be a nest of vipers I'm not sure." Map dealers get nasty.