Neil Gaiman Tackles the Norse Gods
I vividly recall being captivated by the stories of Greek gods and heroes in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. This was where I learned about Zeus and Hermes, Hera and Aphrodite. Before there was Rick Riordan,...
Author: Mark Flanagan
Best Books of 2016 – Mark’s Picks
If you discount the three months I spent reading Infinite Jest, my reading in 2016 was heavily weighted on the nonfiction aisle, so it seems fitting that my picks for the year fall into...
Signs of You by Emily France
★★★★★ Riley’s mother has been dead for two years when Riley spots her in a Heinen’s supermarket, nonchalantly perusing bubble bath as though she wasn’t even supposed to be six feet beneath the cold...
White Sands by Geoff Dyer
★★★☆☆ I came to Geoff Dyer via Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, his 2003 collection of creative nonfiction in which Dyer recounts a decade of listlessness, wanderlust, and his...
The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg by Tim Birkhead
★★★★☆ “I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg.”- Thomas Wentworth Higginson Renowned British...
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
★★★★★ As a child, Hope Jahren spent hours in her father’s science laboratory, and from her mother she inherited a love of language. These earliest influences find an auspicious union in Lab Girl, Jahren’s...
The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova
★★★★★ The confidence artist, or con artist is known as such because he is able to enlist our confidence with his well-crafted narratives. In The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova walks readers through the many...
The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson
★★★★☆ In 1973, on his first visit to Britain, Bill Bryson landed a job at a psychiatric hospital and married a nurse there. It was a serendipitous visit and, after a brief return to...
Bill Bryson on Walking in The Road to Little Dribbling
What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson highway of life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the...
