Tom McGee's Blog

11-22-63

November 16th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Books |

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Restaurant Reviews by One of America’s Greatest Writers

November 8th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Books, Comedy, Food |

Or so they said. Could my favorite author, Cormac McCarthy, really have written these restaurant reviews? Of course not, it says so right on the tin. Still as parody they are hilarious. And so the man defied the villagers and ate the taco. In defiance of the will of those people but also in defiance [...]

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The Bias of the New

June 15th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Books |

I’d have hoped that this crew, who presumably have a longer view of things, would find a way to avoid the “best 100 books of my lifetime” bias you see in these lists; but again I’m disappointed.

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Top Ten Things

September 30th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Books |

That will happen in every Jack Reacher novel.

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Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Novels

June 4th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Books |

Are awesome fun. Like salted peanuts or something I keep gulping them down.

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The Rise and Fall of Communism

January 14th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Books |

Archie Brown, emeritus professor at Oxford, has put out a lively and informative book that traces the communist movement from its intellectual origins in the Renaissance through the present day. If you were politically aware of the world in the late ’80s, you’ll remember it as a time of incredible sweeping change around the world. [...]

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Sign of the Times

December 18th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Books |

Saw this one at Best Buy tonight. Admittedly it’s a little surprising they have a book department at all, and it was tempting to re-arrange the stock to make it even better than it was.

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Under The Dome

December 4th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Books |

I don’t even want to tell you how late I stayed up the last couple of nights finishing off this book: I did the last 300 in one mad sprint in the wee hours of last night. This is top-drawer King, but try to get some sleep on work nights.

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Ants On The Melon

November 17th, 2009 | 1 Comment | Books |

After Suzannah was kind enough to respond with the name of the poet I was looking for, I went over to the library and got out Virginia Hamilton Adair‘s anthology. She lived long, and pours it all out into intense little word paintings. She wasn’t afraid to address subjects like sex and death head-on, including [...]

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Bird Songs in “Oiseaux Exotiques”

October 28th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Books, Music |

Ashgate publishing is releasing a series of single-work musical analyses, and a 2007 volume showed up at the school library recently. It’s an analysis of Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, and it’s full of really well-done and well thought-out musical examples. In particular I like the attached CD, which gives sample’s of Messiaen’s source material — [...]

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Road Dogs

October 23rd, 2009 | 0 Comments | Books |

Seems Elmore Leonard has his mojo back.

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Blood’s A Rover

October 21st, 2009 | 0 Comments | Books |

Alright, this whole “trilogy” thing has got to stop. I don’t know who thought of it first, but it seems like everything has to be part of one these days. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid was sui generis, mixing hard-core crime fiction with tabloid sensationalism, heavily laced with famous names, and purporting to reveal the deepest [...]

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