Books

My book club chose “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer for this month’s adventure. I wasn’t a fan of the movie but it was probably because I couldn’t get Elijah Wood out of the character of Frodo. I usually like WWII tales so I was surprised that I wasn’t taken by the movie. But […]

Books are always better than the movie. I loved the Life of Pi movie, so I was surprised that the book could be SO much better than the most excellent movie. Written by Yann Martel, the story is a fantasy tale of a boy who is shipwrecked and shares a lifeboat with a grown Bengal

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell documents white man’s relationship to, destruction and annexation of Hawaii. The history covered is primarily 1820 through 1898 beginning with Cooke’s sailors, focusing mainly on the missionary colonization, touching on whaling, the monarchy and sugar issues. I first heard of Vowell as a contributor from This American Life. I know

There are many children’s books that I wanted my kids to read but they never had any interest in. When they were younger, I read what they read which is why I became a fan of Dian Duane’s “So You Want to be a Wizard” series, Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” series and

UCSB Reads chose Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. The book recounts Foer’s yearlong quest to improve his memory resulting in his winning the US Memory Championship. Foer explores the history of memory, how memory is measured, notable people who have good memories. UCSB Reads is a common reading