4 Book Reports From Penn's Private Blog.

Stephen Fry Presents a Selection of Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories by Anton Chekov, read by Stephen Fry (Audible) – 210806 – This is very short. Just a few short stories and they’re really short. Just a couple days of commuting, but I needed something fast after Mythos and didn’t want to dive into his “Heroes” yet. I like short stories, and Stephen read beautifully. I liked them very much. I liked the writing. I don’t know Chekhov really at all (although he wrote one of my short stories, “The Bet,” -- it kills me, and isn’t in this collection, damn it).  Not much to say, I just enjoyed it. I bet I end up listening to all Fry’s audio books.

Casino Royal, James Bond, Book 1 by Ian Fleming Narrated by: Dan Stevens – 210819.  I finished up the Stephen Fry and I had this in my que and figured why not. I hadn’t liked it when I started to read, but on the commute it was great. It kept me interested. I never knew what a fuck up James Bond is.  He has no idea what he’s doing and his “plan” is mostly “get lucky.”  And he kind of does. It’s a really stupid book, but exciting and good for the drive. I was surprised by how much he worries about god and the meaning of life, but . . .well, you sure can’t see that in a movie.  I liked it okay.

Lock, Stock & Peril by Dave McBride – 210831 – Dave did these wonderful radio thangs in Chicago, and I see and hear him when I went to do all the LOOP shows to pimp our magic show. He was always so nice and so clever. Really good writer. So, time passes, and he quits and moves to FLA and wrote a novel.  He got in touch and let me know he wrote a novel and I read it. I’m kind of out of my mystery book phase, but I enjoyed this. He does some really clever stuff to get a really believable McGuffin, a really interesting one. He manages to give a lot of interesting real information in his fiction and it’s a nice story.  I really liked it.

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Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. —Thomas Edison

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if I was texting that word to you it would be in all-caps.”

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Her lips were parted slightly even in repose, as though about to blow gently on a dandelion.

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He’d grown bone-weary of Paul Bunyan winters where words froze in the air and had to be gathered up like cordwood and burned in the fireplace to hear what was said.

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John Phillip Sousa believed Edison’s phonograph would destroy the live music business. Why pay to see a Sousa Band concert if you could hear it anytime at home? For a long time he refused to be recorded. But once he saw how good the money was, his band became the first pop supergroup.

Expose Yourself: How to Take Risks, Question Everything, and Find Yourself

by Erin Louis – 210906 –

I used to read atheist books all the time, but I kind of moved out of that phase, but this one has one of my books in the bibliography, so . . . hey, I had to read it.  This is such a sweet book. It’s so sweet and honest. It’s a stripper’s POV on atheism. It’s great to see these Dawkins and Hitchens ideas put into a life that’s more real (at least to me) than the academic world that most atheist writers live in. The writer is (was) a stripper and writes about how atheism helped in that and pushed her in that and uses her thinking from that world. So there’s a sexy side that is, well, kind of lacking from Dawkins except for those of us with very specific tastes. You know there aren’t any new arguments, but it’s nice to see them digested and thought about and then applied to a lifestyle that you don’t usually see it in. Talking about customers at the strip club and other dancers and how atheism fits in with that. It’s like a really fun talk with a stripper and, as some of us know, those can be rare.

I didn’t highlight much, because it’s not really in the style of writing, it’s really in just the sweetness of atheism and stripping, two areas that could always use more sweetness. I enjouyed it.  (And I’m in the bibliography).

Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She said, “Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.”