Does it hold up 15 years after I first read it?

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It's my top 5 list. Yours is probably different.

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It's "A Wonderful Life"- for millennials.

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A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the publicist promoting David Oakley’s new book. I reviewed his first book almost 5 years ago, and apparently the publicist stumbled into it, referring to it as absolutely hilarious and wonderful, and asked if I would read and review …

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Living through a pandemic has definitely been good for finding time to read.

K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches by Tyler Kepner

I greatly enjoyed this book. 10 chapter, each one dedicated to one pitch, in which the author reviews the history of the pitch, who invented it …

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Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

It’s May Day, but probably not a happy one …

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Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

I finished Chuck Wendig’s 800-page opus Wanderers: A Novel …

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Imagine somebody binged on Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne movies for a weekend, then decided to write a book immediately after that weekend binge. They might write The Rescue Nurse. The pacing can best described as frenetic, as our hero Michael Grimm is deep in the shit within the first …

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Simply the coolest book I've read in a long time. If I hadn't forced myself to go to bed at midnight (2 hours after I started it) I would have read it one sitting. As it turned out, I read it in two sittings. It's a YA novel about a …

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I love live music, and this book is a coming of age story centered around the underground music scene in a dystopian near future that seems all too possible.

My biggest issue with this book is the classification of science fiction. The science and technology in the book center around …

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Uncanny Valley is Anna Wiener’s memoir of her mid to late 20s working in salt mines of Silicon Valley. At 25, she was an under employed assistant in the declining publishing industry in NYC. She joined a publishing related start up in NY as employee #5, and then got …

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Yesterday I got to ride Amtrak for almost 5 hours going North, get off the train, give a 45 minute sales presentation, then get back on the train and go home. Not the most productive use of my time, for sure. On the way North I was working. It turns …

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If you look in the left column you'll see a new link to 2020 Books. Posting book reviews allows me to feel like I wrote something, without really writing. I'll still post book reviews when I read something particularly interesting, but otherwise I'll put the reviews on the review page …

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In The Body, Bryson does for human biology what he did for science in A Short History of Everything. In about 400 pages he attempts to provide a college 101 level understanding of pretty much everything you might want to know about your body. He mostly succeeds, although given the …

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About 30 pages into this book, I had a brief thought that I didn’t care that the book won a Pulitzer, there was no way I was reading 400+ pages about surfing.

I finished the book. Surfing is the star of probably 90% of the pages in the book …

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Set in 1969 and 1989, South of Broad is essentially a love letter to Charleston. It's a sweeping story of a set of unlikely friends that meet in high school in 1969 and are still friends in 1989, although given the asshole factor in some of these characters you certainly …

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In The Revenge of Analog author David Sax surveys a variety of businesses that were supposed to be dead by now.

• Vinyl records? Sales are growing. They aren’t going to become a major force in music distribution, but it’s a significant niche with real businesses creating real jobs …

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Chesapeake Requiem is a portrait of the insular community that has lived on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay for 200+ years. If you live in the eastern third of the US and have ever enjoyed a soft-shell crab you can thank the Watermen of Tangier for that crab.

Written …

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Colson Whitehead's previous book, 2016's Underground Railroad, won a Pulitzer. The Nickel Boys might be a better book. The story follows Elwood, an African-American teenager in early 60s Tallahassee FL that dreams of going to college and living a life Dr. Martin Luther King would be proud of. That plan …

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I’m pretty much over the zombie genre, but this book caught my attention because it’s a really unique take on a zombie story. The book is written from the point-of-view of the animals that are left to rule the earth as mankind dies out from a zombie virus …

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