Review: Animals Make Us Human

For a review of the new book by Temple Grandin (and Catherine Johnson), Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals, please see this post.

Movie Review: A Single Man

A Single Man is well worth seeing, if only for the masterful performance by Colin Firth in the leading role. It's sad and romantic at the same time, and beautifully shot. It's a fairly insubstantial story, but with undercurrents of sadness and repression, and very resonant of the period it is set in.

The Fate of Independent Bookstores

Please take a moment to read this post at Three Percent (the blog of the University of Rochester's translation program), where there is a guest post by Jeff Waxman of the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Chicago, about what is happening to independent bookstores - it's thoughtful, provocative and a bit depressing to me.

Review: Ransom by David Malouf

This small book, Ransom, by David Malouf, was a delight. I've been trying to not just mindlessly read fiction, but to be selective and read only books that really compel me to read them or have an angle that is particularly interesting. This book was both compelling and topically interesting to me - it is a reimagining of the episode from the Iliad where the Trojan king Priam goes to Achilles to ask for the return of the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has killed. It's one of the most moving parts of the Iliad, but this book takes that premise and puts flesh on it in the most lyrical and lovely way. Highly recommended.