Oh, Fierce and Nerdy!  How I’ve missed you.  Thanks for letting me visit you again — this missive comes to you from the west coast now, where I am fiercely anticipating the start of a new job in Los Angeles.  As a reader I tend not to delay my gratification (actually, that’s pretty much a [...]

The animals are discomfortingly close at the Washington zoo.  The cheetah, with a running start, seemed like it could easily clear that mere wall of holly surrounding its realm.  The sign which warns not to touch the prairie dogs due to their propensity to bite appeared, well, much more necessary than in other zoos I’ve [...]

I’m planning a dinner party, so of course I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway.  There has never been a better dinner party book, not in the history of literature.  It so perfectly captures that dreamy sense of excitement the afternoon before a party as you shop for ingredients and choose your dress.  There is so much space [...]

I should have known when my aunt recommended it; she always appreciates books as literature rather than some sort of a terrible looking glass and can tolerate much more emotional turmoil in her reading than I can manage.  I should have known better than to read it on a work night, I thought, when I [...]

Despite my general dislike of new year’s resolutions – winters are hard enough without February being riddled with disappointment and moralistic shame along with seasonal affective disorder – I have made one every year since I graduated from college.  It is: finish the Guardian’s 100 Best Books and the BBC’s Big Read booklist.  There’s another list [...]

This Sunday I couldn’t stop reading The Hunger Games trilogy.  Gudrun made it sound so good last week that the books rocketed right up to the top of my Kindle wish list.  I started the first novel meaning to compare dystopian futurescapes with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but to be honest, I can’t.  [...]

In economics, we believe that consumers are rational agents who consume subject to the constraints they are given.  People would buy and buy and buy – buy until the store shelves were empty – if they didn’t have the nagging knowledge of their bank accounts dwindling with every purchase. Preferences differ between agents; someone buys [...]

If you’re worrying about traveling home this holiday week, afraid of the salt-in-old-wounds feeling familial criticism can generate, be thankful at least for this: you’re not Frank Mackay.  Frank is the narrator of Tana French’s new novel Faithful Place. He ran away from his family at nineteen, desperate to escape “the bubbling cauldron of crazy that [...]

It seems like a strange thing, a children’s book chronicling the rise of a totalitarian regime, but when I reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there it was.  The comes out November 19; Stephen Fry claims it’s the “best one yet,” and I wanted to be properly prepared. I’d read the novel when it [...]

“No one’s gonna love you the way that I do.”  From Cease to Begin, the 2007 album by Band of Horses, I heard the song “No One’s Gonna Love You” first on NBC’s Chuck.  I loved the song, but I’d heard the refrain before.  One of the few constants I’ve found in relationships is that [...]