Frozen Toothpaste

A few years ago, a friend let me borrow a CD. It’s cover was odd (below right), the band name — Neutral Milk Hotel — and title — In The Aeroplane Over the Sea — obscure. “But it’s really good,” I was assured.
And indeed, as I found after finally listening to it, it was. Surely the instrumentals were unconventional — bagpipes appear, as do many […]

Warning: This quesadilla may not have been microwaved — Photo by Borderline Amazing
There would seem to be two obvious ways of looking at the microwaved quesadilla: “sounds good” and “sounds gross.” When I was younger — around about 12 — I was firmly in the “sounds good” camp. Recently, I was pretty firmly in the “sounds gross” camp. And then a […]

Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill is probably the most important book in my life. No work has ever influenced so many aspects of my life or caused me to see the world so differently. Were there only one book that I could take with my to a desert island, […]

Lacking anything terribly interesting to review, I’ve decided to write a retroview of a book I liked when I was young, Tacky the Penguin.
Rereading it today, I’m sorry that I didn’t notice it sooner. Helen Lester’s Tacky the Penguin is a rather unabashed reappropriation of the major idea in The Ugly Duckling. Sure, Tacky’s just […]

An explanation of what a Retroview is can be found here, though it should be pretty clear from this text.
The first time I read The Little Prince, I think i was probably around 16. That’s pretty old for a book stereotypically for kids, but I’ve never believed in being held back because my parents didn’t […]