Another fun read from Pearson. Here just a very few funny bits: “For the record, here are the ten hottest toys in the Pearson household: A stick found in the park. …. The cat. Preferably asleep and therefore willing to wear a kerchief and be transported in a stroller. … Dollar-store stuff. Perfect. Quality matches …
Category: literature
Aug 23 2026
Schumacher’s The English Experience – delightful!
Another good one from Schumacher! (The English Experience, Julie Schumacher) “The job of provosts was to create and then disseminate bad news …” p1 “I have an accentuating circumstance …” p20 The students’ assignment starting p42 is full of delights. “I am not saying this to make you an escape goat” p73 “Anyone who …
Aug 22 2026
How We Survived (a story from Fighting Words)
How We Survived (a story from Fighting Words) You’re wondering how it happened. How did we survive? How did our population suddenly plummet from six billion to half that. Enabling our natural resources to recover and, eventually, support us. All of us. In 2020, all of the indicators pointed to our imminent extinction. We …
Aug 05 2026
from Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods – delightful and pointy at the same time
“Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head …” p3 “… he had been let go from jobs at Harvard and the National …
Jul 12 2026
from When the Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi
“…as someone whose sexuality so far had expressed itself as ‘possibly asexual or maybe just unimpressed with the local talent’ …” p187 “Jody Bannon was worth, what, a couple hundred billion dollars? Think about how much money that is. He could have spent a million dollars a day, on anything, and it would still take …
Jun 26 2026
from The Shakespeare Requirement, Julie Schumacher
some good bits from the Schumacher’s follow-up to Dear Committee Members “… temporary instructors, who could probably earn more as forty-hours-a-week fast-food managers than they did as adjunct faculty …” p28-9 “The next student tried and failed to pronounce the word ‘tragic’. … At the back of the room … a student was dribbling hot …
Jun 18 2026
from I Don’t, Clementine Ford
There’s a lot here and every bit is worth reading. Better yet, just get the book. And read it. Every word. * from blurb for Ford’s I Don’t “why do so many women still believe that our value is intrinsically tied to being chosen by a man?” “Ford explains how capitalist patriarchal structures need …
Jun 07 2026
Patricia Pearson, Playing House
(I’ve discovered a new funny author…) “He worked as a jazz musician, living off the avails of his art, which was the annual salary equivalent of two Smarties and a piece of string.” p4 “…he understood certain expatriate secrets, such as where Alberta was and how it felt to be treated like a doofus in …
Apr 21 2026
some funny bits from Tim Dorsey’s The Maltese Iguana
“I don’t need to read anything to know what I’m talking about!” / “In one sentence you’ve just summed up everything wrong wtih our country today!” p152 “A few short years ago, we could look at a drinking glass and agree it was filled to the midpoint with water, then argue about what it meant. But today? …
Dec 09 2025
Death of an Author, by Aidan Marchine and Stephen Marche
For those of you who don’t know, Death of an Author is a novel co-written by the ‘self’-named AI Aidan Marchine (95%) and the human author Stephen Marche (whose The Next Civil War impressed me, leading me to take a look at Death.) I started reading the novel, but it didn’t grab my attention very …
fiction
