“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
I actually finished this days ago, but I’ve been avoiding writing it up here, because…where to begin, really, with this whole <a href=”http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html” target=”_blank”>flapdoodle</a>. The story begins, for me, months ago, when I was …
It’s very funny, and skillfully avoids a pitfall common to travel writing, namely that the diction starts to repeat itself after a while. Hilarious bits about tourists in Killarney and the non-bird that flew …
It’s a book about, basically, how shitty it is to try to make the Olympics as a gymnast or figure skater and what a giant psychopath Bela Karolyi is. Good stuff — a little …
Eh. Too much detail in spots, not enough in others. It’s a reissue of a twenty-year-old edition, and a certain creakiness pervades the prose; the book isn’t interesting enough to make it worthwhile …
It’s really a very good book; I just had problems with putting it down and then for some reason not wanting to pick it back up again, but I’d recommend it for a well-chosen cross …
I liked Ken Smith’s book about social hygiene film, but this one is slight, and something about the tone isn’t fun; it’s hard to explain. (2/16/04)
Didn’t love it. Too many digressions, too much talking about Nyack, and in spots it felt forced, especially when the author was rising above some situation or another — some of the remembrances and …
The Marilyn parts did not disappoint; a less gossipy person might have cared that the book just stopped cold being about Joe D and was just about Marilyn for fifty pages, but I didn’t mind …
It’s beautiful, and Ware’s rendering of everyday sound is amazing. But I’m never reading it again because it’s so goddamn depressing. (7/11/06)
You’ll get a better idea what I thought of the book (and its subject) in this here installment of the <a href=”gbcfive.shtml” mce_href=”gbcfive.shtml”>Girls’ Bike Club</a>, but here’s a sneak preview: Shut up, Jim Morrison. …