Manage your Dad-to-Day is divided into four main chapters:
1. Building a Solid Rock Routine
2. Finding Focus in a Distracted World
3. Taming Your Tools
4. Sharpening Your Creative Mind
Overall, this book tells writers, designers, artists, and other creative people how to better manage their time to give priority to creativity.
For each topic, guest writers are invited to share their thoughts on the specific topic. So, the style of writing can be different from article to article. And sometimes the pointing to outside sources can be a bit distracting. I guess that was done to help keep the book short. Each article is clearly written with most of its material tied together.
It’s concise and practical while still presenting its guiding principles. Not everything outlined in this book will work for every person, but I found it helpful, particularly about setting priorities. Though I have it at 3 stars, it is a solid 3.5 stars.
Often witty, almost always crass, sometimes hilarious — but not for those with a squeamish nature. I won this book in a Good Reads giveaway. If I could give half stars, this one would be 3.5 stars. My main criticism is that at times I felt it was a bit repetitive. Maybe that was intentional. The book contains poems that rhyme and haiku. It has an “Ode to Poop,” and a parody poem entitled “Craven,” taking its structure from the Poe poem, “The Raven.” Part of me was a bit surprised so much could be squeezed out of such an offal subject.
It has been a few years since I was in middle school, but I believe I still can appreciate good poetry and some well-done illustrations to accompany some of the poems. Poems that deal with subjects such as aliens, old folks, a body shamed Santa who loses his way on the way to developing washboard abs, and even a poem on tater tots and more all in this collection rendered with good humor and a bit of tongue-in-cheek. I don’t know of any other poetry collection that has a danger rating at the end of each poem and a list of survival tips. For the poem “Tater Tots” the Danger Rating read “None. We just like tater tots.” The longest and the most complex in terms of rhyme scheme and telling a story is “Body Shamers” about Santa deciding to mold a new man out of himself and how he loses something important along the way. In the poem “Weird Vegetables,” there is the survival suggestion of stuffing Brussels sprouts in your pants until the coast is clear. As somebody who likes broccoli and Brussels sprouts, I found that a poor use of a fine vegetable. Most, if not all, of these poems deserve to be read out loud. Just be careful. You may find it hard to survive if you read some of these around the wrong folks.
It’s often fun to drop in near the beginning of a new series, and such is the case with private detective novel Lullaby Town by Robert Crais. The early 1990s seems in some ways a distant time now. No smart phones. Not even any cell phones. At least none mentioned in this novel. No ubiquitous laptop computers and the best ones were dummy terminals tied to mainframes.
Anyway, Hollywood’s erratic but supposedly brilliant action / adventure director Peter Alan Nelson hires private detective Elvis Cole to find his ex-wife and young son who disappeared almost a decade ago. As Elvis searches the country to find these two, he finds other trouble as well. Peter’s wife has established herself in a small town in Connecticut. Unfortunately, despite working her way up at a local bank to a respectable position, she also has some unwanted, and quite nasty, mob connections. Extricating the ex and keeping the erratic (and emotionally immature) director from interfering make for more than simple search and find assignment for Elvis and his taciturn partner, Joe Pike. An entertaining and fun read — including Elvis’s snarky remarks about other fictional private eyes. Definitely a 4 star and maybe a 4.5 star book.
I rarely give a book five stars, because that would mean it is perfect. While this book is not perfect, it deserves its high rating because of the focus, the breath, and the aim of the book. Part social history. part commentary. This review of American exceptionalism (in both senses of the word) is based around the concept of what Andersen refers to as the Fantasy Industrial Complex, and how for both good and ill, that complex has shaped America, and how, at present, it is undoing America. The style of the book is readable. It is far from a “dry tome.” It goes back as far as the Puritans and comes up to the present and the election of the Fools Gold president currently occupying the Oval Office. A book worth your time.
“The only problem she had was men, who constantly bothered her”: this might be the motto of Jami Attenberg’s latest novel. The line is uttered by Twyla, the daughter-in-law of a dying misogynist gangster named Victor Tuchman. She’s not alone in feeling this way about men in general, and Victor in particular. His wife, Barbra, and his daughter, Alex, have also gathered to see whether the man who made their lives miserable will die, and to figure out how much they really care. This story is about them.
The bulk of the novel takes place over a single day, just after Victor has been for a heart attack. The setting is present-day New Orleans, where Victor and Barbra have moved after a long, mansion-bound life in Connecticut, ostensibly to be near their son, Gary, and his wife and daughter, Twyla and Avery. But Victor is a deceptive man, even to his children. He is also a bad man.
Though we’re never given the exact nature of his crimes, we learn that he was a New Jersey gangster, more or less of the Sopranos variety. He was also an abusive husband and father, a philanderer and a tyrant and likely a rapist. Whatever the details of his life, their implications have long been clear to Alex: “Her gut told her he should be in jail right now.”
It is the women around Victor – Barbra, Alex and Twyla – who must endure the hurricane of his life, who must try to love him, to make him happy, to cover up for him, and who are all upbraided and assaulted by him. Much like Attenberg’s 2012 book The Middlesteins, this novel is uncompromising in its penetrating treatment of the ties that bind a family together.
Attenberg weaves her narrative with a scintillating and often wry prose; her love for her characters, and her keen interest in their joys and longings, never fails to shine through. Often she sets scenes with the terseness of a screenplay, but periodically she plunges into rich description, as when Twyla, crying, looks in the mirror and notices “lips in distress, cracked at the edges, only half the color left behind, the other half disappeared, god knows where, absorbed into skin, into air, into grief”.
These tears are not just for Victor’s victims. Alex must plead with her ex-husband, Bobby, not to expose their daughter to his compulsive lechery. Twyla has lived the bulk of her life trying not to wither beneath the male gaze, and now finds herself more distanced from Gary than ever. Barbra struggles to understand why she still loves her husband, after all this time. And all of them live under the shadow of another, casually destructive man: as Alex thinks every day, “our president [is] a moron and the world [is] falling apart”. The varied experiences of these characters make it clear that the bad man is not an exception to the rule of manhood; he merely defines its borders.
Jami Attenberg
The novel is not only concerned with gender politics: it also frequently returns to questions of socioeconomic class. And yet, it is weaker on this topic. We get cursory moments of virtue-signalling, when the narrative pauses briefly on working people – a cashier, a waitress, a tram driver – to tell us about the second job they’re forced to hold, or about how much they hate privileged tourists. The novel tells us about mass graves for the indigent, and gives us 30 pages with Sharon, a black woman only tangentially related to the plot, who lifts up her neighbourhood while suffering the effects of white gentrification.
But none of these people is a protagonist, none of their lives is centred. The novel points to them, wants them to be recognised; but it refuses to perform that recognition itself. “Whatever we do tonight, let’s not talk about politics,” Alex says to a man she meets at a bar, just after an altercation with a homeless man on the street. Despite the book’s signals to the contrary, this might be its other motto.
• All This Could Be Yours is published by Serpent’s Tail.
Published in 1980, parts of the book take place in 2020, so it was interesting to see what Dr. Forward thought of the 2020. There was no virus running rampant, no nut in the White House, and in many ways a saner world than this 2020. Is it too late to change?
Anyway, this is what would be called a hard science fiction book. The human race in 2020 discovers a traveling neutron star passing though the solar system. In 2050, a group of humans find a way to orbit the star to study it. While studying it they discover there is a race of beings that lives on the star that has a gravity of 67 billion g’s. That means whatever something weigh on Earth, it would weigh 67 billion times that on Dragon’s Egg — the name of the neutron star.
The novel is about how the microscopically sized race of beings — the cheela — develop on Dragon’s Egg, before, during, and after human contact. There is no interstellar war, no invasion of Earth, no plaque vested one species by another. It is a story of how a race advances from infancy to maturity, eventually outpacing its teachers — the humans. This happens in part because time passes faster for the cheela than humans. Consequently, the humans seem slow to the cheela and the cheela come and go quickly to the humans.
This is not a perfect book. The humans are father flat, while the physically flat cheela and more well rounded. Also, the idea that humans rather easily share all the knowledge they have with the cheela. Nobody objects to this and nobody has to check back with Earth, which I don’t think would happen in real life. Also, once the cheela surpass the humans, they share many parts of their beyond-human knowledge and send other parts in code that the cheela say the humans will decipher eventually. No explanation for this cloaking of knowledge is given and it strikes as bit of a plot device than an organic part of the story.
Overall, an interesting read, especially if hard science fiction is you interest.
Trying to fill in my mystery history education, I finally read this novel. My tardiness is not a reflection on the novel, which I enjoyed. If you like private detective novels and the noir slice of life that it can portray, read this book. You may wind up feeling like the pink bug found on the 18th floor of LA police headquarters that Marlowe captures and sets free, or maybe you won’t, but you have to admire the use of telling details throughout the novel to help convey the story. There are a few things that were a bit overdone for me, and really it should 4.5 stars, but half stars aren’t allowed. For me, the use of metaphors was a bit heavy in the first half of the book. Their use settled down — at least so it seemed to me — in the second half. But, overall, the novel is good example of an author striving to bring his best skill and talent to a genre that at the time it was published (1940) that was considered by many to be less than a noble or worthy pursuit. I hope you read and enjoy the novel, too.
I am not sure what to make of this short book. Modern fable? Twilight Zone-like tale. If I could give it half stars, it would be 3.5 stars. In some ways, I feel that the story is simple enough, but still eludes me. A young boy goes to a library to return borrowed books before they are overdue and winds up being trapped in an underground labyrinth where he is forced to study arcane text. When he is done, his brain will be eaten as a delicacy by his captor. With help, he tries to escape and does. He has had to abandon his new shoes, which his mother never mentions to him once he returns home, but then she doesn’t mention his absence from home for several days, either. In some ways, it’s a modern Hansel and Gretel tale. After finishing the book, I was left with a strange feeling of wanting just a little more, but maybe that just means I am not quite the right person for this story.
You wouldn’t think a slim volume with eye-catching illustrations would wait on the shelf so long before being read, but that’s what happened. This mostly picture book has a simple message: that if we acted more in the manner of the best qualities of our dogs, the world would be a better place. Kindness, concern, and service to others. A good book for young readers and older ones as well to take to heart.
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