Thinking back on it, I’m not sure I really learned anything new - not in terms of ideas nor anecdotes - from Here Comes Everybody. And yet I’ll probably end up buying copies for both sets of my grandparents and anyone else I care about who wants to know why it is that I do [...]

After all my dramatic agony and breathless complaining, I am glad I endured. The Argumentative Indian is neither easy nor fun to read. The first three pages of every chapter and sub-chapter are essentially wordy justifications of why the topic is deserving of discussion in the first place.
Throughout the book I was constantly thinking, Amartya, [...]

Cindylu is right, Oscar Wao is straight-up addictive. It captures the turn-of-the-millenium, multi-culti, global reality of right now through the lens of Dominican New Jersey.
Many people call this Oscar’s novel, but Oscar - the fat lonely kid in high school we all felt sorry for, but nevertheless always avoided - is only one of a [...]

This is the first book I’ve reviewed on Goodreads written by a Goodreads friend, but I have a feeling it won’t be the last. My friend and colleague Mialy is one of 27 writers featured in Dreams, Miracles and Jazz. From her bio:
Mialy Ravelomanana Andriamananjara started writing when she was eight, mostly because she was [...]

I absolutely love GoodReads as a social networking site for book nerds, but their formatting for reviews is supa ugly. So, despite my all out war against cross-posting and duplicate content, here is my review of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, maybe the best book I’ve read all year. You can see other books I’ve read, am [...]

Woody Allen, David Sedaris, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Ira Glass, at least half of the usual contributors to This American Life, and probably half of NPR too. Oh, and yes, Steve Almond.
They are funny. They are eloquent. They are insightful. They know a little bit about everything and know how to [...]

I’m writing this, sadly, not while sitting atop floatwood scribbling into the salty breeze of some nameless sea, but rather staring into my computer screen at a metrosexual Budapest café with expensive lamps and wi-fi. It’s exactly the type of café that Roberto Bolaño pleaded his fellow poets to abandon in the 1976 infrarrealist manifesto [...]

It’s funny to read through the other reviews and see how upset McSweeney’s readers get when they have to suffer through something non-literary. Issue number 26 of McSweeney’s is split up into three different books - two 4 X 6 paperback collections of short stories and one 8 X 6 hardcover fictionalized dossier based on [...]

Since my dear friend, Cindylu, just published a post titled “On Beauty”, I figure I might as well dig through my unpublished drafts and publish one with nearly the same title. I wrote this about a year and a half ago over a steaming glass of chai in Delhi, India. I’m looking forward to reading [...]

Never one to let a good meme die.
Myke asks
1. Estimate the total number of books you’ve owned in your life.
This is gonna have to be one hell of a rough guess. Probably at least half the books I’ve read have been traded with other travelers while on the road. Or with friends and family while [...]