A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the waiting room at my mechanic’s, waiting for them to change the oil in my car. I was bored, and so I fired up the Kindle and bought this book over the wireless. The Quotable Atheist is a collection of quotations from several atheists from ancient history…
The Undead and Philosophy is volume 22 in the wonderful Popular Culture and Philosophy series. It’s a collection of essays by various professional philosophers about the philosophical significance of zombie and vampire stories, with a few digressions into specials cases, like bioethics of the Frankenstein monster and the problematic case of the not-quite-undead “Infected” people…
Inspired by the delightful goofiness of a certain youtube personality, I’ve been spending some time reading about hammock camping over on hammockforums.net, and I decided to get the definitive book on the subject. It’s pretty much a straight, to the point, screed on the hows and whys of hammock camping. The idea is that you…
I heard about this book on one of the backpacking podcasts I listen to at work to drown out my noisy co-workers. Hike Your Own Hike is basically a self-help book, but it uses AT thru-hiker jargon instead of the normal psycho-babble you might expect from a self help book. The author seems to be…
This is another book you can download for free from Manybooks.net Pretty much everybody I know who is into the woods / outdoors / nature scene loves this book. If you don’t know the story, the author goes into the woods, builds a cabin, and lives kind of like a hermit for a while, an…
Juniata, River of Sorrows is two stories in one. One of them is about the author’s 100 mile fishing trip, where he floated the whole length of the Juniata River in a Jonboat. The other story is about all the grizzy conflicts between white settlers and the Indians who lived along the river in colonial…
I saw this one laying on a table at the bookstore, and the belligerence of the title kind of sucked me in. I kind of expected this to be one of those “I’m more Buddha than you” holier-than-thou sorts of books, but it really wasn’t. Mostly, the Author is just making a case that acceptance…
I found this book on the bargain table at the bookstore just after Halloween. The gimmick is that it’s a self-help book which will teach you how to be a total bad-ass just like a zombie. As most of you already know, zombies posses many enviable qualities: Zombies know what they want (brains) Zombies are…
I just finished another wonderful freebie from Manybooks.net. I watched the movie version of this a long time ago, but never got around to reading the book. It’s a really good book. There’s lots of interesting discussion of the differences between deities and men, and between men and animals. There’s a particularly funny part where…
The main thesis of this book is that never ending economic growth turns out not to be such a wonderful idea. There’s lots of discussion about how local economies are good and far flung supply lines are liable to get disrupted, especially with cheap liquid transportation fuels getting expensive. Most of the examples used to…