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The very first book I remember reading was about the solar system, but it wasn't this specific book (because the book I remember I read in 1976! -- or did I just have it read to me?). Still, it was something very similar. I vividly remember a description of how gravity on Jupiter is so strong that it would crush an astronaut who would try to stand on the surface (I think the book did assume there was a solid core to the gas giant, but how can I be sure anymore?).

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I'm pretty sure I remember having this book read to me by my dad in 1976 or so. The moral of the story was used on me and my sister in a very unsubtle way, but I couldn't say I resented Seuss for being a part of the parental-industrial complex. I liked the poetry of this Seuss book better than some others -- the rush of words as the narrator gets annoyed at Sam I Am is delicious -- but I think I ended up reading the others (or having them read to me) soon enough after the first.

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I read the Hardy Boys in their mid-sixties incarnation, so I got to skip some of the early racism found in their first incarnation, but I imagine I got a good dose of sexism anyway! The Secret of the Old Mill might well be the first book in the series I read, and I probably read it in 1978 or 1979. By 1981, though, I'd read most of the series -- everything I could lay my hands on at the swap meets and garage sales my family frequented.

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I read Nancy Drew mysteries almost as avidly as the Hardy Boys' mysteries, but I discovered them a few months later. This might be the one I read first, but I have a much stronger sense of having been gripped by the Clue of the Black Keys, or the Spider Sapphire Mystery.

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I couldn't say which Tom Swift novel I read first, but it was definitely from this series. I still vividly remember the cold war raging in Tom's little world -- there was the memorable incident of him dropping leaflets on the ersatz Soviet Union of the novels, somehow managing not to cause a nuclear war in the process, for instance. I never liked these novels as much as the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, but I couldn't say why. I'd like to say it was because of my budding political and environmental conscience, but frankly I suspect that mysteries were just more fun than building superpowered gadgets.

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I read most of the books in the Oz series sometime around 1980. I don't remember how I read the first one, but the sequels I took out of the Halifax Public Library and devoured. Though I don't remember them particularly well, I remember loving them more than I loved most of the books I read in those years.

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I'm almost sure I read a number of books in this series, including the one where Tom wins an air rifle in a bet. But I can't say when. Probably between 1979 and 1981.

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In 1979 or 1980 I picked this up from the Halifax library's bookmobile, which parked just up at the end of Abbey Road. Since I was 8 or 9 at the time, I have no idea what I made of it, but I remember being slightly disappointed -- I thought it was going to be more about Charlie Brown et al.

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My dad gave this to me to read (and paid me a dime every time I re-read it) somewhere around 1979 or 1980. In spite of the re-readings, the allegory (gull=Jesus) didn't sink in for a couple more years, but in the end I got it.

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Could anything be cooler than the story of Robinson Crusoe? To my 9-year-old mind, the answer was probably 'no'. I think I re-read this five or six times as a kid, while also plowing through a lot of other books. But they couldn't match up to the story of surviving and prospering on a deserted island.

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I didn't have the annotated Alice until later, but I read Alice as a kid, around the same time I first read Robinson Crusoe. For some reason, I didn't like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Maybe it was the cruelty with which Alice is treated (if you've forgotten, go back and look -- it's striking!), but whatever the reason this dropped out of my consciousness until my undergraduate education.

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Around third and fourth grade (so, starting around late 1979) I got really excited by the idea of codes and ciphers. I read a number of books, and for all I know this was one (it's written for kids and published early enough), but I couldn't swear to anything. I still remember the ordinal rank of each letter of the alphabet, though (good for those letter-to-number replacement ciphers!).

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I probably read this (it might have been one or two other of the Famous Five novels) around 1980; for some reason, I didn't much like it, and didn't try to read the whole series.

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Did I read these books first in Halifax around 1980-81 or in Lethbridge around 81-82? A little later might be right, because I got the religious symbolism the first time I read The Last Battle (hard to miss, but at a young enough age I might have done). Let's guess summer of 1981, just after arriving in Alberta. I remember particularly liking the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I re-read more than the others -- but now I couldn't say why.

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I know I read *some* Judy Blume, and that I didn't read a whole lot. (The realism didn't appeal to me as a kid; I was more a fan of escapism and adventure.) I'm almost sure I read this one, probably in 1981. The plot centers around a girl at summer camp, and I think I was very disappointed when Sheila "the great" turned out not to be so great.

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Another book from 1981 or so, linked in my memory to reading Judy Blume. I can't say I was so fond of this story -- maybe because it was, as it says, about eating worms!

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I read every book in this series that I could find, sometime around Grade 5 (1981-82). SPOILER ALERT: there is no gap between an odd and the subsequent even numbered page; no one could have made change with those coins; a fan blade turned around will blow air in the same direction; etc.

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Technically, this book was read to me, not by me. But I'll always be grateful to Mrs. Sugars, my sixth-grade teacher, for reading us this fantastic book in installments in the 1982/83 school year.

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The same teacher who read us Alan Mendelsohn also read us a pair (I think) of Peck's books about a boy named "Soup." This might have been one of them, along with (perhaps) the first. I liked Alan Mendelsohn quite a bit more, though.

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I didn't really like A Wrinkle in Time, and that somehow embarrassed me even back in 1983 when I first read it. I felt that it was both good and too weird for me in some way. The idea of a tesseract was exciting, but something about the takeover of Charles' mind was very disturbing to my sense of how the plot *should* go, and so the overall experience wasn't gripping. This is a book I should really re-read someday, just to see what's really there.

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I went through a Jules Verne binge when I was 12 or so, which would mean 1983. I'm not sure what order I read them in, but I do recall that this was one of the weaker entries. The idea of a canon shell aimed straight at the moon stayed with me, though.

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I remember the dusty, old smell of my library's copy of this classic better than I remember the story. But I remember really liking the story. This would have been part of my Verne binge in 1983.

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I didn't take this out from the library -- I own a copy. But did I first read it at the same time as the other Vernes? Maybe. In any case, this is my favourite, and I think it holds up well. The recent movie with Brendan Fraser has my friend Kristin's voice in the background, making an announcement on an Icelandair flight.

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When I discovered this massive pair of volumes at the Lethbridge Public Library I thought it was the best thing ever. And then somehow I didn't read more than two dozen of the annotations. I still loved the massive heft, though. I must have picked it up for the first time in 1983 or 1984.

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Twelve sounds about right -- I must have read The Hobbit sometime in 1983, and probably early in the year. I think the beautiful animated Hobbit was what got me to read the book, and I think I saw the animated version in school somehow. A Christmas treat, maybe? Hard to say. Anyway, The Hobbit is the best fiction Tolkien wrote, and is a great book for kids. The adventure, the pacing, the repetition of Bilbo's longing for creature comforts as he grows from childish to adult in his attitudes -- all perfect for a tween.

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This fancy edition didn't exist when I read LOTR for the first time (just after The Hobbit), and I read it in second-hand paperbacks, but the edition hardly matters. Once a kid gets caught up in Tolkien's world the material world of pages more or less disappears. Sadly, to adult eyes the writing is pretty terrible, and the characterization ranges from paper thin to deeply embarrassing. But the world creation Tolkien achieved is still amazing and admirable, and when I was a kid that was all I saw -- that and big epic battles, which I loved. Mordor. Helm's Deep. The battle for Minas Tirith. I'm glad I got to immerse myself in it.

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Tolkien is not a good stylist, and the Silmarillion has no plot momentum, so there's really no reason to read this book. But I didn't know that when I finished LoTR, so off I went to the used book store to pick up a copy.

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I definitely read this and some of the other robot/empire/foundation books, but when? Spring of 1985, probably. And I'm just going to let this stand in for Bicentennial Man and whatever the heck I read set in that world, because it has all blurred together for me.

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Nothing says "wasted early teen summers" to me like Isaac Asimov. This one features gratuitous sex, which somehow I disapproved of at age 14 or so.

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Summer of 1985 was full of these semi-ok Encyclopedia Brown ripoffs, I think. Thank goodness for public libraries; it would be a shame to have bought them all. Still, disposable fun is fun too.

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Yet more Asimov mysteries. What else could one do after reading all the Asimov scifi one could stomach?

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Did I read this specific book? I'm not sure, since there are plenty of entries in this series. But I'm pretty sure I read three collections, and this might have been one.

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I'm sure I read a bunch of Wells in Junior High, well after reading a bunch of Verne. This was definitely the first. When? Maybe later in JH; winter/spring 1986? It could indeed have come after the Hitchhiker's Guide, though it would have been a pity to have read the comedy first and the serious classics after. Hmm. No, that seems wrong. I'm going to say JH, but before Douglas Adams. In any case, this was a fun read, very creepy, with a social subtext that was hard to miss even then.

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There's something about the plausibility of the detail in this book that made it work for me. Wells goes to lengths to help us believe in the potions that make the titular scientist invisible, and that just adds to the fun creepiness, as if Wells were revealing a hidden aspect of reality.

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I think I knew the big plot twist before I read this book along with the other Wells books in this run. (M. Night Shyamalan fans note: the stupidest part of Signs is just an homage to the ending of War.) I can't say the book made a big impression.

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I bought this delicious collection of Alice-themed logic puzzles when I was visiting Japan for two months, and hungry for English-language content of any kind. That would have been October of 1985.

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I read the Guide trilogy later on in Grade 8, which means Jan-June 1986. Doug Snelling or Mike Forbis, the credit goes to one of you, but I can no longer remember which. Adams' sense of humor was a massive influence on me, and probably helped me to appreciate Monty Python a few years later (in the summer of 1986 I watched Python for the first time and found it too weird), which means that most of my sense of humor stems from these books in one way or another.

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My mom gave me this for Christmas in 1986, so it probably got read on December 26th. A really funny collection of political anecdotes for any Canadian old enough to remember Trudeau and Mulroney politics. (There's also a funny story about being relieved that Diefenbaker hadn't been assassinated.)

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This is the last book that a teacher ever read aloud to me -- and kudos to Mr. Van Orman for doing a great job: a natural rhythm that helped us make sense of the sentence structure, and a willingness to pause at the dirty bits until they sank in were both invaluable. Fall 1986, Grade 10 English, probably October.

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This is probably the first really philosophical work I ever read, and though it's just for fun I'd recommend it to any bright teenager. Amongst other things, the epistemological nightmare is great, and the attacks on positivism are something you'll only enjoy more as you learn more. I know I was in high school when I read this, so maybe early summer of 1987?

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I played Dungeons and Dragons back when no one played RPGs on a computer, and Byfield's book was a beautiful discovery -- it's full of a quirky sense of humor, a love of medieval stuff (real and legendary), and tons of detail. I still remember mangelwurzel, crenellations, and the vital importance of a stuffed crocodile to every alchemist. Recommended to everyone who has at least a time-share in her own imagination, if not living there full time. I'm sure I read this in high school, but I couldn't say exactly when. Let's say more like the summer between Grade 10 and Grade 11, meaning 1987.

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A staple of Grade 11 English. "I am in blood, stepped so far, that to go back were as hard as to cross over." Perhaps not a direct quote, but it's a great grim line. If only Schwartzenegger action heroes were worthy of delivering it.

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"People are people, and worth caring about even if from different social circumstances, or if they once treated you badly, or whatever." That was my minimally articulate attempt to state the theme of Sometimes back in Grade 11 English. That would have been ... fall of 1987? Novemberish?

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Grade 12 English wouldn't be the same without Hamlet. But I couldn't say I really started to know this play until I taught it Fall 2008 as part of a course called Philosophy in Literature. Ask yourself "for which death is Hamlet most blameworthy, and why?" and see the play through a new and valuable lens.

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Reading Miller's play in Grade 12 English taught me something incredibly important: Shakespeare really is an amazing playwright. Miller is nothing in comparison! But I had to get some contrast to really see it, because until this point I hadn't read or seen any plays that weren't by Shakespeare. Grade 12 English was either fall or spring semester ... I'm going to go with fall. So let's say December 1988.

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When did I stumble upon the eldritch horrors, the nameless shapes and angles beyond Euclidean geometry with their terrifying congeries of deformed polyps corruscating in a black mass at a Black Mass, that makes up H.P. Lovecraft's fictional universe? Let's say the summer between high school at university, since I know that by my second year of university I was very familiar with Lovecraft's wonderful imagination and terrible writing. 1989 it is. And this collection will have to stand in for the many I read, including a book or two written by friends and hangers-on who set their stories in the same universe.

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This incredibly short introduction to philosophy was the only text for my first philosophy course (meaning I read this in September of 1989). Thanks to John Woods for inspiring me to go on, and to Tom Nagel for giving me lots to think about in just a few words. This is definitely the easiest introduction you'll ever get to philosophy.

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This was a gift from my undergrad mentor, John Woods. I think it would have been from December 1990, and that I would have read it over Christmas break. Somehow I managed to continue to love philosophy, even though this is definitely not Nozick's best book. (Maybe John passed along a promotional copy he didn't want? I could see it.)

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Did philosopher Peter Preuss tip me off to The Physicists? Maybe. If he did, it would probably be sometime after I took existentialism with him. So let's say summer of 1991 as a reasonable guess. The play definitely has a grim existential air, heightened by the atomic bomb. Though I liked it, this was another play that helped to teach me that Shakespeare kicks ass. How can anyone even try to write plays knowing that the guy will probably never be bettered in the English language?

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Philosophy 2232, Earth and Life, was a course on the history and philosophy of science team-taught by Ron Yoshida and Bryson Brown (which I took in Fall of 91/92?), and they assigned this text along with one on Darwin and natural selction. The controversies are inherently interesting, because they're largely a history of Christian scientists convincing themselves that the Bible can't be literally true, and that's a very interesting process. Sadly, this book is as dry as a mountain of schist.

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Lynn lent me her copy of Mort in 1992, probably. But when? I don't remember the season, just the basement where I sat taking a look at this oddball book. Not too surprisingly, this got me started on the whole series. A nice little introduction to Pratchett's Discworld, though it has the awkwardness of any Pratchett novel that tries too hard to deal with romantic love.

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Wife-beating woodcutter becomes prominent physician; hilarity ensues! Here come a bunch of French plays I read as an undergrad; this was the first of them.

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Spring 1992, I think, is when I took a course from the French department called French Comedic Plays. We read a bunch of stuff. I liked the Moliere -- like Shakespeare with the groundling setting turned to MAX and the human insight dialed back for broad comic effect. And of course this play gives us a favourite example (in philosophy) of bad reasoning: why does morphine cause sleep? Because it has the soporific virtue!

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Another play for French Comedic Plays, and one I liked less well than the others by Moliere. Now that it has lost a touch of its political relevance, the remaining jokes strike me as a little flat.

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Only the grim La Lecon was assigned, though I ended up reading both of these plays. Years later I learned that Ionesco is really Ionescu, a Romanian, who francophonized his name to fit into the scene in Paris. I'd say the play is a bit heavy-handed, though; it features sexual violence which, like the appearance of the Holocaust in an artwork, can be used very carefully to understand the thing itself or rather clumsily to signify something else, and I seem to recall Ionesco ending up on the wrong side of that split.

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I read this in manuscript for one of my undergraduate philosophy professors in 1992. I really liked it, and I think some of Peter's ideas about pleasure (possibly influenced by Plato) leaked into my own work unconsciously.

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This is the first book I read when I arrived at Stanford University, which means I read it around September 18th, 1993. I imprinted on it like a newly hatched gosling.

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I struggled to read this book on my own, thinking that it might be the path of my future dissertation work. How wrong I was! (A good thing, too, since I'm an untalented logician and epistemologist both.) But the book inspired me to talk to Fred Dretske about a directed reading, and that got me onto my future dissertation path. Thanks, serendipity.

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In the summer of 1994 I told Fred Dretske that I'd like to read some books with him about epistemology (the theory of knowledge and justified belief). He graciously agreed, and a few books here followed. Eventually, though, he told me, "Actually, Tim, I'm writing a book on consciousness right now. If you want we can keep reading epistemology, but I find it a little boring." I switched to consciousness, and never looked back. This book kicked off my official readings in the theory of knowledge, I think, and probably did so in June of 1994. Just as the subtitle says, this surveys the debate in warrant (roughly, the justification of belief).

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This is the positive theory that goes with the previous survey; read within a week of the other, also probably in June of 1994.

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I read this as part of a directed reading with Fred Dretske in the summer of 1994. It inspired me to be a philosopher of mind: "THAT'S the kind of philosophy I want to do," I said. Fred said, "well, maybe you should think about foundational issues in representation first, before you do this fancy stuff like Dennett." This was wisdom, but I still find Dennett lots of fun.

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The next book on consciousness that I read after Dennett's, this book was a LOT harder, and had less neat-o science in it. But it was also pretty darn educational, and I've continued to think about some of the issues in it. I probably read this in July of 1994.

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I read this in draft in the summer of 1994 while starting to work under Fred. (Not that I was very helpful. That was Guven Guzeldere's job.) A very elegant and interesting work, but I still love Explaining Behavior best of all Fred's books.

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Was this book written as absurdist humor for 20-something grad students, or did it just work out perfectly that way? Thanks, Jon, for introducing me to the BLT in the late fall(probably) of 1994.

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A friend-of-a-friend loan in grad school (fall 94 or winter 95)led to me reading this. A wonderful bit of scifi for anyone who's ever felt smarter and better than all the kids who never liked him (or her). As many have pointed out, OSC is a terrible writer in general, who just seems to have paid enough monkeys to hit enough typewriters to hammer out one piece of classic scifi and one decent sequel.

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The fairly enjoyable sequel to Ender's Game. Read within seconds of finishing EG.

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"No," they said, "don't read Xenocide. It will just ruin the first two books for you." Well, it didn't quite do that, but Xenocide really isn't good. It's kind of like OSC sat down with a lot of monkeys and a lot of typewriters and said, "Ok, what can you give me with a Portugese spin on it?"

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This book is a combination of a theory of knowledge and a theory of belief, unified by a technical notion of information (as in Claude Shannon's notion). Once I became a Dretske student I got obsessed by the idea of trying to get the 'right' understanding of information. I spent about a year on that until I wised up, starting with this book in around fall of 1994. Still a great book.

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I read this in the apartment of a friend (Hi, Asya) in Rains Apartments, which means I probably read it in the fall of 1995.

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After Grimus I knew I wanted more Rushdie. I know I read this one in grad school, but just when escapes me. Sometime between fall 1995 and spring 1998.

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I heard Diamond give a lecture at Stanford in which he talked about the ideas in this book, and was really impressed. Diamond had a rather goofy slide show to go with his presentation (human diversity, was the point, I think), but when he talked about what history would have been like if the rhino could have been domesticated you could see the gleam in his eyes. I went out and bought a copy ... sometime in 1996? I'll have to check.

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Pnin is really great fun. An academic comedy with a very Nabokovian twist, and a good dollop of self-deprecation. I read this in grad school, sometime in the middle of my degree.

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Lots of fun. The following isn't an exact quote (I don't know where my copy is), but: "...claimed he'd written a story about a young man who comes home from college to find that his father has died and that his uncle, an ear specialist, has married his mother." That 'an ear specialist' always kills me. I borrowed it from a friend to read sometime in grad school.

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This was a fun book to just pick up and read for the heck of it, probably in the summer of 1997. Aside from a puzzling second chapter, I thought it was pretty accessible (for Enlightenment-era philosophy).

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When the University of Manitoba offered me a job in March(?) of 1998, they told me I would be asked to teach a lot of courses on critical thinking. I started reading a few dumb things students could criticize in a critical thinking class; voila Mr. Gray.

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Another book read as preparation for teaching critical thinking. For some reason, this one never worked as well as an exercise, but a chapter from Gray's Men are from Mars was a staple when I taught critical thinking.

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This is the last book I read in grad school, so it must have been around April or May of 1998. It's a brain-busting monster of technical philosophy, and I have to confess that I didn't even make it through chapters 5-7. For those who care, though, it's fascinating to compare and contrast Brandom to another philosopher strongly influenced by Wilfrid Sellars: Ruth Millikan. (Yes! Millikan and Brandom have more in common than you would ever think.)

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This might be the first new book I read after moving to Winnipeg in June of 1998. A receipt I found in it says it was bought in September of that year.

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Michael Feld gave me a copy of this crazy work, which is structurally a lot like Nabokov's Pale Fire: it's a putative criticism of an invented poet, though in this case Sarah Binks, "the sweet songstress of Saskatchewan," is the focus of attention rather than the authorial voice writing about her. Another difference: this is played purely for laughs. Pretty funny stuff, though a DRY humor (as befits Saskatchewan).

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My first seminar was taught in the fall of 1998, and somewhere around late October we got to the infamous Investigations, so I finally had to read the book I'd assigned. (This did not make for the most successful seminar I've ever taught.)

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This was part of a Nabokov kick I went on just after grad school. If I remember correctly, it started with Pnin in grad school, and then went to The Defense -- not nearly as fun as Pnin, but interesting. The marriage of chess and madness is convincing in its odd way.

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Pale Fire really is tons of fun. I'm glad I eventually got around to reading it, probably in the winter of 98/99.

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For whatever reason I've completely forgotten what happens in Bend Sinister. But I was on a Nabokov bender at the time, and nothing was going to stop me from devouring more of the master's work.

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This is GRIM. The darkest work I've read by Nabokov, and the book that convinced me that I didn't have to read everything he'd written. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Someone is going blind, and someone else is taking advantage. That's the dark, and that's the laughter. VERY dark. Not much laughing at all.

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I think I started this in the fall of 1998 and didn't finish until the winter of 1999, mostly because I got bogged down around the chutneys and quit reading for a few months. Still, it seemed a shame to quit before finishing, so I got through to the end and was glad to have done so.

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Rushdie the stylist was a big hit with me, but The Moor's Last Sigh more or less confirmed that all his novels were going to be infected with an underlying misanthropy. I'm not sure when I read this, but definitely before November of 1999.

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After some dark Nabokov and a pair of dark Rushdie novels, this beautifully written but utterly depressing novel by Roy (which I read just after the Rushdies) just about killed my interest in reading serious novels. Ouch! I know that life is painful in various ways; I think I'm beyond needing to be pained by it over and over again! (Unless there's some new lesson I need to learn -- but it's not about psychically bonded fraternal twins.)

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My friend Nomy's first book. I read it in draft in 2002, probably earlier in the year, since it came out in 2003. Though it's a work of professional philosophy, it's also full of great examples drawn from everyday life and from literature, and is super deep.

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Though Three Faces was published in 2004, I read it in manuscript in 2003 -- which was pretty easy to do, as I'm the author.

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Fred's first book is one I never ended up reading until I was asked to write an encyclopedia-type entry about him, which dates the reading of this book to around late 2004. I was surprised just how much it prefigures ideas in Knowledge and the Flow of Information, published twelve years later. Interesting! But I don't imagine anyone who is not a professional philosopher will much care for it.

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The second book by my friend and colleague Nomy Arpaly. In this one, she takes on three simple tasks: showing that 'ought' does not imply 'can', showing what it takes to act for reasons, and showing how all this plus her theory from her first book explains how we have free will whether or not the universe is deterministic. Simple! Like her first book, I read this in typescript, so probably early in 2005.

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Sometime in spring of 2005, I believe (thanks, Liz, for pointing me to a smart book about dogs' minds).

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What are the themes of posthumanism in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon's V.? In the fall of 2005 (probably) I was the outside reader on an MA thesis in English that sought to answer this pressing question. The result: I discovered that I just can't bear V. Full of post-war existential nausea without the timeless quality of Camus's The Outsider, I resented every second of reading V.

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When on Earth did I read this? After coming to Ohio State? Just before? If either one, then sometime around the summer of 2006. Perhaps a touch later. (Now, why is it that I can remember what I read when I got to grad school and to my first job, but not when I got to my second job? It must be that I'm getting old.)

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Normally I wouldn't bother to find the exact translation that I read of a work, but I'm too fond of this great translation by Terence Irwin to let it slide. To my shame, I didn't read NE until I was preparing to teach it to students in Intro to Philosophy, in Fall quarter of 2006. But I've become a big fan. Aristotle isn't remembered for no reason; he's damn smart.

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I read a colleague's copy of this philosophical work while subletting from her, back in November or December of 2006. I liked it enough that I went out and ordered a copy for myself, but that doesn't mean I actually agree with Feldman's theory of pleasure.

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What's a Christmas vacation without sordid tales of depraved rock gods? Not any Christmas vacation that I want a part of. Read this on 17th December 2008, plus or minus a day.

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After Hammer of the Gods I thought I'd change things up a bit and read some DFW. A fun collection that took a couple of days to get through, A Supposedly Fun Thing was a fun thing to read, as people have said, though I'll probably never read it again. Read on 18-19 December 2008.

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Thanks to Nora for recommending this great book to me so often that I finally gave in and read it -- on December 19th and 20th, probably.

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Started on December 22nd 2008 and finished on December 30th. But it really did seem for a while like the book would be infinitely long.

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13 March 2009. Had a free afternoon and needed to not think about much, so it was time for a little light reading. Rose brings up one really interesting fact about hip hop: white audiences buy a majority of hip hop, and white TWEENS make up a large proportion of that. She thinks that this market has been responsible for making most commercial hip hop about "thugs, pimps, and ho's" and she's probably right. Aimed at a pop audience, this book was a little light for my tastes, but still interesting.

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I wish I'd discovered Vonnegut in high school. As he says of himself (more or less), "that guy can't write but the ideas are great," or at least great for bright high school students, and I would have loved him then. This was a fun light read for an evening during Spring Break, but I'm not tempted to read the whole oeuvre. (Oh, and the ideas here: the firebombing of Dresden was bad, but when you look at life from an atemporal perspective, you see there's no free wll and you embrace your existence as a whole.)

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Another book for Spring Break 2009. Wallace's collection of short stories includes a bunch of brief interviews with morally or psychologically hideous men, and these are my favourites. Other stories also tend to focus on moral and para-moral screwups. Good, but they didn't stick with me the way Infinite Jest did.

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SPOILER ALERT: We win! Yes, we defeat the zombies (we learn on the first page). But how did it all go down? This book is essentially a collection of linked short stories on that theme, all in the form of personal reminiscence by various characters. Brooks isn't a great writer, just a solid one, and someone should have pointed out that the spiritual leader of Tibet isn't a South American quadruped, but overall this was a fun way to spend a day of Spring Break.

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I read this with my girlfriend, who is a big fan of Virginia Woolf. It's great! Woolf's misanthropy shines through in a delightful way, and she knows about depression and mixed states like nobody's business (sadly for her). Challenging to read, as we're treated to stream-of-consciousness writing from multiple perspectives, but definitely a pleasure.

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This is the third in a series for kids, and the series continues to be great. Pratchett sneaks in mention of senility (obliquely) in a very touching way. I picked this up at the same time as various highbrow works, but it somehow got read first.

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This book-length exploration (defence) of hair metal -- glam metal, in the author's preferred jargon -- is as much fun as any of Klosterman's books. It's super heartfelt, too. And since I grew up in the same era watching kids wear the same Iron Maiden t-shirts, there was a quasi-nostalgic quality to reading FRC too. The most substantial thesis is maybe that hair metal was meaningful because it offered a lot of kids an exciting identity that was the essence of rock 'n' roll. Can't say much against that.

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This is a beautiful, short book of prose poems about imaginary cities. Something I read in little bursts (it's good for that) in May of 2009.