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If you took the entire West-Coast noir mystery genre and made it into a great 1980s song, “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David and David would be the result. When I first heard it on the radio in 1986, I went straight out and bought the album. It’s one of the most haunting rock songs…
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My parents divorced when I was a little kid. My mom was struggling with mental illness (undiagnosed, at the time) and so I went to live with my father and his new wife, my step-mother Eileen. I saw my mom mostly on the weekends, and we would invariably go to the movies. I probably saw…
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Well, it took us a while, but my great friend Margaret Luongo and I finally finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch! (Hey, give us a break–it’s almost 900 freakin pages long!) Here is our discussion of the second half and heart-stopping conclusion of the book for our Read a Classic Novel…Together channel. And, guess what! We both…
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I’ve read a lot of trippy science books in my time, but Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is probably the trippiest. The only one that sort of comes close is Frank Herbert’s Dune, which makes a lot of sense considering both were written in the 1960s by two extremely smart and talented writers. (One of…
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I had a really good time this week doing a Q&A with Bianca Vendenbos of Book Notions. Check it out here when you can!
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One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends…
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Sometimes you just have to go back to basics. And what could be more basic than the definitive punk-rock song of all time? Some things you might not know about the Sex Pistols: 1.) Their original name was The Pistols. Their favorite venue was a club called Sex. The rest is history. 2.) They only…
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I learned many things from reading the excellent nonfiction book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? For instance, I learned that the Vatican has its own astronomical observatory, which is run, in part, by the authors, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller. Both men are also Jesuits. (The current Pope, Francis, is also a Jesuit—that’s another thing…
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If you’re old enough to remember the early 1980s, you probably know that there was a time when Sting was more than just a meme, and The Police were the greatest rock band in the world. When I say greatest, I mean by almost any measurable component—records sold, concerts sold out, number of MTV plays…
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On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson.…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 