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This post written by Clint A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned
by Michael J. Fox
[cover name=afunnythinghappenedonthewaytothefuture]
You might remember Michael J. Fox from the Back to the Future series and Spin City. Whenever he is asked to speak at a college graduation, he starts his speech with “What the hell were you people thinking? You are aware that I’m a high school dropout?” Dropping out of high school didn’t stop him from becoming a famous actor and traveling the world, and it didn’t stop him from getting a good education on his own, but it did make his life a lot more… interesting. In this book, Michael J. Fox describes some of his more unusual life experiences and shows what he learned from them. Did you know he once got busted by the immigration services at an airport? How about the time the IRS came after him for not paying taxes? Or the time he fell down a mountain in Bhutan?
This book is really short – you can finish it in an afternoon – but it’s also pretty interesting. Michael J. Fox is obviously a sharp guy, and he’s a very funny writer. In addition to being funny, though, he’s trying to get across a couple of good points. One is that being smart and being well-educated aren’t the same thing, so you shouldn’t judge people on how far they made it in school. Another is that, whatever happens in life, you should try to learn from it and end up a better person. Each chapter also has its own message, too, and I don’t want to spoil them all.
ABC News has the first chapter and an interview with Michael J. Fox.
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This post written by Clint Yotsuba&!
by Kiyohiko Azuma
[cover name=yotsubato]
Yotsuba is one of those kids who is always in her own little world. In fact, I’m not sure she’s ever not been in her own little world. I mean, she’s never seen a doorbell before. The thinks it’s some amazing button that makes people appear. She’s never seen an air conditioner before, but as soon as she sees one, she hates it.
The story starts with Yotsuba and her dad moving to a new city. When one of her neighbors asks where they moved from, Yotsuba says “Left!” She’s a strange little kid.
Not a lot actually happens in the story. At least, not in the first volume. I haven’t had a chance to read the others. Yotsuba wanders around her neighborhood, meets some of the people there, catches cicadas, and goes shopping at a department store. What makes this worth reading is that it’s like Yotsuba has never done any of this stuff before, so it’s all new and strange to her. Also, she has no filter between her brain and her mouth, so if she says everything that goes through her head. Everything.
Her facial expressions and the odd things she says and the really bizarre ways she misunderstands daily life are all just hilarious.
In case you are wondering, the title is pronounced “Yotsuba to!” which means “Yotsuba and!” Most of the chapter titles are like “Yotsuba & Shopping” or “Yotsuba & Rain” or “Yotsuba & something else that totally confuses her.”
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This post written by Clint Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Confessions of a Culinary Thrill Seeker
by Robb Walsh
[cover name=areyoureallygoingtoeatthat]
Robb Walsh was in the advertising business when he started writing about food and restaurants on the side. Pretty soon, newspapers were paying him to travel to different parts of the world and review unusual foods. Not long after that, he lost his advertising job and his wife divorced him. He’s still writing about food, though, and according to his blog, he’s married again.
Are You Really Going to Eat That? is a collection of some of the articles he has written for various newspapers and magazines from 1993 to 2003. Don’t let the title fool you. While Walsh really has eaten bugs and other stuff that most people in the United States would find extremely unusual, that’s not what this book is about.
These articles are about more than just restaurants and food. Walsh gets a little bit of culture and history. He also introduces us to some interesting people like Jay, the owner of a Houston bagel shop who threatens him for taking notes in the restaurant. I doubt you’ll visit many of the places Walsh writes about, but the stories he tells are interesting enough to keep you reading.
Most of the foods Walsh tries aren’t that far out, especially if you live in California. You might learn about some new foods, but a lot of it is about fairly ordinary things like hot sauce, coffee, cheese, oysters, crabs, and bagels. However, Walsh always finds some interesting angle on his foods, and he often travels to various parts of Europe or the Americas to learn more.
For example, he goes to Switzerland and France to find out who really invented Gruyère cheese, since the two countries have been fighting over it for years and years. He heads down to Argentina to check out the pizza places in Buenos Aires.* He visits Trinidad to find out about curry and hot sauce, and he goes to a prison to find a famous soul food chef.
Of course, he does spend some time looking at foods that some of you may not be familiar with. My favorite is the durian, a huge, spiky fruit that tastes delicious and smells like a herd of rotting cows. (It’s the fruit on the cover, right beneath the machete.)
As a bonus, Walsh includes twenty recipes that you might (or might not) want to try out.
You can read some of it online at Google Books. If you need more, you can check out the author’s blog.
* Sorry, Robb. The best pizza out there is Zuppardi’s Apizza in West Haven, CT.
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This post written by Clint Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
by Julie Kenner
[cover name=carpedemon]
Kate Connors never went to high school or college, but she had a job she loved and was good at. Then she married a co-worker and settled down to raise a family, and she never even thought about going back to work. She used to be a demon hunter, and that’s not really something you can do while also raising kids.
Kate has been a full-time mother and a full-time wife for the past fifteen years. Her husband doesn’t know about her past, and she’d like to keep it that way. She really wants her husband to see her as a wife and not an unstoppable killing machine. Her daughter doesn’t know about her past, although Kate might tell her one of these days. Her son doesn’t know and wouldn’t care if she told him, since he’s only two years old. Kate doesn’t really like keeping secrets, but since she’s not longer fighting demons, nobody really needs to know.
Her husband is running for a political office and has to win important people over, and one day he calls her to ask if she can put together a dinner party for that evening. Then an old demon jumps through her window and tries to kill her. Now she has to clean up the glass, hide the demon corpse, and make the dinner party happen.
This is where Kate’s life gets fun. Some big, bad demons are moving in on her town, and due to budget cuts and recruiting trouble, she’s the only demon hunter around. She does eventually get the help of an alimentatore, an advisor who is the brain while Kate is the brawn. Unfortunately, her alimentatore has a day job, so he makes Kate dig through records. She also gets the help of another retired hunter. Unfortunately, he’s currently in a nursing home. She also finds a sidekick. Unfortunately, when danger threatens, her sidekick plans to scream and run. Then, of course, she’s got to deal with her husband, teenage daughter, and two-year-old son. With help like this, how can she lose? Oh, and she’s a little out of shape, too. Not a lot, but enough to make fighting demons dangerous.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
by Giles Foden
[cover name=mimiandtoutousbigadventure]
If you think history is boring, you should read this book. History isn’t all names and dates. Sometimes it’s crazy people doing stupid things, and in this case, it’s both amazing and hilarious.
When World War I breaks out, the Royal Navy of Great Britain is ordered to destroy the German fleet wherever it can be found. This includes Lake Tanganyika, a massive lake in Africa. The Germans have a steamship on it that the British want to sink so they can carry troops across the lake.
Unfortunately, the British don’t have any warships on Lake Tanganyika. They don’t have much of anything there. The Belgians had a ship, but the Germans destroyed it. They can’t send the parts and build a ship at the edge of the lake. The Belgians tried that, too, but the Germans have spies everywhere, and they would destroy the ship before it launched. The only logical solution is to take two small gunboats, ship them to Africa, load them onto a train, take them as far as the tracks went, and then carry them the rest of the way across Africa. Sure. That makes sense.
With a plan that is this good, the Royal Navy needs the best officers they can get to carry it out. They pick Lt. Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, the oldest Lt. Commander they have. Although he has barely been involved in the war, he has already managed to sink two ships and nearly destroy a submarine – all of them on his own side. He has been court martialled twice, once for running his destroyer onto a beach (not counted as one of his two kills) and once for accidentally ramming and sinking another ship. As if Geoffrey isn’t enough, the Royal Navy picks out a few more goofy people to send to Africa along with him.
Somehow these misfits and their gunboats make it to Lake Tanganyika and actually manage to cause the Germans some serious trouble. They don’t quite do everything they had hoped to do, but at least Geoffrey Spicer-Simson can now claim to have attacked a German ship. In fact, Lt. Commander Spicer-Simson is the first Royal Navy officer to capture a German ship in the war.
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This post written by Clint Dead is the New Black
by Marlene Perez
[cover name=deadisthenewblack]
The women in Daisy Giordano’s family have special powers. Her mom can see bits of the future. One sister can read minds, and the other is telekinetic. Somehow, though, Daisy missed out. She’s normal, or as near as you can get when your family runs a psychic detective agency. A lot of strange things happen in her hometown of Nightshade, California, but Daisy’s life really gets interesting when the most popular girl in her high school comes back from vacation looking kind of dead. Undead, actually, and she’s popular enough to make pale skin and custom-made coffins stylish.
Then one of Daisy’s fellow high school students is murdered. Death doesn’t seem to stop this student, though, and she shows up to a pep rally. It’s up to Daisy and the police chief’s son Ryan (the guy she’s got a crush on) to figure out what’s going on.
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This post written by Clint Nighthogs: a Pearls Before Swine Collection
by Stephan Pastis
[cover name=nighthogs]
Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. Pearls Before Swine is about the adventures of anthropomorphic (human-like) animals; the primary characters are Rat, Pig, Zebra, and Goat. Rat is dishonest and cynical. Pig is… special. But he’s happy, too. Zebra is always trying to help out his relatives who live in the wild, but they always get eaten by lions. Goat is the smart one, so naturally he doesn’t like interacting with the others.
There are a bunch of minor characters, too. Guard Duck is a paranoid duck whose first plan for any situation involves a rocket launcher. Unfortunately, he seems to own a lot of rockets. Snuffles is a cat who divides his time between looking cute and committing all kinds of serious crimes. A whole bunch of crocodiles live next door to Zebra. They would really love to catch and eat him, but they are far too stupid to be a threat (to him, at least). Stephan Pastis, the writer, shows up in the comic strip from time to time. Many of the other characters hate him.
There are a couple of features that may attract or repel you. First, there are a lot of death jokes. If crocodiles show up in a comic strip, odds are that at least one of them will get killed. Some strips start off like “So X died yesterday.” We’ve never met X, but he/she had to die to set up the joke that’s coming. Also, there’s cannibalism. Half the time, when Pig goes to a restaurant, he orders a ham sandwich or a BLT or something else with pork in it. Yeah, Pig’s special.
Second, Stephan Pastis loves puns, and he goes out of his way to work them in. Sometimes a Sunday comic, one of the really long ones, is nothing but preparation for a single pun. I don’t think the puns themselves are always very funny, even for puns, but I really have to laugh at the massive amount of effort he put into setting it up
If you want to see what the comic strip is like, it runs in several Contra Costa newspapers, or you can read it online.
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This post written by Clint Yakitate!! Japan
by Takashi Hashiguchi
[cover name=yakitatejapan]
How can I describe Yakitate!! Japan? Take some kind of action manga like Dragonball Z or Naruto and replace all the fighting and martial arts and ninja stuff with baking. Or maybe it’s like an all-bread comedy version of Iron Chef, except where the main character is dumb. There’s action and difficult training and secret techniques and excessive drama, all focused around making bread products. There are actually a lot of manga like this in Japan, but they never seem to get translated into English. The basic plot of a lot of these manga, including Yakitate!! Japan, is that some extremely talented cook travels around and defeats many rivals in cooking contests.
Yakitate!! Japan isn’t just about cooking, though. It’s also about comedy. Everything is just over the top – people often have out-of-body experiences after eating a particularly good pastry, for example, and the characters are all a little bit crazy. There are a lot of puns. Other times there will be a parody of some other manga. There is also crude humor from time to time, just so you know.
The hero is Azuma, a sixteen-year-old who wants to invent the best bread in Japan. He calls this Ja-pan, which is a pun, since “pan” means “bread” in Japanese. He’s dumb as a post, but he’s a genius when it comes to bread.
Kawachi is Azuma’s rival/sidekick. They meet when they both apply for the same job at the start of the series. Kawachi knows more than Azuma does about almost everything (he knows what a croissant is, for example), but he is nowhere near as good at actually doing the baking. Even though they work together, he would really like to beat Azuma one of these days.
Tsukino is the manager of the store where they work. She is about Azuma’s age, but she has a talent for finding and hiring skilled people. She is actually fairly normal.
Matsuhiro works at the same store. He’s big, loud, and fond of horses. Oh, and he has an afro. He might be the craziest of the bunch, but he is also very skilled.
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This post written by Clint The Stepsister Scheme
by Jim C. Hines
[cover name=thestepsisterscheme]
You have probably seen the Disney films Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. However, you may not know that there were stories about these three characters long before Disney, and that some of the old stories were much more disturbing. In some older Sleeping Beauty stories, the prince’s mother tries to kill and eat Sleeping Beauty. In one old Snow White story, the wicked queen is tortured to death. In an old Cinderella story, those cute Disney birds attack her step-sisters and blind them.
Jim Hines takes some of these older stories and tells you what happens after Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella had their happy endings. The story begins shortly after Snow White’s wedding, when one of her step-sisters tries to assassinate her. When that fails, she kidnaps the prince. Cinderella sets off to save him, accompanied by Snow White and a particularly kick-butt Sleeping Beauty.
If you want to read the first chapter, the author has put it up on his website.
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This post written by Clarissa Japan Ai
by Aimee Major Steinberger
[cover name=japanai]
This is kind of a travel sketchbook, by a professional artist (she works on Futurama and other things you’ve seen) who’s really into Japanese stuff–costumes, anime, manga, kimono, dolls–and decides to go to Japan with two of her friends. She’s six feet tall and white, so she really stands out! Fortunately for her, and for the reader, she has a really good sense of humor. You can follow along with her as she and her friends experience Japanese trains, food, and hot springs; dress up like geisha; get lost; generally have a lot of fun. She uses her own style of drawing, which is heavily influenced by manga but still unique. The drawings are supplemented with lots of handwritten explanations about what’s happening, and you’ll learn a lot of interesting stuff about modern Japanese pop culture, because she generally knows what she’s talking about. This is really a one-of-a-kind book, giving you the feel of a trip to Japan with three fun, kind of geeky (in a good way!) girls the way a travel guide never could.
Go here for a preview, or click on “OMAKE” for 60 pages of bonus sketches and photos that weren’t included in the published book! (One page has a tiny amount of back nudity of a seated person.)
By the way, if you decide to look for this in a bookstore, it might be in the manga section, even though it’s not manga. It was published by Go!Comi, a manga publisher, so Borders puts it in manga, but a used bookstore might not. You may have to ask.
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