Back to thekurths.com List Movies
| Date | Title | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-08-08 | Scott Pilgrim (Volumes 1-6) | Bryan Lee O'Malley | graphic novels |
| 2010-07-19 | The Big Short | Michael Lewis | audio. The story of the 2008 financial collapse. Pretty technical at times, but thoroughly interesting. |
| 2010-07-09 | The Kid Stays in the Picture | Robert Evans | audio. |
| 2010-07-01 | The Help | Kathryn Stockett | This was fantastic as an audio book. |
| 2010-06-17 | Half Broke Horses | Jeannette Walls | |
| 2010-06-16 | Ender's Game | Orson Scott Card | 20th anniversary audiobook, with some commentary by the author at the end. Great! |
| 2010-06-14 | The Ordinary Princess | M. M. Kaye | Read this with the kids at bedtime. |
| 2010-06-06 | Price Caspian | C. S. Lewis | Read this with the kids at bedtime. |
| 2010-05-16 | The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis | Read this with the kids at bedtime. They (Kaeta especially) loved it! |
| 2010-05-09 | The Graveyard Book | Neil Gaiman | audio |
| 2010-04-23 | The Wordy Shipmates | Sarah Vowell | audio |
| 2010-04-11 | The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | Audio |
| 2010-03-29 | God in the Dock | C. S. Lewis | Audio |
| 2010-03-28 | Last Chance to See | Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine | |
| 2010-03-22 | The Fire and the Staff: Lutheran Theology in Practice | Klemet Preus | |
| 2010-02-15 | My Family and Other Animals | Gerald Durrell | Loved it! |
| 2009-12-28 | The Wild Things | Dave Eggers | Novel version of Where the Wild Things Are. |
| 2009-12-18 | The Glass Castle | Jeannette Walls | One of the best memoirs I've read. Great writing and an amazing story to tell. |
| 2009-12-12 | Hyperion | Dan Simmons | |
| 2009-12-09 | Pride and Prejudice and Zombies | Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith | Audio. This is AWESOME, and the audiobook reader makes it especially entertaining. I loved Lady Catherine de Burgh talking on and on about her ninjas. |
| 2009-11-21 | Tree by Tolkein | Colin Wilson | |
| 2009-10-20 | Story Craft | John R. Erickson | Author of the Hank the Cowdog books. |
| 2009-09-23 | The Time Traveler's Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | Audio |
| 2009-09-23 | Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning | Douglas Wilson | I especially recommend Appendix A, an essay called "The Lost Tools of Learning," by Dorothy Sayers. The essay is online here: http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html |
| 2009-09-20 | The Odyssey | Homer | tr. Samuel Butler |
| 2009-09-19 | Up the Down Staircase | Bel Kaufman | |
| 2009-08-16 | Company | Max Berry | Great! I read it in about 40 hours. A hilarious satire of the corporate world. |
| 2009-07-26 | Prince of Fire | Daniel Silva | |
| 2009-07-25 | Charlotte's Web | E.B. White | Read this with the kids, a chapter a night. |
| 2009-07-01 | Dot.Bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath | J. David Kuo | |
| 2009-06-13 | Don't Make Me Think | Steve Krug | Web usability book -- a quick read with lots of good, common sense advice. Slightly outdated at times (it's the second ed., from 2006), but still highly recommended. |
| 2009-05-25 | Next: The Future Just Happened | Michael Lewis | |
| 2009-05-16 | Genesis | Bernard Beckett | |
| 2009-05-13 | 1984 | George Orwell | |
| 2009-04-24 | Religion on Trial | Craig Parton | |
| 2009-04-21 | god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2009-03-29 | Alexander the Great | various | Penguin compilation of writings by Plutarch, Arrian, Curtius. |
| 2009-03-23 | Is Christianity Good for the World? A Debate. | Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson | |
| 2009-02-13 | Sliver | Ira Levin | |
| 2009-02-07 | Here Comes Everybody | Clay Shirky | |
| 2009-02-01 | Odd Thomas | Dean Koontz | My first Koontz, and I can recommend it. |
| 2009-01-17 | Outliers | Malcolm Gladwell | |
| 2008-12-31 | So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star | Jacob Slichter | Memoirs by the drummer from Semisonic (the band that wrote the song "Closing Time," a big hit in the late 90s). This is a good inside look at the music business. |
| 2008-11-16 | Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars | Daniel Pinkwater | Borrowed from Curt. Very fun! |
| 2008-11-09 | Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs | Craig Stull, Phil Myers, David Meerman Scott | Read for work. Like many business books, it's about 5-10 pages of ideas spread over 200 pages, but still thought-provoking. |
| 2008-10-12 | Bat Boy | Matthew McGough | |
| 2008-10-11 | On Being a Theologian of the Cross | Gerhard O. Forde | |
| 2008-09-11 | Scott Pilgrim (vol 4) | Bryan Lee O'Malley | My first Manga. Wasn't sure at first, but I ended up liking it a lot. |
| 2008-09-06 | The Well-Trained Mind | Jessica Wise and Susan Wise Bauer | This is a comprehensive guide to classical education, mainly for homeschooling. Excellent! |
| 2008-09-06 | Demo | Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan | Some interesting stories, but I can't *highly* recommend it. |
| 2008-08-27 | Watchmen | Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons | I wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't so widely regarded. In the end, it totally lived up to the hype, but I was well over halfway through it before it sucked me in. |
| 2008-08-16 | Me, Myself, and Bob | Phil Vischer | Phil Vischer is the creator of Veggie Tales. The book combines technology, business, and theology, and at times it's very funny. Karianne and I both read it, and it sparked some thought-provoking conversation. |
| 2008-07-22 | Maus (vol. 2) | Art Spiegelman | |
| 2008-07-20 | ScreamFree Parenting | Hal Edward Runkel | O.K. |
| 2008-07-20 | Maus (vol 1) | Art Spiegelman | |
| 2008-07-19 | Ben and Jerry's: The Inside Scoop | Fred "Chico" Lager | Really interesting, if a tad long. I know a lot more about ice cream now. |
| 2008-06-29 | Hank the Cowdog | John R. Erickson | As good as I remembered! |
| 2008-06-24 | Rosemary's Baby | Ira Levin | Great writing, ambiguous ending! |
| 2008-06-08 | A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | First half (chapters 1-6) highly recommended, but I had trouble following parts of the second half. |
| 2008-06-01 | The Hedge Knight (Graphic Novel) | George R. R. Martin | |
| 2008-05-18 | Superman: Secret Identity (Graphic Novel) | Kurt Busiek, Stuart Immonen | An alternate universe, in which the Superman comics exist, and a boy from Kansas gets picked on because his name is Clark Kent. But one day, abruptly, he gets the actual powers of Superman. A very fun story. |
| 2008-05-01 | Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts | Steve Turner | |
| 2008-04-27 | Kiss Me Like a Stranger | Gene Wilder | |
| 2008-04-19 | Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art | Stephen Nachmanovitch | Highly recommended. |
| 2008-04-06 | Art and the Bible | Francis Shaeffer | This is a 64-page booklet I borrowed from Curt. He begins with an apologetic, arguing that the very idea of art is biblical (and not, as some have it, a violation of the injunction against graven images in the 10 commandments). He then defines a few dimensions along which we can create and evaluate art: 1) technical skill, 2) validity (e.g., is the artist just in it for the money, or does the art truly represent the artist?), 3) the art's intellectual content/world view, and 4) how well the art marries style to substance. He also makes the point that a work of art has value in and of itself simply because it is a work of creativity. |
| 2008-03-29 | Born Standing Up | Steve Martin | This is actually a pretty sad book, but I did enjoy it. Many of the best parts of the book are also in this article: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-200802.html?c=y&page=1 |
| 2008-03-26 | Roaring Lambs | Bob Briner | We need some salt. We need the lambs to roar! It's time for the salty lambs to start roaring. SALT ROAR LAMBS SALT! (I realize this note makes no sense unless you've read the book...and that doesn't bother me at all.) |
| 2008-01-23 | The Knights Templar (1982) | Stephen Howarth | Although this is a history of the templars, the bulk of it is about the crusades. Conspiratorial theories about the templars aren't even mentioned until the final page of the book; it's just a well-written history, and the facts alone are interesting enough. It has some pretty dry parts, so I'd only recommend it to people with a particular interest in the templars, but I learned a lot and got a real feel for the time period (1100-1300s). |
| 2008-01-10 | The Dark Tower | Stephen King | |
| 2007-11-22 | Song of Susannah | Stephen King | Dark Tower book 6 -- one more to go! Things are getting interesting... |
| 2007-11-21 | Wild at Heart | John Eldredge | This book was a wedding present from Michelle and Dustin Gooding... You see how long it took me to get around to it! Well, we both read a good part of it back in 2003, but I'd never finished it, and I decided that since I have a son now, I should think about the kind of issues in this book. |
| 2007-11-16 | Get Big Fast: Amazon.com | Robert Spector | Written in 2000, basically a bio of amazon.com. Somewhat outdated and kind of lightweight, but still thought-provoking. |
| 2007-11-03 | Wolves of the Calla | Stephen King | Audio book. |
| 2007-10-27 | The Best Software Writing, I | ed. Joel Spolsky | A collection of articles that I could have gotten for free on the internet, but it was cheap at half-price books. |
| 2007-10-19 | I am America, and So Can You! | Stephen Colbert | Audio book. |
| 2007-10-03 | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | J.K. Rowling | These books really live up to the hype, especially the last two. I highly recommend them. |
| 2007-09-28 | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price | J.K. Rowling | Audio book + hardcopy (borrowed from Curt) |
| 2007-09-24 | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | J.K. Rowling | Audio book |
| 2007-09-13 | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | J.K. Rowling | Audio book |
| 2007-09-03 | Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel | Scott Adams | Library |
| 2007-09-01 | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | J.K. Rowling | Audio book. |
| 2007-08-26 | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | J.K. Rowling | Audio Book |
| 2007-08-24 | The Blind Watchmaker | Richard Dawkins | |
| 2007-08-23 | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | J.K. Rowling | Audio book |
| 2007-07-14 | Darwin on Trial | Phillip E. Johnson | |
| 2007-07-08 | Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Robert Bach | |
| 2007-06-21 | The Probability of God | Steven Unwin | Premise is interesting, calculation was disappointing. |
| 2007-06-15 | Wizard and Glass | Stephen King | |
| 2007-05-08 | All That the Rain Promises and More | David Arora | This is a guide to mushroom identification that I bought at the Muir Woods gift shop because the cover was so funny. Along with instructions for identifying mushrooms, it's full of anecdotes from mushroom enthusiasts, which I read on the plane ride back to Texas. |
| 2007-05-08 | Brainiac | Ken Jennings | |
| 2007-05-01 | The Spirituality of the Cross | Gene Veith | |
| 2007-04-29 | Amusing Ourselves to Death | Neil Postman | I can't recommend this highly enough. It is a history and analysis of the effects of print media versus television on American culture. |
| 2007-04-24 | The Time Traveller's Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | GREAT premise, very well written. Thanks to Colin for loaning it to me. At around 540 pages, it could have been a little shorter. As far as I can remember, this is the first book I've read since "Where the Red Fern Grows" in 5th grade that actually made me cry. The end is sad but complete. It makes time and the people around me seem very real and very special. |
| 2007-04-18 | Logan's Run | William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson | This was like a 180 page chase scene. Interesting premise, but about three times too long. |
| 2007-04-07 | The God Who is There | Francis Shaeffer | |
| 2007-04-06 | What Do You Care What Other People Think? | Richard Feynman | |
| 2007-04-01 | Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman | Richard Feynman | |
| 2007-03-02 | Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell | Susanna Clark | |
| 2007-01-15 | Coloring Outside the Lines | Roger Schank | |
| 2007-01-07 | Rich Dad's Guide to Investing | Robert Kiyosaki | |
| 2007-01-03 | The Small Investor Goes to Market | Jim Gard | |
| 2006-12-23 | Beating the Street | Peter Lynch | |
| 2006-12-20 | A Death in Belmont | Sebastian Junger | Heard him on NPR, thought it sounded interesting. And it was! If you like reading about serial killers. |
| 2006-12-20 | Blue Like Jazz | Don Miller | |
| 2006-12-10 | The Case for a Creator | Lee Strobel | |
| 2006-12-05 | The Warren Buffet Way | Robert G. Hagstrom | Checked this out from the library; it's good, some parts over my head. It's about how Warren Buffet chooses businesses to invest in. |
| 2006-11-26 | Think and Grow Rich | Napoleon Hill | Man, there is some seriously kooky stuff in this book! The first third of it is pretty good overall -- mainly the part about setting a goal and repeating it to convince yourself that you are going to do it (autosuggestion). |
| 2006-11-25 | The Abyss | Orson Scott Card | |
| 2006-10-22 | Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money - that the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! | Robert Kiyosaki | |
| 2006-10-18 | Magic for Beginners | Kelly Link | I especially liked the stories "Stone Animals" (reminded me of The Shining) and "Magic for Beginners" (which read like good juvenile fiction). I especially did not like the story "Catskin." |
| 2006-09-24 | Micro-ISV, from Vision to Reality | Bob Walsh | ISV = "Independent Software Vendor," and the term "Micro-ISV" was coined by Microsoft to mean any software company they hadn't yet acquired. So, in Microsoft-ese, Google is a Micro-ISV! But more commonly, a mISV is a small, niche software company run by just one person or a few people. The book is very inspiring and prompted a lot of small-biz ideas, which I jotted down on my post-it-note/bookmark. Here are those jottings, mainly for my own reference:
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| 2006-09-06 | The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios | Yann Martel | Blah. |
| 2006-09-02 | Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut | [Phoebe Hurty] wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store... She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: "For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses." ...Teachers of children in the United States wrote this date on the blackboards again and again and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. When Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer, receives a letter from a fan promising to make him famous, he says (to his parakeet), "Keep the hell out of my body bag." [Kilgore Trout wrote a story] entitled "The Dancing Fool." Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. All of us were stuck to the surface of a ball, incidentally. The planet was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why he didn't fall off, even though everybody pretended to kind of understand it. The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to. |
| 2006-07-05 | The ACLU vs. America | Alan Sears and Craig Osten | |
| 2006-07-04 | Freakonomics | Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner | |
| 2006-06-30 | The Year 1000 : What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium | Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger | Audiobook, library |
| 2006-06-20 | The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | Audiobook, library |
| 2006-06-10 | How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) | Harry Stein | |
| 2006-05-29 | Hearts in Atlantis | Stephen King | |
| 2006-05-17 | Catch Me If You Can | Stan Redding and Frank Abagnale | Audiobook |
| 2006-05-01 | Fire Someone Today | Bob Pritchett | |
| 2006-04-20 | The Postman | David Brin | |
| 2006-04-10 | The Millionaire Next Door | Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko | |
| 2006-03-29 | The Cuckoo's Egg | Cliff Stoll | |
| 2006-03-25 | The Inner Life | Thomas รก Kempis | |
| 2006-03-15 | A Man for All Seasons | Robert Bolt | |
| 2006-02-15 | The Battle for the Bible | Harold Lindsell | |
| 2006-01-15 | The Hammer of God | Bo Giertz | |
| 2005-11-25 | Who's Afraid of Classical Music | Michael Walsh | |
| 2005-10-01 | The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer's Quest for the Gospel | Craig Parton | |
| 2005-09-01 | Anansi Boys | Neil Gaiman | |
| 2005-08-01 | A Serrated Edge | Douglas Wilson | |
| 2005-06-01 | Assassination Vacation | Sarah Vowell | |
| 2005-04-01 | Juice | Evan I. Schwarts | |
| 2004-11-30 | The Search for the Elements | Isaac Asimov | |
| 2004-09-27 | Our Town | Thornton Wilder | |
| 2004-09-18 | Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible | Dietrich Bonhoeffer |