author: Richard McGuire

name: Steev

average rating: 4.16

book published: 2014

rating: 5

read at: 2017/12/24

date added: 2017/12/24

shelves: art, fun, own-it

review:

author: Thom Hartmann

name: Steev

average rating: 4.19

book published: 2002

rating: 4

read at: 2005/12/22

date added: 2017/12/22

shelves: politics

review:

author: Phil Stutz

name: Steev

average rating: 3.66

book published: 2012

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2017/12/20

shelves: spirit-self, own-it, to-re-read

review:
Excellent. The book represents a rare thing in therapy - actual practical methods for working on things that usually people just get to talk about with their therapist. Describes 4 basic "tools" for overcoming mental/emotional obstacles, and they even include a fifth tool for helping to follow through and keep using the first four. I'm going to (hopefully) continue to refer back to the book and not just forget the whole thing.

author: Chris Lehmann

name: Steev

average rating: 4.30

book published:

rating: 5

read at: 2017/12/13

date added: 2017/12/13

shelves: own-it, politics, fun

review:
I'm having trouble keeping up with the Baffler and soon it will be bi-monthly! ack! At any rate, the quality continues to be very high. Highlights of this issue are Sam Kriss's piece on climate change, Corey Pein's report about immigration detention in the Northwest, and Mike Edison's "The Art of the Heel," exploring and explaining the resemblance of the Trump phenomenon to professional wrestling. Great stuff.

author: David Graeber

name: Steev

average rating: 4.16

book published: 2011

rating: 0

read at:

date added: 2017/12/12

shelves: politics, own-it

review:

author: Sam Lipsyte

name: Steev

average rating: 3.64

book published: 2004

rating: 5

read at: 2012/08/24

date added: 2012/08/24

shelves: novels, own-it, fun

review:
Sam Lipsyte is such a damn good writer. His style is the perfect mix of bitterness, wisdom, and pop-infused sardonic wit, at least for me and my take on the world right now. He's almost precisely the same age as I am, so maybe that has something to do with it. This book is exaggerated and crazy, but it sort of perfectly encapsulates what it's like to be alive today as a verging-on-middle-aged, creative and educated but disillusioned and lower-middle-class American male - disillusioned, even though you're someone who never really bought or swallowed the koolaid in the first place. Something was wrong with the picture from the start, you could tell long ago, but you're still pissed off 20 years later when it didn't pan out the way they said it would, mostly pissed off because everyone else is pretending that it did.

author: Anne Carlisle

name: Steev

average rating: 3.72

book published: 1987

rating: 4

read at: 1990/01/01

date added: 2012/08/26

shelves: fun, novels, own-it, to-re-read

review:
A totally nutty story, in book and movie form. Read this long ago and loved it, want to revisit it soon.

author: David Agranoff

name: Steev

average rating: 3.58

book published: 2010

rating: 2

read at: 2012/08/29

date added: 2012/08/29

shelves: after-the-fall, food, fun, own-it, novels, politics

review:
This book is a comedic satire with an interesting and funny premise: what if some chemical in all the animal products caused non-vegans to turn into zombies? However, in the execution of this idea the thing has lots of problems. I will just list them out:
1. It really should have been better copy-edited, or at all. It's full of typos, spelling errors, grammatical errors, and punctuation errors, to the point where I wonder if the author even re-read his work after writing it, and/or whether he ever passed an English class at a higher level than 7th grade.

2. The book is full of what i call "Portland exceptionalism" - the idea that Portland is some kind of ultimate mecca, different and better in every way. As a former Portland resident that would still be living there if I didn't need more sunshine, I understand the allure of the place, but this kind of attitude is something that keeps getting more and more common and more and more extreme.

3. Besides the poor English errors, it's just, frankly, bad writing. The sentences are very simplistic. The characters and any development they undergo are really obvious, stereotypical, and cliched. The plot is pretty by-the-numbers - at no point do I really worry about any of the heroes or the final outcome, there's no real suspense, since the zombies are so clearly weak, powerless, and easy to kill or avoid.

4. There's some fun humor in the book and great critique of various silly and hypocritical subcultures like freegans, raw-foodists, locavores, and many types of hipsters, juggaloes, and more, but: the book is basically a really overly didactic vegan sermon. Now, I'm sympathetic to the causes and the points made in the book, but it's just painful to read something that's so preachy, especially since there's not much else in the book plot or character-wise to make up for that.

The book is basically "liberal snuff porn" - what if you woke up one day and could finally really shoot in the head all those annoying yuppies and hipsters you hate? - which, as a liberal, I can agree can be fun for a while. But it's not going to change any minds and it's only going to really entertain some smug, simple-minded Portland vegans. If it had been a short story, maybe 10,000 words at most, instead of a novel, some of the above problems could have been mitigated or eliminated. To be sure, if it had been much longer I would not have finished it. I only wish my town still had a smug, simple-minded infoshop that I could leave the book at for some young, earnest traveller kids to find and confirm for themselves that Portland is just as cool as they already know it is.

author: Eugene K. Garber

name: Steev

average rating: 3.00

book published: 2010

rating: 5

read at: 2012/09/14

date added: 2012/09/27

shelves: novels, fun

review:
Weird but good. An anthropologist out in the jungle with natives, wrestling with trying to stay objective. A variety of other westerners drift down the river to provide interesting episodes. Finally a Herzog-like filmmaker with a Kinksi-like primadonna star show up to make a movie. Tragedy ensues. Philosophy, gore, action, adventure, semiotics, theory, praxis, sex, drugs, civilization, wildness.

author: Douglas Coupland

name: Steev

average rating: 3.72

book published: 2006

rating: 5

read at: 2012/10/02

date added: 2012/10/02

shelves: own-it, fun, novels

review:
If I could award half-stars, I would give this book 4.5, but I feel generous, so, 5. It's typical Coupland, in that it sort of is always riding the edge between on one hand perfect spot-on targeting of life and culture, and on the other, silly, annoying, over-the-top comic surrealism. Somehow he pulls back, every time, from that second extreme before it bugs the hell out of me.