Book Reviews »

It’s as good a time as any to talk Atlas Shrugged, eh? The short of it is that I loved the book. I was completely and totally hooked at the introduction of Dagny Taggart and could barely bring myself to put it down, reading by flashlight well into the night during our extended post-hurricane power [...]

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Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
Rating:
Buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Amazon.com

The book was lying on my doorstep when I came home from running errands last Saturday. I heaved the book onto my stack of groceries, garden supplies, mail, and knitting, walked up the stairs to my apartment, and settled down for a read. It seems that in doing this, I failed to shut and lock the front door to the house properly, which will become important in a minute.

Other than a break to bake and eat a frozen pizza (no time for cooking when there is Harry Potter to be read) and to have the following phone conversation with my mom,

Me: Hello?
Mom: What are you doing?
Me: Reading Harry Potter…
Mom: *heavy sigh* Everyone is reading Harry Potter!

I read straight through until I was done, at about 4am. And then I fell asleep. It was at this time that some Bible thumper decided it was entirely appropriate to take advantage of the unlocked door and just waltz into the house uninvited, only to be chased back out by my landlady.

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Author: David Plotz
Publisher: Random House
Rating:
Buy The Genius Factory on Amazon.com

Every parent’s dream is to have a child that is healthy, bright, and good-looking. Robert Graham’s dream was to have a planet of children that were healthy, bright, and good-looking. What if, he wondered, I could, using the magic of masturbation and liquid nitrogen, mate the best men and women from all over the country, and thus produce a generation of perfect children?

The Genius Factory began as a series of articles on Slate.com, collectively known as “Seed”, and tells the tale of the Repository for Germinal Choice, more popularly known as the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. The bank was started by a man on a mission to improve the quality of human stock (thank god he was a benevolent sort) and, according to Plotz, revolutionized sperm banking as we know it.

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