Be Amazing

This is the most recent Mental Floss book. I love these books, which like the magazine they're based on, organize random factoids, generally under some sort of theme.

"Be Amazing" takes the them of being a how-to book, explaining how to do a variety of things. But the things they explain how to do are not necessarily the kind of thing one actually would want to do, for instance how to "Be Raised By Wolves," "be Killed by Soda Water," and "Go Insane." Not that I wouldn't want to know how to be a hacker, get out of jury duty, or become a ninja, but some of this stuff isn't that interesting.

Anyways, the format is just a platform to inform the reader about a truly eclectic collection of facts. I'm now a little afraid of dying by soda water (well, a massive CO2 bubble, but same diff) or a tide of molasses, and I'm intrigued at what ninjas actually were like (they didn't wear black pyjamas, by any rate). Learning about the guy who was the archrival of the Wright Brothers, or that H.G. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr. might have been plagiarists, is really fun.

The only real problem I have with this book is its apparent lack of a copy editor. Words are missing or repeated, and "its" is often spelled "it's," and "whose" "who's." It's distracting, and annoying, and it makes the book harder to respect, but it doesn't subtract from the overall quality of the book.

Overall, I liked "Be Amazing." It was fun, there were a lot of cool facts, and aside from the spelling and grammar errors it was of pretty good quality. I would reccomend it to any knowledge junkies looking for their fix.

Dandelion Wine

"Dandelion Wine" is a book by Ray Bradbury. I wouldn't call it a novel, as it's more like a collection of vignettes. It's also not quite fantasy, but it is full of magic.

It's set during the summer of 1928 in the town of Green Town, Illinois, and is told mostly through the perspective of a 12 year old boy named Douglas Spaulding. The magic comes from the wonder that Douglas has in the world around him. A wax fortuneteller at the carnival is transformed into poor soul cruelly imprisoned by the black magic of Napoleon, an old man's memories become a vessel for travel into the past, and a new pair of shoes is able to make Douglas run faster than the wind.

I really liked a lot of the little vignettes, and Douglas and his brother Tom are both really fun characters to read about. But they didn't seem quite right to me: too virtuous, too wise, I'm not quite sure what it was. Also, the writing, full of rich details as it was, didn't grab me at first. It was wondrous while reading, but took a while each time I started up again. This might have been because I was constantly being interrupted in my reding of it by schoolwork or other things I needed to read first.

All in all, it was a good book, but not necessarily one I would read again. I'll probably read other Bradbury if I can, however.

Who Killed Amanda Palmer

This is a strange book. A collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman, singer Amanda Palmer, and various photographers (most especially Kyle Cassidy), this is a collection of stories, and pictures, all depicting the death of Amanda Palmer. There is also a tie-in CD of the same name, and Palmer's lyrics for her songs are also interspersed with the rest.

I loved Neil Gaiman's stories. He comes up with some rather strange ideas, like a time travel story where an older Amanda travels back in time to kill her younger self, or a modern day folk tale where Amanda is sent to get drugs for her evil stepmother and is rewarded for her kindness to junkies and drug dealers with the ability to have jewels come out of her mouth. Some of Gaiman's stories are really helped with the pictures that accompany with them, such as the picture that appears on the cover, of Amanda's body on a couch covered in leaves which is accompanied with a fake catalog entry as if it was an art installation. There are also some nice pics that are unaccompanied by a story, such as Amanda dead surrounded by wallabies.

However, too many of the pics are too similar, just Amanda lying face down in some location or other, and the locations are too similar for the differences to matter.

Also, I didn't really like Amanda's lyrics. I'm not that big a fan of her music anyways, and reading the lyrics misses something. It was like really bad poetry that's also completely nonsensical.

All in all, Neil Gaiman's stuff is OK, and the photography is nice, but all in all, it wasn't quite worth it. I don't regret reading it, but I don't think I'll read it again, except maybe some of the Gaiman stuff.