Monthly Archive: September 2006

I like reading reviews, usually of books and movies. I like it when the reviewer has some insight about the item being reviewed that helps me see things I missed, educates me, or clarifies my own feeble thinking.

Does that sound like I’m reading the review after the fact? Aren’t reviews supposed to help us make decisions on what to read or watch? Well, I use them sometimes for that purpose, but as often as not I want to read a review after finishing a book or movie, being curious what other people think.

Movies

Rotten Tomatoes is a good place to get a sprinkling of opinions on a movie, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen them link to my favorite movie reviewer: The Filthy Critic. (Caution: he really is filthy.) In addition to being very funny, he is insightful and surprisingly sensitive despite his foul-mouthed language and crude facade. …

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then that I realized that an abridged edition of the essays could introduce Emerson, and make his down-to-earth wisdom accessible, to a readership that might otherwise be put off by his …