My Library

You may be tempted to put down Tom Reynold's Blood, Sweat, and Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulanceafter reading the tragic story in the prologue. Don't. This book based on a compilation of posts from his popular blog Random Acts of Reality, does have its share of tear jerker stories, but balanced by enough humour to help the reader maintain sanity and see how Reynold's maintains his as a member of the London Ambulance Service.

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Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture and an acclaimed true crime author. In Depraved: The Definitive True Story of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, Schechter brings readers the tale of one of America's first serial killers. H.H. Holmes, or Herman Mudgett as he was more prosaically named by his parents, operated from a base in Chicago in the time of Jack the Ripper, but his crimes spread from Texas to Toronto and east to Philadelphia.

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The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine is aimed at people who might be described as multiply interested, the cliched «jack of all trades and master of none.» She calls them «Renaissance Souls» (the modern, PC version of «Renaissance Man».)

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Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs used to be smart. «in high school and college, [he] was actually quite cerebral.» Covering pop culture at Entertainment Weekly, then highbrow pop culture at Esquire drained his brain. He wanted to feel smart again. So, he decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica all the way from a-ak to zywiec. Actually, he stole the idea from his father, an attorney and prolific author of law books, who tried the same feat but only made it to the mid-Bs. The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World is the story of his year long quest.

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I bought No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty because I was interested in ideas to jump start my writing, to move a couple of book ideas off the drawingboard and into the pages of a word processor. I did not expect to finish a novel in 30 days, but I was hoping a book with that ambitious a title would help me move past «I have an idea based on a cast of quirky characters» to «I have a solid plot with a delightfully well fleshed out cast of quirky characters» in a month or so and in a year or so I might have «I have a great first draft of a gripping novel with an ambitious, suspenseful plot full of delightfully quirky well fleshed out characters.» Unfortunately, though it's a good book, No Plot? No Problem is not the book to help me (or anyone) do that.

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