Bowling Book Review

  Decent. I saw this on my tour of Barnes and Noble with Scott.  I actually enjoyed the autobiographical parts of this book much more than the writing tips section. I learned that if you want to be a good writer you have to read all the time and you have to write all the time. I mean like all the time. I mean like King says he takes a book with him wherever he goes. He also writes for like 3 hours every morning and says to write at least 1000 words a day. When he got writer’s block he would go on long walks. He also says to write your first draft super fast then lock it away for 6 weeks and then take it out and get a pen and paper and edit it. He also says that sometimes you just have to keep writing even if the words are not coming to you that easily. I guess I thought writers would like write a bit, then rest a bit, but it almost sounds like a consistent 9 to 5 job the way he describes it. Like either he is reading or writing or both or he is jammed and is taking a long walk...

  I found this book when Scott and I were touring Barnes and Noble during his visit to Pittsburgh. It is not that long. It is actually very recent. She is 29 now and published this when she was 27. It was weird to read this book because most of the time the information in the books I read have happened before I was alive. But she is younger than me so a lot of the things she references I remember or have heard about. Also she grew up about 1 hour from me and I worked like 6 miles from Bethesda so I know the area a little bit.  This book makes you ask yourself a very important question. If you wake up at 430 everyday and eat plain Greek yogurt and swim and then go to school and then after school you swim again and you get a good night sleep and you have a supportive family and you are rich and you have good coaching and you have lots of discipline and you never drink alcohol or party or smoke weed or make a dumb decision, can you become an Olympic gold medalist??? And so I thin...

  Kind of long. Thanks to google for recommending. Strong academic basis for the data in the book and it is basically easy to read. The way Matt collected the stories for this book is cool. He lived in a trailer park and then in the hood of Milwaukee and personally got to know everyone.  This book is nonfiction. It really shows the ins and outs of being an inner city landlord including attending court. On a macro level it discusses problems tenants face and proposes some policy solutions. He proposes more legal representation for tenants and more housing vouchers for tenants. These are good ideas but I am not sure who is going to pay for it. Matt’s idea is that if we stop evictions now there will be fewer costs later. I don’t disagree with this but I am not sure if evictions are the main or only problem that causes other problems and then more money. I think his book does a great job showing that evictions are a huge problem (and they are) but probably there are a variety of f...

  Ok so picture you just got done a family function and you and your drunk uncle who has lived a crazy life get to talking. Your uncle is going on a massive rant about his life. This includes all his mistakes, highs and lows, good advice and bad advice and how he used to date 3 women but then realized he wanted to become a pastor for 2 years. Meanwhile you are a straight edge young adult who's craziest story is sneaking out with your buddies to drink in a field. That's essentially what this book is like. It's a whirlwind of sentences and claims of how you should live your life from one extreme to the next. It has you questioning if you are 'living life' or is 'life passing you by'. You will be in a state of uptight justification saying sentence such as 'I can't just move to Russia, who would pay for that?'. That is the beauty of it because it shakes up your life with such extremes that there is a little bit of truth behind it. It's very comic...

  I found myself enjoying this book more after I finished than while I was reading it. It mainly just had me reflecting and thinking about self esteem and especially looking out for it more. It's like when you notice everyone all of a sudden wearing blue but that's probably everyday in a different form. I'd say this book is broken into two parts. The first part are the six pillars and the second half is applying the pillars to aspects of life. As for the first half I did enjoy the concepts, how they were broken down and applied to life. I agree with the pillars and have experience them in my own life. The only put down I have is at some points it can read very academically and I start to gloss over or my mind would wander and I'd have to re-read. Some people might like this due to the detail but I didn't care for.  I honestly didn't know there was a 'second part of the book', I thought it was just the pillars. There were some interesting pieces but gener...

  Ok so I definitely thought going in this book was going to be so so. However, the classics are starting to grow on me. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest encapsulates my personality perfectly (fight the power). And Last of the Mohicans is one of my favorite stories ever (I think that one is considered a classic but I could be wrong).  The author of this book was a genius. Mary Shelley wrote this at age 19 in the year 1818. How the hell did she come up with this story??? I will have to read about her.  I just spent the last 2.5 hours straight reading so I could finish and write this review. If I am reading the book a lot, that means it is good. This one is worth reading.  The story touches on a lot of themes that are still relevant. The protagonist is very intelligent but this knowledge eventually destroys him: is too much knowledge bad?? Victor creates a life but his creation goes awry: should humans be able to create things as a God would??? Frankenstein is huge and ...