nick

In college I attended a lecture where the late great Kurt Vonnegut spoke to a humid room full of of English and Creative Writing majors. He ruminated on quite a few things, jumping from tangent to tangent as if he was merely thinking aloud instead of speaking to an auditorium full of wide eyed, enthusiastic wannabe writers and critics. Sure, I would have preferred to hear him wax on the future of rhetoric, the changing role of fiction in contemporary America, but I was in the same room as Kurt Vonnegut, so I really couldn’t ask more from my experience.

No doubt you’ve participated in the eternal discussion as any avid, passionate reader has: which is better? Should I see the movie or read the book? Was the filmmaker hopeless or inspired? Did they lose the plot in favor of cheap CGI thrills? Below are some notables that stand out.

The Winners:

If you think Oliver Stone has the conspiracy bug, take a moment and introduce yourself to some of the more creative and paranoid works major, award winning authors have written. Sure, most everyone is aware of The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown’s unique brand of conspiratorial suspense, but he by no means is the only paranoid fiction writer. Below are some of the better novels that incorporate age old conspiracy theories.

It’s true that baseball is no longer the most popular sport in America, that football has annexed that position; a sport where impossibly large men line up infinitesimally in the three point stance in the pantheon of America’s sports loving heart. But baseball embodies something more than a fading memory of the 1950’s and 60’s. The folklore of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Shot Heard around the World, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Hank Aaron has yet to be eclipsed by any other sport.

I’m sure if you really pressed Chip Kidd he might eventually come clean that, yes, there are aspects of his job that don’t greet with a hug and kiss on the cheek. But from here, his job seems pretty fantastic. You know when you’re browsing a shelf of books and you come upon a great cover? For me, the mantra ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ could not be more irrelevant. If I find a cover that could be a work of art in and of itself, game over. That book wins.