Talent is an Asset
The Story of Sparks

Daryl Easlea
Omnibus Press
at Amazon

File Under: music, does that guy really have a Hitler mustache?

Everyone has a guilty pleasure band. One of those bands you listen to that seems to fall outside of your usual musical taste. One of those bands that you are sometimes a little embarrassed for liking so much. For me one of those bands is Sparks. When I first heard their album Angst in My Pants I instantly connected. Like any good music geek I immediately researched their back catalog and found a lot of weird yet compelling music with a guy singing in a falsetto. There was also the time in High School that I tried to pass off one of their songs as one of my own so our hardcore band could get the gig to play the prom, but that is a long story. Obviously I tell you all this because I wanted to relay how excited I was to have been sent this book.

The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock
Mike Faloon
Gorsky Press
at Amazon

File under: Fiction, Short Stories, Lunch Meat Sculpture

Many of you are not strangers to Mike Faloon and might know him from Go Metric!. This is his first book of short stories. I have often times talked about my love of the short story writer that writes the small stories of life and not the bigger than life stories. Mike Faloon is one of those writers who tells the small stories.

Firebrands
Portraits from the Americas
Justseed Artists' Cooperative
Edited by Shawn Slifer and Bec Young
at Amazon
Microcosm Publishing
File Under: Biography, Art, Fight the Power

This is a great book. The introduction says this book is:

"For all our ancestors, especially those misrepresented in those textbooks, left out because they were too brown, too female, too poor, too queer, too uneducated, too disabled, or because they daydreamed too much.".

In Bad Taste
a Quest for the Word's Most Exotic Foods
Dr. Massimo Marcone
Key Porter Books
ISBN: 978-1-55263-882-8
Buy at Amazon
File Under: Nonfiction, funky food fun

From reading the back of this book, I pictured Massimo Marcone to be some cross between Indiana Jones and Sheldon Cooper. After reading it I would also add a a bit of a Bill Bryson when he is in his adventure/travel writer mode.

Massimo is a food scientist. He explores the world in search of the most exotic and often times bizarre foods. Many have heard of Kopi Luwak otherwise known as scat coffee, but is it real? Marcone sets out to find out. Indeed he finds finds the coffee that is collected by the scat (ie: poop) of the civet. He then scientifically test it to find out if there is a difference between it and other coffee.