Sunday Music: The Best of Arlo Guthrie

(Note: Alphabetically, the next album up is The Best of Aretha Franklin. However, that album contains exactly two songs that aren't on Aretha's Best, which I've already covered, so I'm skipping it.)

Album Title: The Best of Arlo Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie

Why I Bought It: Because "you can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant...."

What I Like (Nostalgic): "City of New Orleans". One of the... No, scratch that: the best train song ever written or sung, at least in my experience. "And the sons of Pullman porters / And the sons of engineers / Ride their fathers' magic carpets made of steel..."

What I Like (Fun): "Alice's Restaurant Massacree". Shovels and rakes and implements of destruction; twenty-seven eight-by-ten color photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one; the judge, and the judge's dog; and the Group W bench. Honorable mention: "Motorcycle (Significance of the Pickle) Song".

Overall: The album is about fifty-four minutes long. More than a third of it is the Massacree. Throw in the Motorcycle Song, and you're up to almost half; "City of New Orleans" gets you past the halfway mark. Which is a good thing, because the rest of the album is pretty forgettable. But those three pieces are worth the price, by far.

Books A Million

When Borders went bankrupt and closed the nearby store, Books A Million bought the building. Today, for the first time, I had a chance to go over there and take a look around.

The layout seems pretty similar to the old Borders layout. I was slightly troubled to see that the Politics shelves up front were occupied entirely by right-wing authors: Coulter, O'Reilly, Rick Perry, a variety of others. Nobody on the left, not even Robert Reich. (Surely he has a new book out. He always has a new book out.)

Setting that aside, here's what I picked up.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History. Since I've been reading the Ring of Fire books, this seemed like an interesting choice.
Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes. sunlizzard got me interested in her with Assassination Vacation; this one's about the history of Hawaii, especially as related to the 1898 annexation.
Eric Flint, 1635: The Eastern Front and 1636: The Saxon Uprising - the next two books in the Ring of Fire series.
David Weber, At All Costs. Various Weber fans have talked me into going just a little further with the Honor Harrington series.
Kim Newman, Anno Dracula. This was on my to-get list for a long time, but it went out of print and I gave up. Imagine my surprise....
N. K. Jemisin, Kingdom of Gods, the sequel to The 10000 Kingdoms.
Steven Erikson, House of Chains, book four in the Malazan series.
John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation. A remake of Piper's classic Little Fuzzy; I'm interested in seeing Scalzi's take.

Should keep me busy....