Bad Poetry

Read laugh, scowl, choke, hate, enjoy... whatever... but here's my poem.

Just After

“spiteful koans”
He said
Buttoning trousers
Stumbling towards an open door
“What did you say?”
she asked
Finger knuckle deep in nostril
“Nothing”
He replied
Thinking – Nothing that
a cigarette
and
a train ride through a tunnel
wouldn’t cure.

Thinking About a Nonfiction Book to Read

Until recently I've always thought of myself as mostly a fiction reader. However, in the last year and a half I have read some nonfiction titles which really have me thirsting for more nonfiction titles. One of these books which I really enjoyed was How to Think About Weird Things.

This book was fantastic! Before I read How to Think About Weird Things I had never really read a book about critical thinking. I had always thought of myself as a sharp person and able to see the fallacies in poor arguments, but this book really helped to sharpen my dissection of ideas and arguments. While the book is meant to push the reader to think and to understand the world with a keener eye for mistakes we all make in our day to day lives, it was also an extremely entertaining read. The author uses many many quotes which are both humorous and very poignant. In addition to this countless real life asides are used to illustrate thought fallacies which the book describes.

I picked it up in a used bookstore where it had been miss-shelved… So, I don’t know much about it, but it appears to be a text book for a college or high school course. Having said that, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve ever read a text book which was so enjoyable. If all of my college texts had been this well conceived, I would have definitely been a more studious reader of texts. (Not that I was a bad student, but well... You know what I mean.)