emmaryanallmann

[emmaryanallmann]

Whistling Vivaldi

Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele is a fascinating and gratifying read that follows a career studying how stereotypes can inhibit a persons life.

Woah baby it’s been a while. Rest assured my friends, while I’ve been away from writing about the books I’ve been reading as furiously as ever. So much so that my to-write-about stack is making quite the effort to grow bigger than the to-read stack. I used to believe that a commute to work would be a bit of a pain, but I gotta say I love my morning afternoon train time reading. I recently finished

[emmaryanallmann]

The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan is a very sexy book about apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. I'm not even really kidding.

Have  I mentioned maybe a million times how much I love that I have friends who read and then give me recommendations? Because I do. I love it so much. My friends are the best and the smartest and are never wrong about what I’ll like to read. Which brings us to The Botany of Desireby Michael Pollan. I’ve been diving deep into the world of non-fiction and the main struggle has been getting really…

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May 21, 2017: You May As Well Go For It

May 21, 2017: You May As Well Go For It It this addition of Throwback Thursday my dad almost stumbles all the way down a mountain and we stumble across a great big castle!

View on the way down.

After we filled up on cookies at the top of our hike we headed back down the hill. The way down, as ever, was much faster than the way up. Though, not as fast as it usually is given how genuinely scary the wind was. I feel like in my last post I hyped the wind quite a bit but I’m not kidding when I say it felt like it was going to blow us right off the side of the hill. In…

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Chocolat

Chocolat by Joanne Harris has all the love, chocolate, and charm I could ask for...it also gave me an excellent excuse to make brownies.

The movie Chocolat is probably one of my favorite movies. The story always makes me sad and happy cry, the characters feel real and beautiful and the movie’s general aesthetic is right up my alley. Also the chocolate, good lord the chocolate. The movie gives me all of the feelings including hunger. So, when I found out that it was based on the book, Chocolatby Joanne Harris I had to buy the book,…

[emmaryanallmann]

The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson made me so excited to check out more of Chicago!

It’s not so often, really, that I get multiple recommendations for the same book over the span of a couple years. That is exactly the case, however, for The Devil in the White Cityby Erik Larson. I got so many recommendations for it that I finally bought it about a year and a half ago. It’s been sitting on my to be read pile for such a long time, I almost forgot I had it. Now that I’m actually…

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May 21, 2017: "Some would say that's too much..."

In today's Throwback Thursday we learn that the Allmann's are willing to take on the wind and hike up the darn mountain!

We knew we wanted to go on a hike in Connemara but we didn’t have any idea as to where exactly in Connemara we needed to go to do that. So we did what every reasonable person does in this situation, we google mapped Connemara and headed to the first point that was labeled visitor center. At the very least, we figured we’d find some pamphlets that would tell where we should actually be. We had the…

[emmaryanallmann]

The Three-body Problem

The Three-body Problem by Cixin Liu and translated by Ken Lieu was a head trip of The Cultural Revolution, aliens, science and video games.

Have I mentioned how much I love being in a bookclub? At first I thought it was just because there’s nothing I love more than having a conversation about a book, but now I’m realizing that I also like when someone else tells me what to read. I would never have thought to pick up most of the books we’ve read so far and even when they’re not really my style, I’m happy to have read them and…

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Difficult Women

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay is so good it made me cry on the train.

An interesting side effect of social media (looking at you Twitter) is that the online communities we become a part of contain people who have an internet life and an entirely separate not the internet life (some people call this “real life”…this blogger remains skeptical that it’s any more real than this). I love following authors on Twitter so much that there are more authors I follow who’s…

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May 20th 2017: Gotta Love A Gift Shop

In this weeks throwback Thursday is basically a gift shop appreciation post...gotta love a good gift shop.

I know that there are a lot of people who look down on the gift shop. It is the epitome of a tourist trap. Everything is overpriced and most things are pretty darn tacky and I love them so so so much. I would never skip the main event for the

gift shop but in terms of ranking the various extras that come with main events, gift shops are way far up on the list. All of this is to say the gift shop…

[emmaryanallmann]

Ok, so, as my dad has said, “We’ve been stuck in Galway for a long time.” This is true. I’m back on the Throwback Thursday train and so ready to tell you all about my time at the Cliffs of Moher. I’ve tried to keep my travel section of this blog from just turning into a photo journal mostly because I’m not a good enough photographer to have a photo journal, but it’s impossible to take a bad picture at the Cliffs of Moher. So, fair warning the end of this one is a bit of a photo journal.

  We saw some cows

This one did not like us.

We agreed after a long rambling walk back from grabbing a Guinness (or two or three) that we would wake up early the next day and drive to the Cliffs of Moher. This was on our to do list for the trip because how could we not visit the Cliff’s of Insanity or for all my friends who aren’t so into The Princess Bride then how could we not go look for horcruxes where Harry found one? So we rolled out of bed bright and early Saturday morning looking forward to the Cliff’s but a little bit dreading the weekend crowd we may run into there!

Panorama from Corkscrew Hill

The drive itself was a lot more relaxing than the drive from Dublin to Galway. For me anyway…I wasn’t actually driving. My dad may tell a different story, though I think we were both grateful that the Verizon guy on the phone helped us figure out what was wrong with the navigation. Our goal was to get to the Cliffs with as few stops as possible so we could spend more time actually hiking around than on the road to hiking around. In that we were pretty darn successful.

View of the Burren

It did help that the drive to the Cliffs was gorgeous. We tried to stop to find some caffeine a couple of times. Unfortunately the sleepy towns we were driving through were..well, asleep. After a couple of psych outs involving breakfast signs, we finally stopped to fill up the car and I ran into the station to get some road trip snack food (which we agreed, after we ate half of it, was just as mediocre as gas station road trip snack food in the US) and some coffee. The only other stops we made were for some cows. One of which was giving us some evil eyes which I had to record and another to just get out of the car for a while

between Ballyvaughan and Kilmoon at Corkscrew hill. Yes, you read that name right. It is a particularly apt name for this section of road. We were stuck behind a truck and had a car that wanted to go much faster than we did behind us, so we jumped at the first opportunity to get out of the car, stretch our legs, and enjoy the general splendor of the Burren.

When we finally arrived at the Cliffs we had our pick of parking spots and the day was looking beautiful and windy. I’d expect no less at the Cliffs of Insanity! I glanced around a bit and I saw no six fingered man, Sicilian, Fezzik, or even Inigo Montoya. I managed to hide my disappointment and head into the visitor center to get our bearings. Inside they had a gift shop, a place to pick up some food, and a sort of Cliff’s museum in a cave. I know that last one sounds a little weird but it was

pretty cool and not just because we were in a cave (eh…eh? See what I did there?) It displayed and taught lessons about various histories and evolutions of the Cliffs (Ocean, Rock, Nature, and Man). After a bit of a meander inside to shake the car ride off, we finally headed outside to take in the absolute beauty that is the

Cliffs of Moher.

The official park of Cliffs of Moher is a nice little hike that follows along the edge of the Cliffs. There is a point in the path where there are signs indicating that you are no longer on official Cliffs land but there is still a hike. Dad and could see a point that looked like a sort of end point and we decided we would try to hike all the to the end and back. When we were wandering around The official park area it had started to fill up with more and more people but the further away from the parks land we got the thinner the crowd got. It was kind lovely to walk along such a gorgeous view and have the area mostly to ourselves. The further we walked the further away that end point seemed to be. We kept thinking if we went just a little bit longer it would start to feel like we were making progress. Somehow our starting point kept looking smaller and

smaller. It felt a bit like the land was stretching out under us as we were walking. Now, we are not quitters but at the same time we are often led by our stomachs and our stomachs were leading us back to the Cliffs official park area for some food.

    Flowers lured me to the edge

I got that sweet sweet wind blown hair look.

Gotta get that selfie

Honest to goodness I took this picture because I wanted to show how teeny tiny the purple flowers were…it ended up being more about how gigantic and gorgeous the Cliffs are.

In this weeks Throwback Thursday I talk about our time at The Cliffs of Insanity… I mean Harry Potter…I mean Cliffs of Moher.

Ok, so, as my dad has said, “We’ve been stuck in Galway for a long time.” This is true.

In this weeks Throwback Thursday I talk about our time at The Cliffs of Insanity... I mean Harry Potter...I mean Cliffs of Moher. Ok, so, as my dad has said, "We've been stuck in Galway for a long time." This is true.

[emmaryanallmann]

White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith is a story with such depth and texture that I want everybody else to read it and tell me what they thought because I just know there's more to it than I could grasp on first read.

I’ve been stalling and completely incapable of stringing two sentences together about White Teethby Zadie Smith. It’s a book worth writing about and discussing. I’ve just been a little tired and distracted. Then I found out that Zadie Smith was 24 when this book was published. Well, that kicked my almost 27 year old butt right into gear. I can’t imagine having the literary or emotional…

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A Canticle For Lebowitz

A Canticle For Lebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. is in a future that feels a lot like an off-kilter past.

A Canticle for Lebowitzby Walter M. Miller Jr. is a book club book and thank goodness for that, because there is a lot to process in this one and I did a little speed reading toward the end to finish in time. The book is split into three parts which, from my understanding, were originally published separately. The first part is Fiat Homo (Let there be man) and takes place about 600 years after…

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Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunders first novel and holy smokes did he ever start with a weird one.

I’d like to, in an official way, thank all Independent Bookstores for all that they do. Not only because it was recently Independent Bookstore Day but also because one of the Independent Bookstores me has a bookclub that I joined and met some wonderful people and read a slightly weird book. Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunders first full length novel and it is not quite like any other book…

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Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir is toxic bubblegum. It might taste like strawberries but you're gaining nothing from it but death. Or...the reading version of it anyway...I guess...idk this has gotten out of hand.

More and more I’m encountering popular books and movies which are by most accounts entertaining enough but if too much thought, or any, really, is given to them they simply don’t hold up. They’re toxic bubblegum.  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a timely example and now I’m adding Artemis by Andy Weir to the list. Andy Weir is, of course, the author of The Martianwhich was also turned into a…

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Eric

Eric by Terry Pratchett was the epitome of wit and I was absolutely delighted by it!

There is nothing quite like a Terry Pratchett book to cleanse my reading palette. The man writes in exactly my kind of witty. This is the second Discworld book I’ve delved into the first, Small Gods, took the solemn topic of religion and turned down every witty and clever road to make light of it while exploring it. Ericstarted with a slightly less grandiose premise but it managed to maintain the…

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May 19 2017: Winging It!

In todays throwback Thursday I prove that winging it is honestly ok and it gets me to Galway!

I may have shouted “Paparazzi!” right before taking this picture then told dad he shouldn’t have looked away from the road.

The goal was to get from Dublin to Galway. My dad had arranged for a car rental but without even having to talk about it we both knew neither of us wanted to drive in, or really even near, the city of Dublin. We could have managed, sure, but if you don’t have to, why would…

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The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu

Holy hiatus, Batman! A new city and a new gig have kept me distracted and away from my books for longer than I like. I’ve finally adjusted to a new schedule and when I haven’t been exploring I’ve been working my way through The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer. I was happy to finally get started on this one as I bought it all the way back when I was in Portland(mostly for the…