I’ve had numerous people over the past year or so tell me how much they thought I’d enjoy the Batman graphic novels. I thought about trying to read some last summer but didn’t know where to start. This past spring, though, I figured that out: Batman: Year One, Batman: A Long Halloween and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Yesterday I went to Borders to pick them up as plane reading material (just the first two). Curious, I started Year One last night and ended up finishing …

I came across a list on the internets of [The Essential Man's Library][1]. Curious, I decided to look and see if I’d read any of them and see if I agreed with their choices. I’m doing this post kind of “live blog style” so final commentary will be at the end.
##[Part 1][1]
***The Great Gatsby*** by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I read this in High School and remember enjoying it (unlike many of the other books we read). Beyond that, I don’t honestly remember much about it.
***Slaughter-House Five*** …

Last night, Juli and I saw [Iron Man][1] after an enjoyable dinner with the Doke’s. If you haven’t heard about it, click the previous link to go to Apple’s trailer page. Anyways, I really enjoyed this movie as it was both action-packed and quite enjoyable. Having never read the comics, I can’t attest to its accuracy so if that is a must for you in the onslaught of various comic book movies, don’t expect to find any info either way in this brief review.
Having got that intro …

One of the highlights of Christmas vacation not mentioned in my last long post was getting through six different books. I imagine everyone reading this already knows, but if you didn’t — I love to read. And because I was so successful over the past couple of weeks, I’ll offer some mini-reviews, as most of the books I’d recommend. Without further ado, here they are (in no particular order):

Jim and Casper Go To Church — Jim and Casper chronicles the story of a Christian and an atheist …

The second chapter, titled Fear and the Moral Life, starts with the question: what does fear do to us? The answer to this question has its beginnings in the moral nature of fear as fear is a basic emotion which isn’t morally neutral (this is not to say fear is bad, but that it, like all other strong emotions has a moral edge to it). A culture of fear plays off of these emotions in a rather morally dubious way. Rather than putting fear into its appropriate …