Tag Archives: books

The Best of TIM’s Best of 2016

Happy New Year!  Wow, have these twelve months gone by quicker than a Rick Perry presidential run or what?!  I guess it’s true what they say: Time flies when you can’t remember.  Hence, what follows is my tippy-top Timmy picks for the past year, which I relate as part archival documentation, part suggestive recommendation, part award-winning compilation, and part Tom Cruise starring in Rogue Nation.  So sans additional adieu, I give you the third annual

Best of TIM’s Best of 2016 (with pictures and everything)

And the winners are (in no particular order except alphabetical)… Continue reading →

I Saw Dead People

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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Paris with some time to kill and instead of purchasing Nintendo stock like I should have been doing, I decided to fritter away my time at a sidewalk cafe eating batter-fried foods.  I found finding French fritters a frustrating fiasco however, and so I elected instead to head to the local cemeteries, as I have been dying to get into them for some time and take selfish selfies with the post-mortem celebrities interned therein.

The first cemetery I went to was the more renowned Père Lachaise (pictured above), which is a French term for ‘two matching Lachaise’.  Père Lachaise is chocked full of superstar corpses, many of which are tied to French history and culture.  Thanks to my public school upbringing, I was familiar with exactly none of them as they were named neither Napoleon nor Gérard Depardieu.  There were some names I recognized however, and I put together a quick Wander Around and Stumble Upon strategy to miss almost all of them and take up as much time as possible making U-turns and backtracking.

Like most Ugly Americans, the first grave site I visited was that of Continue reading →

The Best of TIM’s Best of 2015

Happy New Year!  Here’s hoping that your arbitrarily chosen day celebrating the interminable passage of time was filled with all the whimsicality such inconsequential festivity deserves!  And what better way to mark such an insignificant festal period than to also mark the best of the best of one’s experiences contained within that very same random twelve month period?!

And so here it is:  the enormously personal and subjective and somewhat recommendary listing of my favorite happenings of the very comma-filled foregoing, that is, previous, year, namely, the second annual

The Best of TIM’s Best of 2015 (see above)

Starting with… Continue reading →

The Best of TIM’s Best of 2014

Happy New Year!  Today marks the beginning of a new tradition here at conTIMplating that is bound to last upwards of one year in a row!  In the past, during the last week of the year, I have daily posted on my personal Facebook wall hi-lights of the previous year in terms of ‘Best ofs’ such as Best Book Read or Best Movie Seen or Best Comeback Thought Of A Week Later or Best Abbreviation For A Latin Phrase Meaning ‘And So Forth’, etc., etc.

To illustrate my desire for equality and unity, I have decided to yoke said numerous wall posts together into one culminating conglomerate blog post that singularly covers my multiple personally favored favorites of this past year entitled

The Best of TIMs Best of 2014 (see above) Continue reading →

I Love Making Up Non-Fiction

About a year ago I waxed eloquent in Pulitzer-winning fashion about my favorite fiction books.  Since then I have been swamped with an e-mail asking about my favorite non-fiction books, to which I have been hesitant to respond because non-fiction books are hard—especially when being thrown at you for taping the end of the Alabama-Auburn game over one’s wedding video.

In my defense, I have already watched the end of that game way more often than any wedding video.

And in retrospect, my defense is perhaps not as strong as I had anticipated.

The problem with ranking non-fiction books is that when you combine the sheer number of categories with varying personal tastes you almost have a possibility for every time Lorde is played on the radio.  Continue reading →