My Imagination Is Power

Almost half of this book has shown up on This American Life in some form or another, so it wasn't as fresh to me as her other books I've read. I don't really care all that much about Frank Sinatra, so having to read through her story about him a second time wasn't so thrilling. The stories also lose something when you don't hear her reading them. But then again, maybe having heard her read them made them better, knowing her inflections and timing. It was like listening to the show IN MY BRAIN!

One of my favorite bits (since I do it so often myself) was this:

"The phone rang. It was Dave, a writer friend. We talked for over an hour, mainly about punctuation. He has big plans for the ellipsis. He's mad for ellipsis. I tell him, yeah, I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on though relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period)."