3:51 PM
A new month, new reccomendations in the sidebar.

I remember really enjoying Around the World in Eighty Days when my dad read it to me as a kid, but it wasn't until college that I rediscovered Jules Verne with The Mysterious Island and fell in love all over again. Verne's castaways make Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson look like savages as (thanks to landing on the world's tightest concentration of a wide variety of natural and mineral resources) they reconstruct civilization from scratch, a process described by Verne in incredible detail. Verne doesn't just say "they cleared the rocks that were damming the stream"--he describes how they gather all the neccesary materials to make dynamite from scratch, including the construction of the neccesary tools, laboratories and workshops. Toss in a surprise reappearance by a character from another Verne novel (to say which would spoil the surprise), and while it's not one of Verne's best books, it's still one of my favorites.

It took two Spiders to bring together me and one of the best albums I've picked up in the last five years, Running Jumping Standing Still. It was Spider Robinson who clued me in to this fantastic folk-rock-blues album by Spider John Koerner and Willie Murphy. Normally I'm not a big folk fan, but something about this album draws you in, starting with the rollicking "Red Palace", followed by probably one of the greatest songs ever recorded, "I Ain't Blue", and on through the rest of a terrific album. Sadly nothing Koerner has recorded since is up to quite the same level (though some of his album titles--Stargeezer, Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Been etc.--come close), but this record/CD/8-track is well worth laying a few hard-earned dollars down on the counter of the company store. I know I've found a truly great album when I can listen to it in my car and I'm never tempted to punch past a song. This is one of those albums.

Please, enjoy.