Agent Palmer

At some point in our lives, we read children’s books. Perhaps they were read to us, but the very nature of a “children’s book” conjures up clean white pages with simple stories and often beautiful illustrations.

Later on, we move away from children’s books. We put away anything remotely childish like a picture book, and we start reading for school. It’s the stuff without pictures and often without an interesting cover. If that didn’t kill your love of books and you’re among those of us still reading, you’re probably as far away from picture books as ever…

While not entirely applicable, the word that kept coming into my head as I read “The Laptop Millionaire: How Anyone Can Escape the 9 to 5 and Make Money Online” was “shyster.”

Author Mark Anastasi’s 2012 book feels like a novel in that it is a bunch of regurgitated buzzword internet money-making schemes that feel more about making money than the “value” he claims they represent. Adversely, he never actually represents that value with anything more quantifiable than overusing the same word.

Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra is a tell-all book written by Sinatra’s long-time right-hand man, George Jacobs, and with the help, I suppose, of William Stadiem who also gets an author credit.

It’s not the type of book I would have normally picked up on my own, and I didn’t really know it was tell-all until I started reading it. It will, at least knowingly, be my last tell-all book. For every chapter except the Afterword, it felt like I was reading one of the weekly celebrity gossip magazines.