There's a television programme here in America called '60 Minutes' which, as you might have guessed, is sixty minutes long. Except it isn't. For if one removes the time spent on commercials then it's probably between 45-50 minutes in length but I'm assuming a tv show with the title '45-50mins Once the Commercials Are Taken Out' is just a little too out there. About once a month, nowadays at least, the last couple of minutes are taken up by an old time radio and television writer named Andy Rooney who is as famous for his eyebrows as he is for his journalism. In those two minutes Andy will rant about any given topic of his choosing and the book 'Years of Minutes' is a collection of his rants from 1982-2003 inclusive.
Mr Rooney seems to polarize people in their opinions as it appears a lot of people can't stand him and others think he's great. I happen to fall into the latter category and so it will come as no surprise to you that I loved this book. The only problem I had with it was that it only went up to 2003. Of course, it was published in 2003 so it's not as if they could have added the more recent years but I was just saying is all!
There aren't really any chapters in this book but each section of rants is broken down into the year they took place and the year takes the place of the chapter. Maybe that means there are chapters after all just in the guise of years but bear with me as I'm doing my best here. Each chapter year contains several subtitles describing the rants that appeared during that particular tv season. For instance during the 2002 season he grumbled about libraries and here's a few snippets of what he had to say:

"...silence in a library ought to be abandoned...silence can be more obtrusive than noise because you strain to hear the words of every whisper but you're oblivious to a yell or a shout."

"There are too many blank pages at the beginning and end of most books [with] authors taking up a whole page to say something like TO MY WIFE GRETCHEN WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN. Why should we waste our time while the author tries to get in good with his wife? If you took all the useless pages out of all the books in a library, they'd save miles of shelf space."

"Dust jackets are a pain in the neck and do not prevent books getting dusty."

Those type of comments are exactly the type of reading you get in this book on subjects from catalogues to cold remedies, from ghostwriters ("General Colin Powell...signed a book contract for $6million...[he] is going to have a ghostwriter...for $6million don't you think he ought to write the book himself?") to football uniforms.
For book lovers there are plenty of book related topics such as those already mentioned as well as many others including cookbooks, school books, magazine page numbers and also dictionaries. He even has a diatribe about his eyebrows!
All in all I found this to be a very entertaining read and with over 500 pages worth of Andy's various rants, none of which take up more than a couple of pages, it's a good book for the quick bus journey or to relax with for a few minutes while drinking your favorite beverage. ( )