Reading Into the Past: Week of 5/28

I'm running very late this week, since I'm not even rolling the dice until Tuesday night. So, without further ado, here are the books I was reading this week in 1992:

• Gary Gygax, The Anubis Murders (5/21)
  This book is not very good. Fourteen years ago, I probably would have gone much, much further. But the pain has subsided, and I, thankfully, don't remember all of the details.
  
• Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America (5/22)
  I remember that it was an interesting book, that I could only agree with about half of it, and that Bork generally hated everything about modern society. Bork also writes great, precise sentences, and he's one of those writers who can be very entertaining about things he hates (as long as it's not something the reader particularly loves, of course).
  
• Daniel M. Pinkwater, Fish Whistle (5/22)
  A collection of essays that were originally NPR commentaries, mostly about Pinkwater's life and ruminations. Pinkwater was the greatest YA writer of the '70s and '80s, and I don't care who disagrees with me. I wish he wrote more; he's a national treasure.
  
• David G. Hartwell, Christmas Stars (5/25)
  An anthology of SF stories about Christmas. As I recall, it was noticeably better than I'd expected -- we even did it in the club.
  
• Lawrence Block, A Walk Among the Tombstones (5/25)
  One of the middle "Matt Scudder" novels, which was new at the time. This isn't my favorite era of the series -- they turned more into thrillers than mysteries for a while there, and I'm not a fan of thrillers -- but the Scudder books remain among the very best hard-boiled novels ever written.
  
• Tom Mason, editor, The Three Stooges: The Knuckleheads Return! (5/25)
  No memory at all. I have a suspicion that this was a collection of comics, which would make it very weird.
  
• William Lutz, Doublespeak (5/27)
  A non-fiction book about the various circumlocutions used by business and government to hide what they're actually doing. Lutz has made a bit of a career out of these, but I believe this one was the first and best. It's a good book to read if you want to write (or just think) clearly about the real world.
  

I do seem to read books randomly, bouncing from genre to genre blithely, when I have my druthers. (And that's made the last few months a bit weird for me, since I'm exclusively reading for WFA and SFBC.)