Tuesday, November 03, 2020

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

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This is not the eighteenth Matthew Scudder novel. But it is the nineteenth Matthew Scudder book , and it's not too far from novel-lengt...
Friday, October 30, 2020

Quote of the Week: Political Theory

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The Same Man/Crazy Man Theory had been explained to me over margaritas in an L.A. Tex-Mex restaurant a few weeks before by novelist and ess...
Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel

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I'm still not sure if I ever read this book before. Corrupting Dr. Nice  was published in 1997, and the trade paperback I have came out ...
Monday, October 26, 2020

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/24/20

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This irregular post lists all of the new books I get, however I get them -- it started out to catalog review copies, but expanded, when that...
Friday, October 23, 2020

Quote of the Week: Emotional Support

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Before I could, Overse caught up with me and asked "Are you all right?" I was absolutely great. It wasn't like this situati...
Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Reading Into the Past: 2001

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 This will be two weeks in a row, which I count as some kind of win. As before, "Reading into the Past" is a dive into my reading ...
Friday, October 16, 2020

Quote of the Week: Never Thought You'd Be Alone This Far Down the Line

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And, to her surprise, she could now see that their photograph collection was really pretty good. She stopped before her favorite, a picture...
Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Reading into the Past: 1999

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This is something I used to do, back in the early days of the blog. I thought it was fun, and a silly way to look at a random grouping of bo...
Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

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I am quite possibly the last person in the world to read Nick Hornby's 2009 novel in bound galley [1] form. My copy of Juliet, Naked  ...
Friday, October 09, 2020

Quote of the Week: Mourning

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They buried Parradan Smith in a separate grave and piled a cairn of stones to mark it, on Burnbright's advice, she being the nearest ex...
Thursday, October 08, 2020

Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

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I've written a lot about P.G. Wodehouse here over the years, mostly in reading through Overlook's marvelous Collector's Wodeh...
Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Earworm of the Day

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We all get songs stuck in our heads. And when we do, we have the bizarre urge to share those songs, as if it were a parasite that could be i...

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

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Funny can age badly, because what each generation thinks is funny changes. The more generations, the more change, and eventually we need lea...
Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Bad Machinery, Book 8: The Case of the Modern Men by John Allison

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I always ponder how far to get into history and minutia when I'm writing about, say, the eighth volume collecting a webcomic. I mean...
Sunday, October 04, 2020

Fifteenth Anniversaries

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Yesterday, while doing something else, I realized today was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. Now, I was once in the habit of writin...