Sunday, August 16, 2026

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 15, 2026

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I was out at the library, and vaguely unhappy with the choices I had at home for my next book to read. (Three big bookcases just isn't e...
Saturday, August 15, 2026

Quote of the Week: O Pioneers!

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It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home - you never find that sort of people among pi...
Friday, August 14, 2026

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

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Lone Wolf and Cub  is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early ...
Thursday, August 13, 2026

Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

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Last novels are often incomplete, fragmentary, not fully formed. Details might be fluid in different chapters, as if the author hadn't f...
Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Seek You by Kristen Radtke

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One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the "here's a trend; what does it mean?" book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; bree...
Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Planeta by Ana Oncina

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I'll admit I don't always understand what makes a book "manga" in the American market. Translated from Japanese - sure, th...
Monday, August 10, 2026

All of This and Nothing: One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

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"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in t...
Saturday, August 08, 2026

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Reporting, Circa 1996

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Price had taken what the police had told him and gone straight to work on it; the thought that there might be more to discover would never o...

Quote of the Week: Not Bad for Government Work

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General Stubblebine countered by setting his psychic spies on Noriega. This was the Fort Meade team, who worked out of a condemned clapboard...
Friday, August 07, 2026

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

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Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking t...
Thursday, August 06, 2026

The Pass by Katriona Chapman

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Mea culpa : I put off reading this book for several months because I thought it would be heavy, wordy, "serious." It is not. Creat...
Wednesday, August 05, 2026

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania by Doug Savage

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First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly...
Tuesday, August 04, 2026

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

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I saw the movie made from this book long before I actually read it. And I've read several other books by journalist Jon Ronson before g...
Monday, August 03, 2026

All of This and Nothing: Quit While You're Ahead

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"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in t...
Sunday, August 02, 2026

Books Read: July 2026

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I'm slightly back-dating this; I'm writing in the late morning of August 2, and setting the post-time to be a few hours ago, mostly ...