Your Humble Blogger had been vaguely wanting to reread The Forever War for a while, despite not having particularly liked it on first reading. Certain aspects of it niggled at me, and after ten years (or twenty-five, as I can’t…
For years, Your Humble Blogger has been griping to people, on those rare occasions when somebody brings up Animal Farm, that after all, at the end of the book, all Napoleon did was make the farm indistinguishable from the neighbor…
One of the great things about library book sales—well, I suppose any used book sale, but I seem to go to library book sales more often than other kinds, more often even than used book stores—is coming across some book…
I think Little Dorrit may be, in some sense, the most sophisticated, clever, well-constructed and rewarding of Charles Dickens’s’s’s novels. It’s not my favorite, which of course is Bleak House. Favorite, though, has a lot to do with things that…
I know, I know. Believe me, Your Humble Blogger is aware that you have all had these conversations about genre before. Besides, y’all went through this back when The Time-Traveler’s Wife was on the best-seller lists, and wasn’t on the…
Well, and Linda Greenhouse, the NYTimes Supreme Court reporter, wrote Becoming Justice Blackmun more, it seems, out of opportunity than anything else. There was the archive, and there she was. I suspect she would rather have written a book on…
There was an interesting thread over at Benjamin Rosenbaum’s blog recently, about … well, about slipstream and genre. But no, really, there were things that were interesting. Honestly. Well, I thought there was interesting stuff. One of the things I…
The problem with Eleanor Updale’s Montmorency is not that it wasn’t good, it’s that it wasn’t good enough. A clever set-up, decent writing, some lovely period detail, and for what? In fact, the whole book felt like a set-up. That…
I was mostly annoyed by What’s the Matter with Kansas, even though I do think that Thomas Frank has some valid points. Unfortunately, I have done just enough reading of social science to find the use of individual history backed…
It’s a good thing that Tobias Bucknell has a good site up for Crystal Rain, because Tor’s website is still crappy beyond belief, and YHB had entirely forgotten which book this was. The title was providing me with no clue…