It’s been quite a while since I had gotten into a book so much that I was, when out doing something enjoyable, eager to get back home and back inside the novel. This happened with The Hallowed Hunt, the latest…
Well, and I finally found a Studs Terkel book that didn’t knock me out. Well, and there were bits in And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey that were pretty terrific, actually, but they were fewer and…
Can some Gentle Reader explain to me what Les Liaisons Dangereuses is about? The Christopher Hampton play, I mean, although I’d also love to know what is appealing about any other version of the novel, including the novel itself. I…
Gentle Readers, there will be spoilers below. On the other hand, the publisher has already spoiled the spoiler. See, Breath, by Donna Jo Napoli, is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but is also a sort of mystery….
Here’s the thing: if you set any substantial part of an action/adventure story on a train, you are obligated to get your good guy and your bad guy up on top of the train for a fistfight, or at least…
As often happens when I am in the library listlessly looking for something to read, and not being particularly moved by anything, I checked out the latest Terry Pratchett. In this case it was Thud!, a Watch book, and it…
Michael Hoeye appears to have self-published Time Stops for No Mouse and somehow convinced the local bookstores to give him shelf space and even push the book quite a bit. And when you live in Portland (OR), and your local…
I didn’t get it. chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,-Vardibidian….
Your Humble Blogger is, as Gentle Readers will be aware, a fan of Young Adult specfic. Well, and it isn’t the Young Adultness—Farah Mendlesohn, more or less correctly, uses YA as a derogatory term for the sort of Moral Introduction…
You are probably thinking to yourself, Gentle Reader, something like why does the silly bastard read books of short stories if he’s just going to whine about how he doesn’t really like the short story form? Aha! Tricked you. I…