Goodbye, Mr. Chips was one of those books I not only had never read but had never really seriously considered reading. I saw bits of one of the television adaptations, long ago, and actually watched the abysmal musical movie as…
Your Humble Blogger has, for one reason and another, seen a fair amount of movies over the last n days. I enjoyed Billy Elliot a lot, but there was far too much acting. When I say that, what I mean…
Honestly, I picked up Chindi at the library because it was a paperback, and I was sick of reading hardback books. Really. Big old clunky hardbacks. Feh. I wanted a good paperback book, something I could put in my overcoat…
So a couple of weeks ago, my Best Reader and I happened to watch a few minutes of the The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor televised ceremony. Not this year’s, but a rerun of the 2005 show,…
I’ve just been looking through some old posts by that little bastard I thought I was thirty years ago. Hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. That’s all done with, anyway. Thirty-nine today, and sound as a…
I’m not sure how I managed to read a fair number of the stories in Fragile Things before they were collected into a book. Your Humble Blogger has mentioned, perhaps, once or twice, that the short story form doesn’t really…
Bill Poser over at the Language Log alerts me to the story about the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell in Powys. It seems that the Powys County Council Trading Standards was required to inform the company that the packaging of…
The Book of Story Beginnings is Kristin Kladstrup’s first book, which is just as well, because I suspect that if I discovered that she had half-a-dozen books out, I would probably run out to the library and read them all…
I’m sure that the first time I read Caves of Steel, probably the first half-dozen times I read it, all in the seventies and eighties, I’m guessing, I was able to look at the spine of the book and read…
Song of Songs, Chapter One, verse 12: While the king [sitteth] at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof. Ooh, nard. The question here is who she is referring to as the king. Is this the Shepherd, who…