See, here’s the thing about Ellery Queen books. Frequently (I would say almost always, but in fact I’ve read maybe half-a-dozen books out of approximately thirty-eight thousand) the murderer deliberately sets out to trap Ellery by leaving complicated false clues…
I’ve been meaning to give Brundibar a good look since it was published. A new Maurice Sendak book is an event, and a reason for hope for the world, and this book being a collaboration with Tony Kushner to retell…
Your Humble Blogger is, you know, and old left-winger and news junkie, and back in the day, I used to watch The McLaughlin Group. When I was 22 or so, it seemed like I was finding stuff out by watching;…
Your Humble Blogger came across the Wimsey Papers a while ago. I hadn’t known that Jill Paton Walsh had used them as a jumping-off point for her Peter Wimsey book A Presumption of Death. The book is … well, do…
The haftorah for today (Parshah Re’eh) was Isaiah 54:11-17, 55: 1-5. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, [and] not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy…
As it happens, YHB was in the middle of reading Coyote when I noticed Ian Frazier’s collection Coyote v. Acme on the shelf in the children’s room of the local library. Now, CvA happens to have in it, in addition…
OK, YHB is still insensitive and all, but I have passed through the stage of vague interest into outrage. How could we fail to provide food, water, shelter and medicine to our own refugees? My shock over this goes back…
Your Humble Blogger hasn’t done any rhetorical analysis in ages, in part because, well, I can’t really listen to Our Only President and The Aristocrats with any objectivity at all. And what with one thing and another, I haven’t put…
As it turns out, I was suckered into reading Allen Steele’s Coyote, which I thought was a novel (what with it saying novel on the cover) but is actually one of those series-of-short-stories things. Oh, and I’d already read one…
I made a note of John Tierney’s column in this morning’s Times, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why I thought this piece of drivel was worth blogging. It’s called The Road to Hell Is Clogged…