BOOK REVIEWS
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Cozy Mystery a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is usually an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community A few days ago, I reviewed here the first Christie book I had ever read, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Upon finishing Ackroyd, I… Read more
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Cozy Mystery a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is usually an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community Even though I am a big reader of mysteries, somehow I managed to get to the age of 64 without having read a single Agatha Christie novel.… Read more
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Like most book lovers, I enjoy reading books about books. I got Michael Dirda’s book, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books, from the local library here as an ebook. Since one of the points Dirda makes early in the book is how he only reads physical copies of books (never ebooks)… Read more
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I have been spending a little time of late again with Robert Browning, reading Chesterton’s biography of Browning and re-reading for the first time in a couple of decades his poetry in a serious and more formal way. I have never been far from Browning (who incidentally, shares my birthday) because certain Browning poems and… Read more
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As any reader knows, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book the first or second time you pick it up. Yet if you pick that same book up at a later date and start reading you may actually fall in love with it. I have noticed that music works the same way for me… Read more
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Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I… Read more
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H. Rider Haggard wrote in the late 1800s. He is credited with inventing the lost civilization adventure. His most famous of books are: When I began my list of classic Adventure stories I had not read in their original, I included all four on my list. I could have started with any of them but… Read more
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Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Penguin Classics) (p. viii). Penguin Publishing… Read more
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If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. ~… Read more
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In the summer of 1984, I drove a 1964 Galaxy 500 (Deluxe Sport Coupe) 1713 miles from Dillon, Montana to Saginaw, Michigan with only one companion – a beat-up paperback edition of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. The radio was original with the car. In eastern Montana and western North Dakota I could seldom pick… Read more
ClimbingSky 