ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

DAILY BLOG

  • Hardboiled Coffee & Cigarette

    It wasn’t completely light when I woke up again, but the foggy, half-light that sometimes lingers along the coast in August. I got up and put some coffee water on and got under the shower. Pain leaped through my stomach and my head felt like a coconut that had fallen from a tall tree. I… Read more

  • On This Day in History

    1455: The Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in movable type, was published 1954: The first mass polio vaccination was administered at Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to a few sites on the internet (and we all know how reliable the internet is for facts and news) these two events happened on this day in… Read more

  • Golden Age Detective Fiction

    For some reason I have been reading a lot of Golden Age Detective Fiction of late. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally considered to be the kind of mysteries written in the 1920s and 1930s, primarily in Britain. What that means is that I have been reading novels by and short story collections… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Merton on Consumerism

    “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Murder by the Book, ed. by Martin Edwards

    The Bibliomystery is a sub-genre of Mysteries that I greatly enjoy. Bibliomysteries, as their name implies, are mysteries deeply intertwined with books and the literary world. These stories might involve the theft of a rare edition, the murder of a bookseller, or shady dealings within a publishing house. The defining characteristic is a substantial connection… Read more

  • Choosing What to Read

    I have admitted here before that I am an “Indiscriminate Reader.” I read what catches my fancy. And if the book is free, even better. I routinely pick up any Kindle freebies that catch my eye. Over the years, I have found some very enjoyable reads that way. And, to be fair, some very dreadful… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Malice Domestic” by Philip MacDonald

    Writer Philip MacDonald was born in Britain but immigrated to California where he became a screenwriter for Hitchcock among others. I found his excellent short story “Malice Domestic” in Murder by the Book, another wonderful volume in the British Library Crime Classics Series. “Malice Domestic” in the story of Carl Borden, “a writer of some… Read more

  • Hard-Boiled Coffee Beans

    “There was a pot of coffee perking in the kitchen. Real coffee. The aroma reminded me of a little store I used to know in Newark as a kid, where fresh coffee beans always spilled out of a grinder into the window. It was the only street in my neighborhood that didn’t stink.” (cf. Vorzimmer,… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Murder at the Manor, edited by Martin Edwards

    The classic English country house is a quintessential backdrop for British crime fiction, particularly short stories. From Agatha Christie to Margery Allingham, renowned authors crafted intricate mysteries for their detectives to solve within these sprawling estates. The enduring popularity of these tales stems from a combination of nostalgia for a bygone era and the irresistible… Read more

  • Wandering & Wondering

    I may have mentioned here before that in a different life I could have been a pastor. I actually studied and trained for three years after graduating with an English B.A. to be a Lutheran pastor. Even had a congregation for a year, preached every Sunday, led bible studies and retreats. In the end though,… Read more