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This Living Hand
When we think of Rome, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the English poet John Keats, who died there in 1821 of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Here is his grave in the Protestant...
View ArticleTwo books to avoid
I used to read a lot; now I don’t. Writing gets in the way. (Also working for a living.) And when I read nowadays, I often get cranky. Here are two very different books that made me cranky recently....
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“A Christmas Carol” turns 175
Lots of people took notice. Dickens, of course, wrote it to make money. He was in debt to his publisher and needed a hit. That’s how life works. Here’s the beginning of A Christmas Carol. Was there...
View ArticleSaying good-bye to my friend’s novel
Along with my novel, this week I said good-bye (I think) to my friend Jeff Carver’s novel (now split in two), which he’s been working on (and we in his writing group have been critiquing) since 2006 or...
View ArticleOf serial killers and grammar
I recently listened to the audio book Evil Has a Name about the Golden State Killer, the guy whose rapes and murders terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is essentially an audio...
View ArticleKilling Commendatore
This is Haruki Murakami’s latest novel. I’ve liked Murakami’s work in the past, but not this one. Am I tired of him and the weird worlds he creates, or is this really a bad novel? It’s got something...
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Books from the attic: “TOM SWIFT in The Race to the Moon”
We were looking for something in the attic and came upon a stash of books from long ago. Tom Swift Jr., Chip Hilton, the Hardy Boys… This one is from 1958. Tom Swift is in a race to the moon against...
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Books from the attic: “Hoop Crazy: A Chip Hilton Sports Story”
Growing up, I loved the Chip Hilton books. Unlike the Tom Swift Jr. and Hardy Boys books, they had a real person identified as their author — Clair Bee, a well-known college basketball coach back in...
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Books from the attic: “The Secret Warning”
I’ve got lots of Hardy Boys adventures. I grabbed this one from the top of the stack. Everybody knows about the Hardy Boys — the great teenage detectives and sons of the well-known detective Fenton...
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The Reefs of Time
My friend Jeff Carver has been working on The Reefs of Time since the Coolidge administration, I think, and it’s finally here! Jeff’s specialty is galaxy-spanning science fiction with intriguing ideas...
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