Hazell and the Menacing Jester, by P. B. Yuill [Gordon Williams & Terry Venables] I like reading books. Really, I do. I read for enjoyment, to learn stuff, to delay the inevitable minute when I have to return to work, and to distract myself when I’m sitting in the meditation chamber in my house. And …
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Ace Double Novel 37062: The Inheritors / The Gateway To Never, by A. Bertram Chandler Just a quick note about these two short novels that make up an Ace double that I recently devoured after pulling it down from my shelves. The book, an Ace Double published in 1972, presents two science fiction stories about …
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Turn On The Heat, by Erle Stanley Gardner Erle Stanley Gardner created more than the always triumphant lawyer Perry Mason. So prolific was the writer-lawyer that he fed the pulps with stories from the pseudonymous pens of over a half dozen noms de plume, creating dozens of characters pleasing readers of mysteries and westerns for …
The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth, by Judith Moffett This ‘fix-up’ novel* about the interactions between Earth people and ecological aliens was so ponderous and so swathed in psychobabbulous platitudes that I almost began to sympathize with the Sad Puppies.† Almost. Even this pointless set of interminable tales of deus ex …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, by Marjorie Kelly Returning to a book almost twenty years after its release may bring many pleasures, surprises, or insights. Reading an author’s words decades after they were written may cause us to nod our heads in …
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The Camp-Meeting Murders, by Vance Randolph & Nancy Clemens A fairly pedestrian mystery story is enlivened by its depiction of small-town life in the South and by the peculiar spinster narrator, Bedelia Alcott, who plays the traditional part of the clueless detective in her misguided musings about the central crime, the murder of a Holy …
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or, At Least The Unexamined Life Requires Less Math As I mentioned a little while back, I have now read 400 of the books in my personal library since I started tracking my reading back in June 2015. Below is a sketchy analysis of the books in this last hundred books. Of course, as usual, …
James O. Causey’s Frenzy is a scathing noir novel about a vicious, vulpine grifter with big plans and bigger failures, a feral fox among wolves who wish to tear out his throat if he makes just one false step. He makes several. But he survives each beating, each attack, each checkmate by fast talking, flight, …
Some trepidation is normal when visiting a old friend with whom one has not passed any time for many years. One fears that he has changed, that you’ve changed, that neither of you are the persons who once shared the deep intimacies and easy bonhomie that make up true friendship. How pleasant it is, therefore, …
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As I mentioned earlier this week, I recently finished reading book #400 since I started keeping count in 2015, and, since I’ve already caught you up with lists of the first 75 books in the last hundred books, here I’ll catch you up with the remaining twenty-five books making up the full hundred. (As usual, …
