I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Information Inferno, by Whodini™ If it is hard for ‘kids today’ to appreciate what life was like before the advent of cell phones, it is almost as difficult even for those of us who lived through that strange sea change we now just call ‘the …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: The Information Inferno“
Fear to Tread, by Michael Gilbert Michael Gilbert has proven to be one of the most consistent, most versatile, and most surprising writers of thrillers and suchlike dark fiction. Not that his books are dark—far from it. At their core is an almost quaint sensibility of the power of human goodness, even as recognition that …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, by Brian Bates Though this book is a muddled cornucopia of flaccid ideas masquerading as history, anthropology, mythology, psychology, and spirituality, I am not going to spend much time outlining just why this book is …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: The Real Middle Earth“
Sir Nigel, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Almost all readers know that Arthur Conan Doyle created the immortal Sherlock Holmes, the seminal precursor to all the idiosyncratic detectives which have since become a welcome (mostly) plague upon all our houses and libraries. And those readers more familiar with the creator of the duo of Holmes …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. My Opinions: Incest and Illegitimacy, by Alfred JordanThe Negro and the World Crisis, by Charles Lee Magne Sincerity is a casualty of this Ironic Age. We now are surprised to contemplate that perhaps some advocate of this or that position actually believes the things he or …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: Wacko of Delight vs. Wacko in a Whiter Shade of Vile”
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. How to Overthrow the Government, by Arianna HuffingtonShrub, by Molly Ivins & Lou DuboseStupid White Men, by Michael Moore I have said before that reading political works years after their publication is an instructional exercise. The intervening years make plainer the ingrained biases of both the …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: 3 Civic Voices from the Crepuscule of the Before Time”
The Lies That Bind, by Kate Carlisle (A Bibliophile Mystery, #3 in the series) Kate Carlisle is no Raymond Chandler, and her book—The Lies That Bind—is an affront to his project of raising mystery fiction to the level of literature. If anything, the author of this, the third in the series of so-called ‘Bibliophile Mysteries’, …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Banality of Feeble Dept. Journey To The Impossible: Designing an Extraordinary Life, by Scott Jeffrey This is perhaps the worst book I have ever read in my life. I was sorely tempted just to let the above sentence be my entire report upon this piece …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: Journey To The Impossible“
The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, by Horacio Quiroga To master the short story is to possess the ability to tersely describe the critical moment, the veritable crux of events, ideas, and emotions—and to capture that moment so that readers can contemplate and appreciate the revealed profundity in these smallest of prose packages. Hector Quiroga—a …
Continue reading “Monday Book Report: The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories“
Sea Of Grass, by Conrad Richter (1936) This very brief (just over a hundred pages, in the edition I read) narrative is a prose poem, a threnody for a lost time and place, New Mexico when it was new in the American imagination. As well, it is a meditation on the mystery of marriage and …
