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Multitasking
How many books do you read at the same time? Once in a while, a book so grabs me that I can’t read anything else till I’ve finished it. (Also, once in a while, I have to read a book that is by its...
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Detecting Sauvage
A couple of years ago I read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I still have the one for which he gained considerable fame posthumously, 2666, waiting for me to tackle. I say “tackle” fully cognizant...
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Life On The Dark Side
There is a moment in Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night in which the protagonist, Joe Coughlin—Joseph to his father, the man against whom Joe gauges himself all his life—realizes that he is not what he...
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The Wimsey Principle
Recently I read my first two Lord Peter Wimsey novels. An acquaintance has long held Gaudy Night to be an exceptional work, so I settled down to indulge a period mystery, only to discover a very...
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Time and Motion
William Gibson is, if nothing else, a careful writer. You can feel it in the progress of any one of his novels and in the short stories. Careful in his choice of topic, placement of characters,...
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In Review
2015 is done and I have read what I read. It was a year fraught with turmoil in science fiction, a year prompting reassessments, a year when required reading competed with reading for pleasure, and...
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The Bang That Whimpers
After eight years, the ABC show Castle has ended. Despite a strong premise and a superb cast and excellent presentation, the show exemplified dramatic entropy of the most annoying kind and after an...
View ArticleScandal In Romania
Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Nick and Nora Charles, Charles and Kate Sheridan, and in one unexpected offering Clark Gable and Carole Lombard—all have one thing in common: they are all detective...
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Bridges, Circles, the Pleasure of Continuing On
As I’ve gotten older, my reading has taken turns I would never have expected. My preferred genre is science fiction, and yet I find the number of SF books I read per year shrinking. Perhaps I’m...
View Article2022
I have been remiss in not doing these annual reviews more regularly. I have no excuse. Other words get in the way sometimes. But this, one year into my “official” retirement, I have no excuse not to...
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