I got a bunch of books over the last two days, thanks in part to Christmas gift cards and impulse buying at Thriftbooks. Grantville Gazette VI Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, a memoir of his broadcasting career by Red Barber 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose In Baseball, a memoir of the year Jackie Robinson …
Serendipity took me into the used bookstore today. It’s one floor up at the mall from a satellite post office where I’d gone to mail a couple of letters that were too heavy for ordinary stamps. I’m wandering up and down the aisle in the SF section and what do I see but “Shadow of …
Book given, to Mom: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.” Also, a $25 Amazon Kindle Fire gift card to my sister. Books received: “Wild Tales,” by Graham Nash; Simon Winchester’s “The Men Who United the States,” and “The Passage of Power,” Volume IV …
I got half a dozen books in the mail the other day from Amazon and another four or five from Thriftbooks, not birthday books as such, but ones I’d ordered several weeks ago. I also got a Barnes and Noble gift card. Then I got an email notice from the library today that two new …
All the ghost stories I’ve been publishing links to on Facebook came from The Haunted Looking Glass, originally published forty or fifty years ago. It’s a collection of ghost stories selected and illustrated by Edward Gorey. The full table of contents with links to the stories on the web can be found in this 2009 …
Here’s the Fresh Air interview with Linda Ronstadt upon the publication of her memoir “Simple Dreams.” I got it last Friday in the mail and I finished it Saturday. It’s too short! If you’re looking for a gossipy tell-all, go elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a story of a musical journey, it’s an excellent …
I’m reading Robert Goldsborough’s “prequel” to the Nero Wolfe books, “Archie Meets Nero Wolfe”. It’s okay. Archie’s language is much more refined in this than it was in the early books Stout wrote. He was a true roughneck in “Fer de Lance,” “The League of Frightened Men,” “The Rubber Band,” “The Red Box,” and “Too …
I like musicians’ memoirs. I have Dylan’s and Keith Richards’s, and I just got word from Barnes and Noble that my copy of Linda Ronstadt’s “Simple Dreams” has been shipped and should be here by the weekend. The way the music biz works, it’s the songwriters who get the royalties forever, not the interpreters. Buy …
I have a brain full of junk. Often I wish I could remember things other than those I do. For example, when I was about five I was fluent in Spanish, a result of living in Puerto Rico. 15 years later when I lived in Arizona, did I remember any Spanish? I did not. I …
I’ve seen the name Cordwainer Smith mentioned whenever classic science fiction is being discussed, so when I was wandering through a used bookstore this afternoon and found a copy of his collection When the People Fell for a buck I thought “why not?” Then I noticed that it had an introduction by one of Smith’s …