Influenced perhaps by my recent avian encounters, my friend Stephen loaned me what looks to be a marvelous book titled “Providence Of A Sparrow,” by Chris Chester and after finishing Jonathan Kellerman’s unsatisfying “Gone” and promptly feeding it to the recycle bin I seemed ready to dive into the memoir that stems from the discovery …
I have Susan and her keen hotel-finding skills to thank for allowing us to discover the remarkable Shakespeare & Company. From our room overlooking the Notre Dame Cathedral, the venerable bookseller was tucked in not so much as a stone’s throw away from us, but we didn’t know anything about it until a walk post …
This easily dates back to 2004. Gawd, maybe even ’03. One of my favorite occasional stops along the internest then and now is the website of Found Magazine, and way back then they put out information that they were planning a book to be filled strictly with found Polaroid images submitted by readers. I didn’t …
UPDATE: If you’re visiting from Jalopnik, welcome and thanks to them for the link love… I think. As to their subheadline sass over asking “who calls a horn a honker,” the answer is: not me. Down near the end of this post “honker” refers not to a horn itself, but is rather the agent noun form of  the verb “honk” and describes the person honking …
Growing up if there was one writer whose new releases I waited for with practically rabid anticipation, it was Stephen King. Richard Adams’ “Watership Down” might be my favorite book, and one that I read even before I’d heard of anything by King, but subsequent Adams tales that I consumed such as “Shardik” and “The …
There’s a reason I don’t usually read overly long introductions to books — especially nonfictionals — I’m about to embark on and Norman M. Klein in his preface to his “The History of Forgetting” definitely had me rolling my eyes almost had me saying “Forget about it!” at several points, such as this one: “In …
I’d heard about it, but it just registered today that Michael Crichton has a new book out titled “Next.” My first impulse was “yipee!” because I’ve a long history of reading the readable writer: “Andromeda Strain,” “Terminal Man,” “Jurassic Park,” “Lost World,” “Westworld,” “Congo,” “Airframe,” “Timeline,” even the rather tedious “Rising Sun.” All were easily …