There must be some cathartic force at work, to compel those of us who blog to arrange our most fleeting, insignificant thoughts as electrons on a screen. Maybe it’s a desire for connection, like casting a bottle into the sea in the hope that some sympathetic soul will retrieve it. Or not. Maybe we all just have too much time on our hands. In any case, here’s […]
The seven stages of blogging:
This is a rough description of my thinking over the last couple of weeks. Having reached stage seven already, it may be time to regroup. Not sure what I was thinking, devoting a blog to crime fiction when there are so many excellent ones already out there. Perhaps I’ll change the focus to late-50s quiz shows… 1. I’ll just see how it works. You figure everybody else […]
From pulp fiction, one good habit
In a far corner of the warehouse, back in the dust and shadows, there are some books I haven’t seen or read in more than four decades. I no longer remember the plots or characters or dialogue, but I do remember the pleasure of reading them. Sometimes I wonder: Did those books start my interest in detective stories, or was I drawn to them because I already […]
Back to the keyboard — but it’s a new one
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I’m back to work on what I will refer to as “the book.” I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day’s output. But since I’ve had these productive impulses before, and since they tend to expire after about a week, I’m employing a few other strategies. First: […]
The matter of the hardbound book
I suppose it is not a sign of my good taste or reverence for books that so many I own are paperbacks. I have fairly strict criteria for buying hardbound volumes: If the book is a gift, if it is a work I expect to frequently reread, if it is a reference book, or if it is something I just can’t wait to get my hands on. […]
The book vs. the movie
For Father’s Day this year, my daughter Cassie presented me with the first volume of the Harry Potter series and two CD audio sets: Stephen King’s “Blood and Smoke” and Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked.” (While she shares my fondness for reading, she leans more toward fantasy and horror than crime fiction, a genre she dismisses as shopworn and tedious.) Now, I had started on Harry Potter a couple […]
This jury’s still out on "The Wire"
We don’t watch a lot of TV here at the ancestral manse, and now that “The Sopranos” is history, we watch even less. My current viewing schedule is about the same as it was a decade ago: Reruns of “Seinfeld,” mostly, and the odd episode of “American Justice.” But whenever the wife and I rave about “The Sopranos,” certain friends and relatives keep insisting that the HBO […]