Going by the number of hits it gets, evidently my most popular post to date was back in June, titled “How Important Is Reading?” Here are some of the search terms which people have used to find this page: how important is reading? (with and without the “?”) is reading important? (ditto) why is reading [...]

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As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post. We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” [...]

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A few weeks ago, I read a blog entry somewhere about the claim (phrased variously) that the setting in a given work “becomes like [or even is] a character itself.” It drove the blogger crazy, because setting and character (in his/her opinion) have so little in common. Whatever my other reactions to the rant, it got [...]

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Continuing last Friday’s meditation on the topic of sight, and the things which we might see differently “if only”… First, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book*: Picasso is riding on a train and someone sits down next to him. Recognizing who he is, the person asks, “Why don’t you paint people the way they really are?” [...]

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Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother. Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True [...]

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From Richard Selzer’s Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, quoting Lady Mary Wortley, via Hugh Walpole: People wish their enemies dead — but I do not; I say, give them gout, give them the stone. From “When in Gout,” by Allison Williams, Time Out New York, April 16-22, 2008: You would know if [...]

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I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” [...checking yearbook... yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence [...]

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I’ve got a new review up at The Book Book. Short version: Nurk is a children’s book (the publisher says age range 9-12). But it’s a children’s book in the same way that the Shrek movies are children’s movies. That is, parents who let their children keep this book to themselves are missing out on [...]

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You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. [...]

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(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.) Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one [...]

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