Today marks the completion of 30 years of keeping track of the list of books I’ve read. Yesterday, I finished my 84th book of 2025, which also happened to be my 1,500th book since I began keeping my list. The book was C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution I began the
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always
The losses accrue and reminders are daily this time of year. Barry N. Malzberg died a year ago yesterday. We lost Carl Sagan twenty-nine years ago today. Both writers had an outsized influence on me. One, as a mentor, and writer whose subject matter and style resonated with me as no other writer before. The
In the end it was primarily Robert Silverberg who took the hit. I’d gone to pull a copy of Dying Inside off the shelf to check the publication date. The book seemed stuck to the bottom of the shelf and when I pulled it off, I saw the bottom was black with some kind of
Folks, I’m on a mission. I sat down today to jot down a list of books to read the last two weeks of the year. We abandon the cold and gray of winter in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area for the warmth and sunshine of gulf coast Florida for the last few weeks of the
We recently replaced the “old” 55” flat-screen TV we have mounted above the fireplace in the living room with a brand new 65” flat-screen TV. Ordinarily a TV would last us a decade or more, but for some reason, the old TV started to get darker and darker, and it just seemed time. The new
I. The Nine Planets The first time I experienced a sense of wonder was upon arriving home from the Franklin Township Public Library and tearing into the book I’d just checked out: a nonfiction astronomy by Franklyn M. Branley titled The Nine Planets. I was still learning to read, and I can clearly recall wondering
In the summer of 2007, I traveled to Europe for a month and I brought with me, as entertainment for the flight, the recent James Bond hit Casino Royale. I spent my first few days in Europe in Venice, and as I walked about St. Mark’s Square, I was momentarily taken aback by its familiarity.