Isaac Asimov died 34 years ago today. 30 years ago today, inspired by Asimov’s lifelong habit of keeping a diary, I started my own diary habit, one that continues today. I woke up this morning and headed into my office, looking at the shelf of reference books beside my desk. In addition to half a…
I bought for myself, as a belated holiday gift, a brand new Royal Scriptor II Portable Electric Typewriter. I’ve been yearning for a working typewriter for at least a year now. What finally pushed me to make the purchase was my recent realization that I’ve spent at least a third of my life for the…
Over the December holidays, I read Louis Menand’s article on dictionaries, “Look It Up” in The New Yorker. The article referred to a book by Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary and who can resist a book on dictionaries? So, sitting poolside, I read Fatsis’s book with pleasure and…
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…