Several good magazine articles in this week’s reading batch. Here’s what I managed to get through (and my effort to read an article a day has now stretched to 42 days as of yesterday.) 3/3/2019 – “Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” by Melinda Wenner Moyer, Scientific American, March 2019 3/4/2019 – “The Other Tool Users”…
At a recent meeting of my writers group, there was a lot of talk of “rules” for writing during the critiques. Among the advice offered was “it’s better to use short sentences in thrillers” and “try using at least three senses in description.” These kinds of “rules” bother me. They are more about the brushstrokes…
I like to keep some curated reading lists handy for those times when I struggle with what to read next. The three lists I depend on most are: Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels Sports Illustrated’s 100 Best Sports Books Slowly, I am chipping away at these lists. But I…
We’re over the colds that ran through the family last week, but I spent a lot of the week catching up so things were mostly quiet here on the blog again. Hopefully things will be back to normal this week. Here are the articles I read this week, which took me through 34 consecutive days…
I learned last night that Janet Asimov died on February 25. Janet was a psychiatrist, and a writer of books and essays. She was married to Isaac Asimov for the last 20 years of his life. Over my many readings and re-readings of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographies, I felt like I came to know Janet as…
I was back to my normal reading pace in February and it came as a relief. Of course, I didn’t have a video game sucking up hours of my time like I did last month. I finished 14 books in February: Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (#855) I’ve had an on-again,…
I started the week in New York visiting family, and with one kid sick with whatever is going around. I ended the week sick myself for a few days, with a couple sick kids on the mend, and several inches of snow in between. So things have been a little quiet here on the blog…
Over the years I have developed a pretty good sense about which books will interest me and which won’t. I don’t like wasting much time on a book that I can’t get into, and have learned to give up on them pretty quickly. Of course, there are those books that pull me right in, fiction…
Back when I started writing and submitting stories as a junior in college way back in 1993, I used to daydream of what it would be like to have a story accepted by a magazine. I’d be walking to class and imagining getting a letter back from an editor telling me that they liked my…
A lot of driving this week. I had to drive to Pittsburgh for work on Wednesday and then back home on Thursday. Yesterday we drove up to New York for the long weekend. I still managed to read an article each day and my backlog of magazines has been shrinking nicely, just as the March…