July appeared to be a Stephen King month for me. Most of the short fiction I read was King and every novel I read was King as well. Short fiction still suffered this month, but that is in part because I read three fairly long books (two of the three books added up to nearly…
I am convinced that there is only one form of magic in the world: reading. Think about it for a moment. Reading is a form of telepathy. As you read this post, thoughts that were in my head are being transmitted to your head. This is happening without my actually speaking to you. In many…
[T]here are milestones in life about which we look forward to: birthdays, holidays, bar mitvahs and baptisms, weddings and graduations. But it seems to me that among these milestones, we often overlook one of the most exciting and significant: Getting a library card. That may seem like hyperbole, but it isn't. I can still remember…
Music evokes powerful memories for me. So does reading a book. As I approach the 500th book I’ve read since January 1, 1996, I’ve been wandering through my list and it surprises me how much I can remember where I was when I read a particular book. Examples are always good, so here is a list…
I treated myself to the limited, 25th anniversary edition of Stephen King’s It put out by Cemetery Dance and it arrived via UPS this morning: It is an absolutely gorgeous edition. It is illustrated and the sections of the book are clearly marked on the border of each page. It is huge and heavy, and feels…
I finished Bag of Bones yesterday. I gave it 4-stars on Goodreads but that’s because they don’t allow half-scores. I would have given it a 3-1/2, but gave it the benefit of the doubt. Much like my experience with ‘Salem’s Lot and Needful Things, I thought the first two-thirds of the book was outstanding. King developed a great story…
Last night, the oppressive heat wave finally broke. I spent much of the day indoors and trying to move as little as possible. I read. Specifically, I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. Prior to that (while in Maine) I read his recent collection, Full Dark, No Stars, and enjoyed it and found myself once again…
I’ve decided to consolidate my monthly reading posts into a single posts covering short fiction, magazine articles, and books. It seems to me that one post is more efficient than three and can be just as easily organized. And it has the added benefit of allowing me to list everything for the month in a…
I think I already have a beat-up paperback copy of this book. But this is a hard cover in pristine condition. It’s part of the Gareth Stevens series that Asimov worked on in the years before he died. He wrote something like 30 books in this series. The last few books were ghost-written but…
I get that third-party vendors of digital magazines like Zinio may not share subscription information with the source magazine in question. So when I subscribed to New Scientist through Zinio and I kept getting renewal messages from New Scientist, it kind of made sense, in a bizarro-world kind of way. New Scientist simply didn’t have any way of…
Early in May I started keeping track of the significant non-fiction articles I read, just like I keep track of the short fiction I read (to say nothing of the books I read). I started partway through the month, but I figured I’d report out those as well, for anyone who might be interested. This…