Twice a day I take a two-and-a-half mile walk through the Bluemont Junction part of my town. I walk from our house down to the park and then follow the bike paths along what is known locally as the Bluemont Junction trail. Sometimes, I stop at a local 7-Eleven for a soft drink or a…
“Give me any random idea and I can write a story from it.” This is how I used to think of myself back when I first started to write with an eye toward selling stories. I was twenty years old, and up to that point, the ability to write, such as it was, was the…
When I first started keeping a diary, I did it mostly out of imitation. Isaac Asimov kept one, and I liked the idea. As he wrote, “I began with the intention of recording everything of significance each day. As time went on, however… my diary became a kind of compact literary and social record of…
i. A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read. It was…
2024 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Book, for me at least. I generally set myself a goal of 100 books a year, but that arbitrary. Some books are barely 100 pages, while others are over 1,000 pages. The goal of 100 books loomed large in my head for a time,…
I read with sadness this afternoon about the passing of the great Charles Osgood. I’m sure many people knew him from the two-plus decades he hosted the Sunday Morning program on CBS. But I recall him most fondly from his “Osgood Files” radio spots. During 8 years of commutes between Studio City and Santa Monica,…
I read 101 books in 2023. I also read around 300 feature articles in magazines. What follows is my top 10 best book reads of 2023 and some of my favorite articles of 2023. For those interested in more details of my overall reading for 2023, see the section that follow this which summarizes my…
Recently, I mentioned delving into the Star Trek Lit-Verse. My first foray, in that regard, was a book by Greg Cox called Captain to Captain. I enjoyed the book–it was just what I hoped I would find. But I came away feeling under-prepared. There were things happening in the book that I knew nothing about.…
Over Thanksgiving I read Patrick Stewart’s new memoir, Making It So, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Reading it put me in mind of Star Trek, even though Stewart’s time on the show and the films make up a relatively small portion of the book. I know little Star Trek lore beyond what most casual viewers…