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A great book, as long as you’re not a “just one more chapter before bed” kind of reader. Virginia Woolf will not demarcate bedtimes in her art, thank you very much! (I’m such a snob. I hate movie tie-in editions, and this one also has a “reading guide” at the end.) The story follows a […]

Or: Murder She Wrote…IN SPACE! I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the subtitle on the cover “The Midsolar Murders.” A pun made it onto the cover. I’m going to like this book. Earth has recently been contacted by aliens who are far and away technologically superior to humans. Outside a few official diplomatic missions,

Jumpers is one of my favorite Tom Stoppard plays. (Disclosure: I’ve never seen it, just read it.) It’s set in an alternate universe where the moon landing, accomplished by Great Britain, ended in disaster, rather than triumph.  The lunar module was damaged to the point that it could only lift off with the weight of

Or:  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…IN SPACE! The Galactic Empire’s been going strong for 12,000 years, but now is beginning to stagnate. Careful observers see signs of stress fractures, especially out on the frontier. Twenty-five million inhabited worlds is a lot to ask any one Emperor to control, after

Even though it doesn’t cast me in a good light, I’ll tell you the reason I grabbed this copy of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám at the most recent used book fair. I just finished reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (write-up to follow!). Throughout that entire book, the one “off” note in the

Before I read “The Odyssey,” I thought I was pretty familiar with “The Odyssey.” There was Wishbone’s version, of course, and probably some illustrated kids’ edition, and a live-action movie with campy special effects that I must have been shown in middle school. If I’d been asked to recount the story from memory, the Cyclops

“The Princess Bride” is one of those books that, by the time I actually got around to reading it, I was pissed that I was only just then getting around to reading it. Surely, someone should have made sure I understood how good this book was. But no. I was forced to discover it for

This is an unusual choice for a blog post subject, for a blog that purports to about me reading the books on my bookshelf. The book is “Fra Keeler” by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.  I haven’t read it, and it’s not on my bookshelf. I own it, and I fully intend to read it,

Thanks to Sherlock Hemlock from Sesame Street, I can honestly say that I’ve loved parody detectives longer than I’ve loved detective fiction. If you don’t remember Sherlock Hemlock, probably take a couple minutes on YouTube and get to know him. (Just for your own personal growth and development journey – it’s not remotely relevant for