Unabashedly Bookish

I still turn to books when I need to remove myself from the stresses of the real world. And with the holidays fast approaching—and A LOT of family time on the horizon—there are several books I plan to lose myself in when I just can’t pretend to enjoy Aunt Betty’s story about her latest cross-stitch pattern for One. More. Minute. Read more...

Back before my wife and I started our family, I would go mountain biking with a group of friends every Sunday and we would inevitably seek out new trails in the wilderness, be it a barely visible deer run or a path that we created ourselves with a machete and some pruners. And – oh! – the wonders we discovered because of this decision: the remains of old farmhouses hidden deep in the woods, overgrown tunnels from a long abandoned munitions plant, a secluded pond in an ethereal sunlit grove... Read more...

As a lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy who is well entrenched in middle age - my beard is now more gray than it is brown and I'm proudly rocking the bifocals - I love looking through publisher catalogues and websites to discover a few months ahead of time what literary gems are going to be released through the upcoming year. And of all of those enticing titles that I add to my "to read" list, I'm particularly intrigued by a small subgroup: the science fiction/fantasy reissue. (You know you're old when the books you read in your youth are now being repackaged and republished to a new generation of readers as genre "classics"!) It's fascinating to me to see which novels are unearthed and given new life – and just as fascinating to try to figure out why exactly publishers have chosen to resurrect a particular title. Read more...

Martin Eisenstadt is a pundit with a credibility problem. This hardly qualifies as a shocking revelation; most pundits have credibility problems. You don't make your bones predicting the future without some errors. As Smooth Jimmy Apollo said on The Simpsons: "Well, folks, when you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time." But Eisenstadt has a bigger problem than most pundits face: even if just days ago he defended himself here on the Barnes & Noble forums, still almost nobody thinks he exists. Read more...

Last night I saw a powerful play out about the health care debate, Anna Deveare Smith's Let Me Down Easy. Smith writes in a unique way: She writes one-woman plays by recording interviews with real people, cutting them to size, and committing them to memory. She becomes each of her interviewees on stage, to present the sort of powerful discussion that would never happen, by chance, around a dinner table. Read more...

That scary, eager young teacher with the bright red pencil and the old-fashioned, rather smelly sweater - she might have taught you grammar but probably never taught you how to tell whether you need a comma between multiple adjectives such as scary, eager, young, bright, red, old-fashioned, and rather smelly. What's the secret? Read more...

Who is Dani Noir? Read more...

The naughty-yet-useful advice featured in "Lessons from a Scarlet Lady" hits delightfully close to home for men and women. Read more...

Most of those who will remember Huxley will remember him, unless some shift in social consciousness turns future readers' attention onto one of his many other books, as the author of Brave New World, a book that has been upstaged by another novel that imagines a dystopian future, that is, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the apparently superior vision of the future that awaits us, if not in 1984 perhaps in 2084. But Huxley may have been more correct than those in the twentieth century realized. Read more...

R.A. Salvatore is so much more than an adventure fantasy novelist. He’s a philosopher, a sage, a literary shaman, a changer of lives. To those who have never actually read one of Salvatore’s novels featuring the dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden, the superficial storyline may seem like just another stereotypical fantasy adventure – a misfit group of cardboard RPG characters (an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, a halfling, etc.) running around a fantastical realm embarking on quests and battling the monstrous forces of darkness. But that would be like calling the Tao Te Ching just a bunch of old poetry… Read more...