Unabashedly Bookish

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...

One of the things I love most about Chick Lit books is their covers. Sassy, colorful, and fun, they often tell a story all their own. And while many critics have mocked these cover images that include anything from long legged women in stilettos to frosted wedding cakes, I’ve always read them proudly (especially in public places!). Read more...

When HBO's miniseries The Pacific hits televisions in 2010, fans will probably hit the bookshelves looking for companion pieces, much as they did with 2001's Band of Brothers. Viewers of that earlier series were fortunate in that they could turn to a historical text of the same name to get a fuller picture. But viewers of The Pacific may find themselves turning to memoirs like Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed and fiction like Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Read more...