While watching a movie earlier today, I heard my phone ring, and hit the mute button on the television remote. I was mildly surprised when closed captioning appeared on my screen, as I’d forgotten the mute button did that. It’s what comes from using the tivo and uverse remotes more than the actual television one, [...]

It’s a classic scene. The young woman is driving down a twisting road with her long blonde hair streaming behind her, and suddenly, she realizes she’s going too fast. She slams her feet down on the Corvette brakes, but nothing happens – the brake lines have been cut! For my last “common themes” list of [...]

I’m adding a book to my wishlist because I saw it on the $4.98 table months ago, didn’t buy it, and it amused me. It’s called Manifold Destiny and it’s all about how to cook on your car engine. While it does not offer tips on how to grill burgers on your billet grille, it [...]

If Barnes and Nobel was closer, it might well become my second home. It’s already my favorite weekend destination. Oh, we have a library in the neighborhood, and I used to be a frequent haunter of libraries, but used books smell funny, and I don’t like to have to give things back. We have a [...]

You’d have thought, by listening to the intensity in his voice, that the old man was trying to find a decent New York Moving Company willing to transport a grand piano between boroughs, but no, he was merely consulting with the Barnes and Noble info-desk dude about a book he really needed to have. “Can [...]

Hola, everyone. I’m back from Mexico, where I barely had time to read, though I did finish The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell who also wrote Blink, and re-read a good portion of Anne Rivers Siddons’s Outer Banks because a weathered copy was in the casita and I needed something in the bathroom. Bathroom reading [...]

While packing today I’ve been feeling rather like I’m planning an escape, except that all I’m escaping is the winter doldrums, and the not-even-terribly-cold weather that I really can’t complain about. I don’t really travel to escape. I read to escape. When life feels like one endless treadmill, albeit one without the benefit of granting [...]

An advertisement for Amazon’s “Kindle” e-book reader has me contemplating e-books again. I go through stages where I almost like the notion of reading via screen, keyboard and fiber cable, but then I come back to my love of printed covers and textured pages, and the fact that even the most expensive e-book reader isn’t [...]

At the dinner-party we attended earlier this evening there was some talk of cruises, and specifically Alaskan ones. We all agreed that a cruise of the Inside Passage would be fabulous. On the way home, singing Christmas carols with Fuzzy, I thought about the collection of books I have that involve cruise ships. Most, of [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot that characters in fiction either have very high-profile or very low-profile careers, and they’re generally pretty generic, so that if they need to plausibly have a lot (or very little) of money, the author can arrange that. You see lawyers, for example, but do you ever see a mesothelioma lawyer [...]