Alas, my quick trip to Assembly Row in Somerville didn’t end well. The idea was for me to go see The Odyssey in IMAX comfort, but… First of all, it turned out that I wasn’t feeling well. I had a… Read More ›
Books
Murder off the Page
Are you a New Yorker? Are you a librarian? Perhaps someone you know is both a New Yorker and/or a librarian? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then Murder off the Page is for you. Or… Read More ›
With Prejudice
You may or may not know that Robin Peguero is a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida’s 27th District. You may or may not know that he is also a novelist… and the author of With Prejudice…… Read More ›
Happy birthday (or maybe not), Messrs. Strunk and White!
When I was a teen — i.e. before I knew better — I thought highly of Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style. It came highly recommended by the establishment, and even though I was suitably anti-establishment back in the… Read More ›
Dine and Die on the Danube Express
Someone recommended this book to me — I wish I could remember who. But maybe it’s just as well that I can’t. Written by one Peter King, not Agatha Christie, it was clearly inspired by Christie’s famous detective novel. But… Read More ›
Unabridged
You do remember Stefan Fatsis, right? Maybe from NPR, maybe from Word Freak/Scrabble. Now he has published a must-read called Unabridged. Yes, as you suspect, it’s about dictionaries. In particular, it’s about Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English… Read More ›
The story of classic crime in 100 books
The longer you spend trying to decode this book title, the more confused you will be. You can probably think of six different interpretations before breakfast, depending on what you think story, classic, crime, and books might mean in this… Read More ›
First do no harm.
Yes, I do know what they say about books and their covers. And I do love S.J. Rozan’s Lydia-Chin-and-Bill-Smith series. But I was still initially irritated as soon as I glimpsed the cover of the latest book in that series,… Read More ›
At Midnight Comes the Cry
As you can see in the image below, that’s the title of a novel by Julia Spencer-Fleming. If you like having the context that you can get by reading previous books in a series, you may want to go back… Read More ›
Vance and Moore… back when both of them were younger
Every day, it seems, I read something by or about two of our distinguished politicians: J.D. Vance and Wes Moore. Well, one of them is distinguished; the other is, well… what are the appropriate adjectives to describe someone who has… Read More ›
The Dry
This is not a review. More of a warning, I suppose. The reason it’s not a review is that I can’t write one for a book that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t even come close to finishing Jane Harper’s… Read More ›
The Little Altar Boy
No, not the song by that name, nor the TV series. What I’m reviewing here is the 2020 crime novel of that name, written by John Guzlowski. (Why, you ask, am I so late to read and review it? It’s… Read More ›
Death of the Party
Take one part gothic thriller, two parts cozy mystery clichés, and three parts Agatha Christie, stir them all up and you get Carolyn Hart’s Death of the Party. It’s a serviceable combination of those components, but what stands out is… Read More ›
A note from Langston Hughes to my dad
Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughes’s co-author, Milton Meltzer, added his own autograph… Read More ›
Enough is enuf.
This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe Henry… Read More ›
Friends with words
Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (think about it). If you yourself are… Read More ›
Language city: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York
The title and subtitle may make this book sound rather esoteric. But in that case they are unintentionally misleading. You don’t have to be a linguist or a cultural anthropologist to enjoy reading Language City. If I still have your… Read More ›
A slowly dying cause
What do you know about Cornwall? Cornish hens, I suppose. And Cornish pasties, but only if you’ve been to Britain. That’s probably it, unless you have an esoteric linguistic interest in the lesser-known Celtic languages, as I do for some… Read More ›
The Last One
Don’t read this novel if you are susceptible to nightmares! Amazon calls Will Dean’s The Last One “an unputdownable locked-room thriller,” which is true as far as it goes. I would like to tell you more, but I don’t know… Read More ›
A Scourge of Vipers
My one-word review is “meh.” Bruce DeSilva’s A Scourge of Vipers is not a bad mystery. (There’s litotes for you. You can look it up, as I think I said in my last post in a different context, though still… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 