What I’m Reading

  I got a deal on a copy of The Sixties by Edmund Wilson at the Whately Antiquarian Book Center, marked down from $35 to a buck. Who knew the journals of this crusty old gentleman could be such fun? There are quite a few references to my grandmother, his cousin, and her brother Sandy, […]

The bad news is that the Whately Antiquarian Book Center is closing. I can’t tell you how many hours of enjoyment I have had from the hundreds of books I purchased there. The good news is they’re offering a lot of excellent bargains. Almost all the books are a dollar or two, even the ones […]

I’m reading my 20th Spencer novel  by Robert B. Parker, and while I have found that some of them are positively preposterous, and all are very formulaic, I still enjoy reading about Spencer beating up thugs, making love to Susan Silverman, and quoting poetry. In Painted Ladies, the wife of a murder victim alludes to a […]

I just finished my 17th Spenser mystery by Robert B. Parker — ‘Silent Night.’ Coincidentally, it’s the last one he wrote, or rather co-wrote. He was working on it when he died and Helen Brann, his literary agent for 32 years, finished it, with the blessing of Parker’s wife Joan. Obviously it’s a formula I’m […]

I was very sad to learn that the Whately Antiquarian Book Center is being sold and will be out of business in January. It’s been on the market for some time, and there was some hope someone would buy it and keep running it as a bookstore, but no such luck. Now they’re having a […]

I’m enjoying a book I picked up many years ago at a tag sale called ‘A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman.’ It was one of those books I thought I might read one day and never did. Now I’m culling my library, and I’ve disallowed the category of ‘read some […]

I guess I’ve reached my intellectual nadir. I’m now too lazy to read anything except mysteries by Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton. I’ve been a Grafton fan for many years. I love visiting Kinsey Milhonne and her found family in Santa Theresa, California. I read ‘Double Deuce’ by Robert B. Parker several years ago, […]

I’ve been having great fun with a book I got at the Emily Dickinson Museum called Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon. The Dickinson family had a grandmother, Lucretia Gunn, who was “tart and ill-tempered.” When anyone said anything nasty, it was excused as Grandma Gunn coming out. This was probably behind Emily’s line […]