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 […]

My Life So Far by Jane Fonda is a great read which I picked up for background information when Sarah and I went to Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where she made On Golden Pond with her father Henry and Katherine Hepburn. You would think that growing up as the daughter of a big movie […]

Every once in a while, when I get ambitious, I try to tackle the writings of Edmund Wilson, the great man of letters who was my grandmother’s cousin. Lately I’ve been trying to slog through To the Finland Station, subtitled “A study in the writing and acting of history.” The first chapters are about a […]