There is a profound affinity between the writer and the carpenter. Each creates something with their hands and fingers. The something for a writer is a novel. On the same scale, the something for a carpenter is a house. Each something requires patience, planning, a choice of materials, a selection of methods, style, appearance. It […]
Sometimes you’re hot. Sometimes you’re not. Sorry to say, this time you’re not, Ms. Lippman. You ran this one right off the rails. Hey, it happens to all artists once in a while. I saw – read – it happen with Lee Child, Kate Atkinson and even, yes even John Sandford. Perhaps we can blame […]
This Saturday’s book review is of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Let me begin by saying Stephen Greenblatt is an absolutely marvelous storyteller. He captured my interest immediately and held it in an iron intellectual grip throughout his book, The Swerve: How the Word Became Modern. I truly don’t want to […]
I have iconoclastic taste in books, so I often don’t recall how I came to choose one novel or another to read. That is not the case with this one. I was intrigued by the title, the name of one of my favorite cities (I’ve been to Taiwan and Taipei five times). Taipei is also […]
The John Corey Chronicles Nelson DeMille, a prolific writer if there ever was one and whom, I am given to understand, writes in longhand (for you millennials, that means he holds a pencil or a pen in his hand and uses it to create words and sentences on paper), has given us great pleasure in […]
Do you “hear” the voices of characters when you’re reading a novel? Do you begin to imagine what characters look like, perhaps even making some assumptions about their personality and values? Do you feel their emotions, from joy to anguish? In other words, do you let your imagination bring the story’s characters to life? I […]
Read the book, skip the movie. It’s a common perception of Hollywood book treatments. Well, today’s review is an exception. Here’s the back story. I was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and came across a mention (I research the heck out of everything!) of another of his great movies, “Rear Window.” Researching a little more I […]