Via the Serendipity Express, two science-fiction novels have recently crossed my panoply of reading. Or perhaps have trudged should I say they have come across my literary desert, in search of a shared oasis? Or flew in from the internet of (paper) things? In any event, by divergent routes, these two books ended up on […]
Would you like to do something fun? Interesting? Challenging? Read on. Paris. Night is falling. I’m standing on the Rive Gauche. I can hear the Seine and see some lights across the river. Must be the Notre Dame Cathedral. But the lights are odd. Thinking if Paris is the City of Light, there ought to […]
You may have seen this in my previous posts: I thought I’d add a teaser to my JackBoston blogs and let you know what would be coming in the weeks ahead. Great idea, right? But it flopped on the first go-around. Why? The content wasn’t ready for my review. The plan was to write about […]
I hadn’t read a John Grisham novel for some time, but when I saw A Time for Mercy* I was really primed for a great lawyer-courtroom thriller. In that particular respect I wasn’t disappointed, but I had several other issues which seriously impacted my reading pleasure. At 464 pages the book is too long, at […]
After completing my review of Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Underland, I was ready for a thriller. Beijing Payback did not disappoint me. Author Daniel Nieh is a multi-talented creative person with a gift for writing. As I began reading, I saw the earmarks of a carefully crafted story and a manuscript which had be revised, likely […]
I have two friends who are writers. Well, more than two, actually. Many of us exchange our writing with one another. But for the sake of this post, I’m only going to discuss two different types. Friend number one always responds to what I send with comments. I always reciprocate by reading and sharing my […]
I grew up in South Dakota’s Black Hills, a small mountain range that looks as if it had gotten pushed up out of the flat prairie earth that spreads out endlessly on all sides. The Black Hills instilled a lifelong love of mountains and forests in me, which must have been on my barely conscious […]