Quotes Out of Context
Or, why I'm an Anglophile. From the Sept. 2008 Oldie: "[Duncan] Campbell recalls bumping into former bank robber Bobby King in a pub. 'He had done an Open University degree in prison. He was...
View ArticleA Day in the Life of Doris Lessing
I think I'd find a report of a typical or atypical day in anyone's life interesting, and Doris Lessing's, a mixture of 'what I do each day' with her reflections on health, life, and reading, is no...
View ArticleWhat I'm Reading Lately ... Death, Death and Certainty
My irregular annotated link dump: >> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm: The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway?...
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What Makes You So Desperately Unhappy?
Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at...
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Reginald Hill Interviewed
Shelf Awareness briefly interviews one of my favourite crime novelists, Reginald Hill, for their daily email, timed for the publication of his latest Dalziel and Pascoe mystery, The Price of Butcher's...
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The Likeness
Just finished The Likeness by Tana French, which follows on her evocative debut of last year, In the Woods, both set in Ireland. The Likeness would be a great readlike for Donna Tartt's The Secret...
View ArticleWho Deserves What?
PD James' latest Dalgliesh crime novel, The Private Patient (2008), is set largely in Devon at a manor house-cum-plastic surgery center. Central themes seem to include worthiness and what we deserve,...
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Out of Context: The Price of Butcher's Meat
Just finished Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat (2008; published as A Cure for All Diseases in the UK), which was strong on Dalziel (still recuperating), introduced budding psychologist and...
View ArticleBankruptcy
Bill Gorton: "How did you go bankrupt?" Mike Campbell: "Gradually, and then suddenly." -- Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises
View ArticleRIP Harold Pinter, 1930-2008
From the NYT obit: "Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his...
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