From Thursday, 19 September through Sunday, 6 October, I read Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Flame in Byzantium (NY: Tor [Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.], 1987; 406 pps.; book club edition). The wraparound cover (below) is by San Julian; apparently the woman on the cover is supposed to be the lead character here, Atta Olivia Clemens, but she looks more ( Read more... )

I began reading James Morrow's Towing Jehovah (NY: Harvest Books [Harcourt, Inc.]; 1994; 1995 trade paperback edition; ISBN: 0-15-600210-8; 384 pps.) on Saturday, 3 January 2009, but I officially abandoned it on Sunday, 29 September 2013, after stalling out around 200-odd pages.

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For various and sundry reasons (one of which happens to be a still-ongoing series of trials and tribulations with my spouse's and my vehicles, plus [PERSONAL CRAP], still more [PERSONAL CRAP], a bout of some non-specific gastrointestinal complaint, and a comedy of errors of an audit at work that dragged on two weeks longer than it should have), I' ( Read more... )

When one of my co-workers deigns to chit-chat with me, he can sometimes say something that will really make me scratch my head in bafflement ( Read more... )

From Monday, 5 March to Wednesday, 4 April, I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945 [portions of the novel were previously published in abbreviated form in Town and Country]; 351 pps.); this is the original version, not the revised edition ( Read more... )

I still haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), but, what with the 23 December release of the U.S. movie adaptation of the first book, directed by David Fincher (Alien 3, se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin ( Read more... )

I read Richard Condon's A Trembling Upon Rome (NY: Pinnacle Books; 1983 [1st mass market paperback Pinnacle edition published in January 1985]; ISBN: 0-523-42324-1; 382 pps.) from Wednesday, 7 September through Sunday, 2 October.

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Since the U.S. media have been falling over themselves trying to bat clean-up on Vanity Fair's big scoop in its July 2005 issue, announced on Tuesday, 31 May -- that the one-time number two man at the FBI and heir-apparent to J. Edgar Hoover, W. Mark Felt, now an ailing 91-year-old, was "Deep Throat," the anonymous source that helped steer the ( Read more... )

**EDITED 4 September 2004 due to an unrepairable tag.**

Last week I finished reading a book by one of the 20th century's greatest literary enigmas, B. Traven; the book that I read was the first of his series of six Jungle Novels, Government, published by Ivan R. Dee, Publisher of Chicago.  I'm not sure what the original publication date of ( Read more... )