In 2013 I added another platform to the tried-and-true (and, if truth be told, still preferred by me), 650-year-old printed and bound book platform: the missus sold me her Kindle Fire 7" last February, after she'd bought a Kindle Fire HD. I had a brief scare with it in April, when it mysteriously quit working, but the missus was able to dope-slap ( Read more... )

I'm almost halfway through reading Robert Hughes's Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History (2012); while it's entertaining and interesting enough in its way, it's not a patch on Hughes's magnum opus The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding (1986).

As usual, I'm finding that Rome's index is only partially complete; if only I ( Read more... )

The 7 February 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books has a book review essay by Avishai Margalit, a contemporary of the Israeli novelist-cum-memoirist Amos Oz, of the English translation of Hadara Lazar's Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel (originally published in Hebrew in 1990 as The Mandatorians: The Land of Israel 1940-1948; ( Read more... )

I've pretty much made my peace with my hard drive becoming infected and needing to be wiped before being resurrected a few years ago, save only for two things: one, a mild regret over the loss of my final post on David Copperfield (in which I was arguing that the book's subtitle should've been "I Get Hard for Retards," given the titular hero's ( Read more... )

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... )

From Saturday, 22 September 2012 to Thursday, 8 November 2012, I read Frances Yates' The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (NY: Routledge Classics [Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & NY], 1979, 2001; ISBN: 0-415-25409-4; 263 pps.).

( Read more... )

I recently got through the third season of Californication; that's the Showtime series starring David Duchovny as the congenital horn-dog, drunkard and druggie (and occasional published author) Hank Moody. Hank apparently really loves his pubescent daughter, the Wednesday Addams-lite Becca (Madeleine Martin), and her mom, Hank's on-again/off-again ( Read more... )

First we had Gore Vidal's not-unexpected passing last Tuesday, 31 July.

Then we learned of the death, on Thursday, 2 August, of Sir John Keegan, certainly one of, if not the, preeminent military historians of the late 20th century, and one noted for the attention that he paid to the psychological effects of war upon men in works such as 1976's ( Read more... )

The May 2012 issue of Harper's (Vol. 324, No. 1944) has an especially infuriating "Annotation"; this is the regular two-paged feature wherein a rotating list of writers take a document and expound upon it, prizing out the backstory and nuance that might otherwise escape the attention of the casual reader ( Read more... )

From Sunday, 1 January 2012 to Tuesday, 17 January 2012, I read Robert Murphy's Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 1920-60 (London: Faber and Faber Limited; 1993; ISBN: 0-571-15442-5; 182 pps.).

( Read more... )