Gore Vidal died on Tuesday, 31 July at the age of 86 due complications from pneumonia; the Internet pretty much blossomed on Wednesday, 1 August, with remembrances and "good riddances", which trickled to a stop by Friday, 3 August (or, in some quarters, Sunday, 5 August ( Read more... )

From Friday, 9 March to Saturday, 10 March, I read Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education (NY: Atlas & Co. Publishers [distributed by W.W. Norton & Company], 2009 [first published in the UK by the Penguin Group]; 173 pps.); this was an expansion of the article she'd had published in Granta, which was the basis of the eponymous 2009 film (which I've yet ( Read more... )

From Friday, 13 January 2012 (how apropos...) to Monday, 16 January 2012 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), I read Stephen King's The Dark Half (NY: Signet [a division of the Penguin Group], 1990 [copyright 1989; previously published in hardcover by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.]; ISBN: 0-451-16731-7; 468 pps. [includes a 16-paged ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from ( Read more... )

Tip o' the shako to pithhelmet, who linked to the "I Write Like" site, which purports to analyze your writing style based on a sample of several paragraphs (not tweets) that you've written.

For shits and giggles, I pasted in my two most recent LiveJournal entries. First, the entry from Saturday, 23 April (a book review of Philip Kerr's A Quiet Flame, the ( Read more... )

I recently re-read What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (NY: Penguin Books, 1980 [first published in the U.S. in 1941 by Random House, Inc.; first published in the UK in 1941 by Jarrolds; first Penguin Books edition published in 1978 with a new afterword by the author; reprinted in 1980]; ISBN: 0-14-00.4795-6; 252 pps.), from Wed., 8 July 2009 ( Read more... )