As I’ve chronicled in this space a few times, friends of mine tend to tell me when they come into possession of great heaping hordes of books. It’s natural among bookish people, I think, and it’s usually not bragging or vindictive. I like to think of it more as sharing the happiness, the sheer giddiness, of that first moment when all of those new acquisitions are finally yours.
There’s always an element of anxious calendar-watching for a reviewer and editor, since newspapers have lead-times and review copies of books tend to appear long before the finished copies
Many years ago, I was invited by an old friend of mine to take part in a funeral. He’d been the lazy proprietor of a off-the-beaten-path little bookshop in a sleepy little town since roughly the Crimean War, always carrying along with nominal business at the cash register, always there for
Recently – I know this will shock you – there was a little dust-up on Twitter. Since this one was about books and the reading and writing world, it was a relatively minor dust-up, of course, but it was almost squarely in my own target-range of interest:
In my reading life, I’ve lost count of how many times some book has prompted me to say “Oh come ON” out loud. Whole generations of beagles have been surprised out of sound sleep by such outbursts on my part over the decades, and the outbursts haven’t all come about for the reason you might think.