Detective Chief Inspector Henry Christie is 50ish, drunken, divorced and promiscuous, but still living with his ex-wife and children. He's the hero of Crunch Time, by Nick Oldham.  He's been asked to go undercover to trap über villain Ryan Ingram, suspected murderer and kiddie/… Read full post »

 

 

A Whole New Mind, written in 2005 by Daniel H. Pink, is a book whose time may have passed. 

Pink's thesis is that in a world of Asia (that is, the existence of places where they can do things like manufacturing, software coding and x-ray reading for far/… Read full post »

 This is the kind of thing I get up to when I'm not occupied with reading....

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The Magic Thief.  By Sarah Prineas,  HarperCollins Children's Books, 2008.

 

  

 

I didn't think there was much that was new and interesting that could be written in the boy-learning-he-is-a-wizard-and-saving-the-world genre.  I was wrong.

 

I won't go i… Read full post »

Making the Cat Laugh.  By Lynne Truss.

This is a collection of columns on single life by British writer Lynne Truss, who also wrote the bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  It's laugh-out-loud funny.

This is a bit on food scares:  A fortnight after Chernobyl, do you just decide… Read full post »

The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa De Carvajal, by Glyn Redworth. 

Luisa De Carvajal was born in 16th century Spain, to a wealthy and well-connected family.  Women of her era and class had two choices - they could marry or they could enter a nunnery.  Luisa chos/… Read full post »

Voss: How I come to America and Am Hero, Mostly, by David Ives 

This is a young adult satire about Voss - don't even try to pronounce his real name, he tells us - from Slobova.  In  Slobova the national symbol is a bowling pin and the national flower is the mustache. … Read full post »

You know those people who always have a book with them?  That's me. 

Those people who don't seem annoyed at waiting in lines, because they've got their nose stuck in the paperback they pulled from their pocket?  That's me, too. 

You may even know one or two eccentrics… Read full post »