Sometimes luck happens. I found a used edition of Alexander McCall Smith 11th novel, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, which I’ve been wanting to read. It’s part of his series about a lady detective who resides in Botswana and opens the first agency in her small country. As I l

In the December issue of More Magazine, Jan Sheehan observes that in some ways we get better as we grow older. One consolation she offers is that while we may have more trouble retrieving words, we know more of them. (“8 Ways Your Body Gets Better with Age,” by Jan Sheehan , More,

Mark Twain said of Rudyard Kipling, whom he admired, “I am not acquainted with my own books, but I know Kipling’s books.” (Hello Goodbye Hello, by Craig Brown, excerpted in The Week, 11/30/12 pg. 41). His remark surprised me the moment I read it. Surely this was excessive praise

During one of my coffees with a friend, I admitted I was thinking of going back to writing short stories rather than novels as the latter are time consuming and cost more to promote than what I earn in sales. My friend smiled sympathetically. Then she told me about a famous rock perfo

A little heralded event happened recently. Philip Roth, author of The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint — and one who has despaired for the direction literature — has decided to stop writing. His last novel, Nemesis was published in 2010 and at 78, he feels he has noth

A few years back, I wrote a fairy tale, Grimahlka, the story of a witch who adopts a human baby. The tale has a medieval, eastern European flavor and takes place in dark woods where, as it does in much of literature, transformations occur. The work was published in Tales of the Talism

A roman a` clef is a story of real people and real life but one given the gloss of fiction. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence mirrors the life of artist, Paul Gauguin, for example. Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald and Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe are two other n

Walter Russell Mead is a serious scholar who writes serious essays. I’ve enjoyed his scribblings over the years and was delighted to find his reviews for two new books in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs: Peace, They Say by Jay Nordlinger and The Global Right Wing and the Clash of

Megan MacKenzie makes a strong case for allowing women to perform full combat roles in the military and calls the current set of regulations discriminatory. (“Let Women Fight” by Megan H. MacKenzie, Foreign Affairs, 11/12/12 pg. 32-42) She adds that women already perform full mili

I just finished another of my Dollar Store book finds. This one was Wheel of Darkness by New York Times bestselling authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I’ve read two others of their works, also Dollar Store finds, Reliquary and Relic. I enjoyed all three of these action packe