To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I slowed down as I reached the circle at the edge of the cul-de-sac and started looking at the numbers. Number 37 was a ranch house at about 270 degrees, three quarters of the way around the circle. Blue vinyl siding capped off a flagstone foundation. A couple of fence posts in the corner, with […]
I must have read this book, as I assume that I’ve read all the Travis McGee series, but it hasn’t been recently, so I picked it up as a palate cleanser after the last Robert B. Parker effort. Within this book, McGee reunites with a former acquaintance he had known when she was a teenager. […]
Apparently, this book came along with one of the films when it was released on DVD. As such, it’s marked NOT FOR RESALE. Note that I am personally not in violation of the law here, I hope, since I merely bought this little book at some book fair or garage sale. Hopefully, I can avoid […]
I read Bing’s earlier novel, Lloyd What Happened, in 2006. Wow, what a different world that would have been. It was one of the first books I read after my first son was born, so I no doubt read it while being on call early in the nights during that first week. I was also […]
Apparently some amateur went to the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book fair. You want to know what happens when a real book person goes to book fairs? Here are some case studies.
As Tam predicted when I bought the book two and a half years ago, I enjoyed this collection of roadside attractions, cut-rate museums, and silly tourist traps you find on the edges of US and state highways. It’s interesting to read about the obsessions people of previous generations have had, with things from nuts to, […]
This is a retelling of Firestarter from a conservative perspective. Try as you might, you make the inevitable comparison. Children with mystical powers on the run from bad men who want to exploit them protected by a single parent. The book’s telling has key differences, of course, since Andrew Klavan is not Stephen King and […]
As I mentioned when I bought this book, it would probably be a good book to read during a ball game. It was. I admit I wasn’t that familiar with the Pogo comic strip. Of course, one book doesn’t make me a knowledgeable fan by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t get into it […]
I wouldn’t call it good book hunting. It was nominally the first garage sale weekend, so we hit a couple advertised in the Old Trees local papers. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago when the people decided to throw their sales, it was 70 degrees on the weekend. Yesterday morning, it was 38 with a wind. […]
Well, it surely comes as no surprise that I’ve been on a Star Trek kick lately. I’ve read a number of books in the last couple of months (see this, this, this, and this). Last week, on Tuesday through Friday nights, I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, […]
I bought this book earlier this year at a garage sale here in Old Trees at the same time as I bought my Triumph TR books and New York At Night. So I got it cheap, which is good, and in an gluttonous frenzy of book buying, which is also good, for this is not […]
I bought this book on September 29, 2007, and as I suspected, it’s better than the other city-themed picture book I’ve read this year, Detroit. Whereas that book focused on helicopter shots of the buildings in the city, this book covers New York at night. The text is a bit affected with first person sort […]
I bought this book this weekend for a quarter, a super bargain since it’s a two-fer: It’s the first printing of the Signet movie tie-in edition (with the book review from the New Yorker cut out and tucked in as a bookmark), and I bought the next two books in the series last weekend, so […]
This book collects a bunch of quotations and a couple of poems about happiness. Eh. But the best part is the photos ca. 1972 of people in various states of happiness and 1970s dress. I highlighted some of them when I bought the book, but let me share a few others. They always bring a […]
As I mentioned, I bought this book at an estate sale this weekend. Since it’s one of those lite collections of poetry that came out in the early 1990s, printed by companies happy to have content from the public domain, I assume that Mr. Paul got it as a gift. It contains 43 poems dealing […]
Ladies and gentlemen, I guess I have become a cat person after all. It didn’t start to be this way. In the old days, I was a normal guy, favoring dogs over cats as pets. Of course, for a very long time, we didn’t have pets except for Oscar, the snake my mother wussified by […]
As you may recall, gentle reader, I bought this book earlier this year at the Friends of the Webster Groves Library book fair. It’s a collection of 82 sonnets that tell the arc of the Eve story. You know, Adam and Eve, but not limited to the Genesis account of it. Using that myth as […]
I bought this book at the Kirkwood Book Fair this year; I think all of these book club edition plays come from the same fellow’s library, but different ones are available each year. I wonder what’s up with that. This play, originally from the early 1980s, was made into a movie in 1992, and I […]
Now I remember where I got these books; I bought them at Patten Books for a couple dollars each after I discovered how well they sold on eBay. Unfortunately, I would also later discover that the books available in bookstores tended toward the later, less salable editions. In a final stroke of ill luck, I […]
I bought this book for a dollar at the cheap bookstore in Springfield (you know, the one on Glenstone. Come on, people, work with me here; the name’s not important, the six for five dollars hardbacks in the very back are). As the football season geared up, I thought this would be a worthy read, […]