clock … watching time, the only true currency

While I panned In Danger’s Path, I enjoyed The Hostage from W.E.B. Griffin for one reason: I listened to it. As an unabridged audiobook which doesn’t demand much attention, nor require a constant memory of the previous character “development,” The Hostage swallowed many boring driving hours for me this summer and fall. I have other [...]

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I should be ashamed to admit that I read Ted Bell’s Pirate. And I am, mildly. Still, I bounce around in my reading, and candy has its place among the food groups, too (or something like that). If I’m going to record the books I’ve read, I want to capture all of it. I certainly [...]

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Not planned, but found myself doing anything and everything but updating the blog this summer. More than a dozen books and a handful of movies await a capsule review, or at least an aside. School starts for the kids today, and the education from our adhesive customers is in the near future. Oh, and a [...]

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I haven’t read a word of the fiction that makes Haruki Murakami famous. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running logs the author’s real-world training for the New York City Marathon. The structure of the training journal doesn’t bound the words or topics, though. Subtitled “A Memoir,” the book explains the start of [...]

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The trailers for Gran Torino menace, and the film darkens your spirit from time to time. A retired auto worker buries his wife, and then faces the changes in his neighborhood with the same coldness (at first) he shows his less-than-agreeable children.
But any gloom in Clint Eastwood’s new movie is lifted by simple moments and [...]

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I clicked on Seth Godin’s head long ago. Given all he’s shared online, I haven’t spent much time with his books. But The Dip was front and center at the library last weekend, and admirably small and brief, so it was an impulse read. With the goal of being the best in the world, with [...]

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I thought I owned Watchmen, but couldn’t find it on the shelf. So, with all the building hype about the imminent film, I decided to buy and read the graphic novel ahead of the movie’s release. Quite a tale. Follow the first link if you want a summary, but flip through a print copy for [...]

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I’ve used a webcam since 2003, and I was excited about it then for family communication. Today’s New York Times article “Grandma’s on the Computer Screen” talks about the growing trend among extended families to use webcams to stay in touch, especially for grandparents and their grandchildren.
Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering [...]

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I succumbed to the re-re-read for 10 Lb. Penalty, by Dick Francis. Now I’m going to put this very tasty book in the bag to leave the house and give it a new home. Never a problem to return to old favorites, especially for such bon-bons, but I won’t need a fourth reading.

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After this summer’s revelation, I picked up another Alan Furst novel, Kingdom of Shadows. The story almost matches the cover for noir. Paris again serves as the hub, but most of the action takes place in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Nice page-turner in dangerous pre-World War II Europe, where the inevitability of war made [...]

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