Our book today is A Face Turned Backward, the 1999 second installment in Lauren Haney’s delightful series of murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and featuring stalwart (and easy on the eyes) Lieutenant Bak, commander of the Medjay police force in the frontier town of Buhen during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The book’s […]

It’s always a thing I feel a little bit ashamed to admit, but there it is: I go to comic books mainly for their artwork. I know all about the brilliance of today’s comics writing – I hear about it all the time from comics aficionados, that today’s industry writers are smarter and more literate […]

A good many of you responded favorably to that last “Six for the Scribblers” writer-biography round-up (and some of you pointed out that the entry didn’t, in fact, include six biographies but instead only five, against which my only lame defense is to note that this is “Stevereads” not “Stevecounts”), and since there are EVER […]

Our book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign); it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise (The New York Times called it […]

Our books today are six sterling choices from that strangest of all biographical sub-genres, the literary biography. A writer friend of mine (too soon gone, but his books live on, which is kind of the whole point, isn’t it?) summed up the strangeness rather well one day while we were prowling the Brattle bargain-carts when […]

Our book today is The Queen’s Head, a 1988 murder mystery set in the England of Elizabeth I, written by a first-class hack under the pen-name of “Edward Marston” (there’s an in-joke there, but you’d have to be mighty well-read to spot it, and there’s no class of scribblers better-read, of course, than hacks). The […]

Even a winter-fancying polar bear (or perhaps arctic fox? I’ve had my nose licked by the latter and only been silently, systematically terrorized by the former, so maybe we’ll go with “arctic fox”) such as myself could hardly have complained about the gorgeous summer day that unfurled today in observance of the Boston Public Library’s […]

Our book today is Homer’s Iliad, a choice some of you will have been expecting all throughout this “summer books” thread, since I’ve made no secret of the fact that I re-read Homer every year, the Iliad in June and the Odyssey in August. I use them as mental bookends to what we’ll increasingly need […]

Our books today form an essential part of “summer” reading: trash. I mentioned yesterday the peculiar mongrel enjoyability of a crappy book, but I mentioned it in context of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, which is thickly populated with very brainy authors, most of whom, when sober, would sternly disavow the idea that they ever intentionally wrote […]

Our books today are yet another steady go-to choice for “summer books”: science fiction and fantasy novels, most of which I tend to read during the lazier summer months. Is there any point in concealing the fact that this is because the books themselves are often lazier? Most of them – even the best of […]

Our books today speak and breathe of summer, because June traditionally ushers in the long march of summer in Boston. The days are longer, and usually, at least in June, the evenings slowly glide into fragrant, cool relief from the day’s heat, and something ineluctable changes just a bit in the mental atmosphere. Though I’ve […]