Year: <span>2017</span>

Did you make your New Year’s resolutions yet? Myself, I don’t make resolutions for the new year, but I think I’m in the minority. Most people try to turn over a new leaf at the start of each new year.

Time was when making it to the “Best-Seller List” was quite an accomplishment, but when it comes to the list, or more properly “lists,” plural, these days, the bloom is off the rose. Why? For two reasons. One I alluded to above: a proliferation of lists. And the other is recent alleged manipulations of lists...

If you were around in the late ’60s/early ’70s, you may remember the bumper stickers and pins and posters that read, WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME? I was reminded of that saying last Saturday. Only it wasn’t a war. It was something that should’ve been much more fun.

I did a booksigning this past Saturday, reading two picturebooks at an area bookstore. I alerted everyone on my local mailing list as well as posting notices on both Facebook and CraigsList, and the bookstore had told me they would do promo as well.

I read the article so long ago that I remember neither where I read it nor all the particulars. It concerned a difference between the genders when reading a novel or watching a movie, particularly one with a romance in it, whether that was the main thrust of the story or merely an incidental thread....

Remember when books were just…books? If you wanted to read a book, you picked up a book…period. In the beginning, all books were hardcover. Then came “mass market”—small paperbacks printed on inexpensive paper, they were mostly westerns for male readers, romances for females. The next advance was “trade paperbacks,” better-quality paperbacks, larger in size and...

Do you have hidden treasure in your home? No, don’t go digging up the floorboards or searching the attic or basement. The “treasure” I’m talking about isn’t stacks of old coins or paper money, squirreled away by a curmudgeon who didn’t trust banks after 1929.

Would you go into your neighborhood supermarket and purloin a bunch of bananas? Would you head to the clothing store and swipe a pair of pants? Unless you’re like a certain fellow I once knew—okay, lived with, but when I learned his true colors I kicked him out—you’re no shoplifter. You may not like or...

I have a friend who’s a “booksale hound.” Whenever there’s a booksale within reasonable driving distance of her home—and she considers well over an hour “reasonable driving distance”—she’s there.

When I was a kid and got sick—chicken pox, measles, or what my doctor termed “Virus X”—I took the opportunity to read as much as I could. “Real” books, comic books—I devoured them all.