-

I read a lot. Probably too much. It is keeping me from my household chores, like taking out the garbage.

(Hmm, maybe I should read even more.)

Magazine-wise, I get the New Yorker, People, the Week, Vanity Fair, Florida Sportsman (it has great pictures of fish I can’t seem to catch), Golf Digest (another magazine that highlights my inadequacies), and one or two others that I don’t recall ordering. I also get The New York Times, because I used to work there, and because in my ultra-conservative neighborhood in Florida I like to piss people off.

(I must remember to tip the delivery guy at Christmas; my home must be his only local stop!)

I also read books in print.

Some suggestions: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens; The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson; Black Smoke, by Adrian Miller (which has a great recipe for “Old Arthur’s Pork Belly Burnt Ends”; The Martian and Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.

The last two, by Weir, are of course science-fiction.

But they seem a lot more believable than some of the recent news coming out of Washington!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

STOUT READING!

-
I devour books, in all forms. Most of them in their print version, which may surprise some people who have labeled me an apologist for all things Amazon and Kindle-ish. But I am an unregenerate library rat. The city where I live, Naples, FL, has the best library system I’ve ever seen. The Headquarters Library is housed in a building that resembles the Alamo (pre-Santa Anna), and there are more branches in town than Publix supermarkets, which as anyone in Florida knows, seems impossible. As a thriller and mystery writer myself, I’m always looking for inspiration, so I recently grabbed some Nero Wolfe mysteries. Addictive? Think Hershey’s Kisses or N.C.I.S. I don’t know why I picked up Might As Well Be Dead , my first Wolfe. I didn’t even know much about the author, Rex Stout, who sounds like a star of silent Westerns, but is in reality one of the finest mystery writers this, or any country, has ever produced. After finishing Migh t, I rushed out to get the first two Nero Wo...
Read more

I HEAR YOU!

-
A couple of years ago, I  devoted a column  to the popularity of audiobooks. I recounted how some members of a golf group I occasionally joined were enthusiastic audiobook aficionados. I was asked why my books weren’t part of the “lucrative” audio market. I don’t see many of those golfers much anymore. I’m not the president; I don’t really play all that often. Besides, the pandemic shut down the course for a long while, and when it reopened, only walking was allowed. After 18 holes in the heat (and it’s been brutal), returning golfers look like they were at a casting call for “The Walking Dead . ” I walked only nine holes until golf carts were allowed back. You have to ride alone now, unless you’re with your wife (the rationale being, I suppose, that couples who golf together want to kill each other anyway.) But if I do run into those duffers, I can’t wait to tell them that I now have an audiobook in the works. To recap, there are three ways to create an audiobo...
Read more

FORE!

-
No, this isn’t about my golf game. (For those that are interested, my handicap is now 26 and rising faster than ocean levels. Pretty soon, I’ll be getting strokes on the practice range!) I’m talking about fore shadowing, fore boding, fore telling and fore warning. I once saw an interview with Sidney Sheldon, who according to Wikipedia is “the king of the potboilers” and “the seventh-best-selling fiction writer of all time”. Sheldon, who didn’t start writing fiction until he was 50 and died at 90 in 2007, said that he started with an idea but never knew where his books were going. He added that he liked to write himself into corners, and then write himself out of them.  That’s basically how I do it and that’s where the “foreshadowing, foreboding, foretold and forewarning” come in, since I don’t want my readers to be lost, too. I use computer-writing software called Scrivener, which allows me to put chapters, research, ideas, scenes and odd thoughts (of which I have many) on el...
Read more