Too many roll over. But I did get to see a photo, asking for ID, of a large snapping turtle head skeleton that had come ashore. Much discussion ensued, someone saying that was their first husband. Also Vatican announced cremation was fine, but not ash scattering or jewelry-making. Perfect response from one was that they wanted their ashes scattered in St Peter's Square, with boombox accompaniment of Highway to Hell. Chuckle.

Had to go back and apologize to so many friends who said "you'll love Louise Penny" and I always said "sounds too schmaltzy." Wrong. Just finished her most recent A Great Reckoning. Good reading. Unique mysteries. Interesting history of Canada. GENTLE, honest, kind characters. Started with the first book, now, am part of a family I truly respect, laugh with, admire, and cry a little when finish the latest book. Always wish I knew more people like Ruth, and love the title of her book of poetry: FINE. ( I won't give it away.) Happy reading.

Also late to the game, now reading The Boys in the Boat. Wonderful. Absorbing. Really makes me wish I was born in an earlier generation.

What election?

Got an email that I have an A/R, took me a moment of mystification to translate that. But I have sent cheques $additional $1500 CDN for new A/R. The news is that the process server finally contacted my effing contractor (after latter avoid two earlier attempts) and he has until Halloween to reply. This shit has been going on since April. An albatross. That might have been my US escape path. No Sheetrock inside. No water or septic connections.

Dorothy Sayers. My favorite is Gaudy Night.
Love all British mysteries. P.D. James, mostly the earlier ones.
And what I call the "gentle" books: Barbara Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jane Gardam.

All the Iris Murdock novels. When someone asks me who is my favorite author, I always say, "you mean not counting, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West ."

If there are other lovers of British authors, I hope you've read 84 Charing Cross Road. A real treasure.

any idea about his politics! That's excellent, I'll enjoy him even more next time!

I like escapist entertainment. Probably one of the best is Lincoln Child's Lethal Velocity. Set in the ideal theme park, Utopia, where everything starts to go very wrong.

I also like John Grisham's Gray Mountain because it goes beyond good escapist entertainment into actual real issues (and is set nearby in coal country).

and for the really nice essay that brought us to him, CStS. I love the periods of radical socialism/anarchism and workers rights movements, from the 1870's to 1930's. Will definitely look for Stout next time I'm out.

How I come to discover then read authors is a little like how I exposed myself to music at a young age. I was omnivorous for discovery, insatiable with curiosity. Many times it was reading about the influences of the authors (as in music). And always talking with other obsessed, passionate fans. With authors specifically if I am introduced in the context of his or her writing to another I make a mental note and look into it on a cursory level. If the name then appears again while I'm reading elsewhere I know it is someone I need to investigate and plunge in, sometimes to the exclusion of most else for a period. Happens all the time.

There are some great, inexpensive used books stores in Bklyn that I treasure and can hardly go into without leaving with an armful, sometimes titles I really that I add to the small pile of extras to be given to friends (anybody else do that?). Fairly recently we invested in a shelving system that screws right in the wall, so all the wall space can be used. Even so, the shelves are bulging.

Of course then theres also the digital format, where through the iTunes store and for free are many great old titles that have gone into the public domain. So onto my iPad I've downloaded tons of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Thoreau, Victor Hugo, Knut Hamsun, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Chekov, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, etc. I mostly only use this device to read in bed, especially now that Ibooks has updated the program, so that if you're reading in the dark the backlighting will adjust to an all black screen with white typeset, which gives off much less light.

At the moment in that format one of the handful of books I'm currently reading is by Herbert Spencer from the 1850's on the education system and the radical departures he was introducing against rote learning (even in that day!) and instead advising a more organic approach that dignifies and encourages a child's own intuitive curiosities, as well as stressing an integration with nature and science. I'm cross-referencing that with Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Friere. Got a baby coming up on his first birthday and have great misgivings about the American public school system, which my preconceptions about are already deep in the negative.

As I sit on the floor and type, the contents of the stack of books closest to me now are these: "The New Class Society: Goodby American Dream?" by Wysong, Petrucci and Wright (which I got a sociology conference I attended by way of invitation by two professor friends); "Catch-22," the Christopher Hitchens memoir, the aforementioned Freire book, "The Power Elite" by C. Wright Mills (which led to a great conversation on a flight a few weeks ago with a like-minded radical psychologist who taught at a co-operative school in San Fransisco in the 70's); "Upside Down" by Eduardo Galeano (who I was introduced to by Democracy Now in a tribute to his life); and "Flyboy" by Greg Tate.

Thanks for the thread!

and Kafka.

Somehow both seem more and more relevant these days.

last one being The Mother Hunt. Somehow that one escaped me until a few months ago. I started reading them in junior high and it took me until recently to be able to say that I had read all of them. I've read many of them than once. For me the writing still holds up and Archie's wise cracks never get stale. And happily I have a attic, basement, and a corner of my bedroom, full of books. I love books. I love to hold a book in my hand and read it. Of all my personal possessions my books are what I love most.

Rex Stout had the perfect touch of humor running through his murders. That's what sets him apart from everyone else. Archie was the perfect wise guy and Fritz Brenner is the perfect foil. I had a copy of Too Many Cooks that had recipes for the dishes that were served to the dinner guests. And I read one time that 'fans of Nero Wolfe are the detective fiction equivalent to Trekkies. There also is the Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout which can be downloaded online.

I got into mysteries with Poe. (That's how I learned to do cryptograms - from The Gold Bug.) Next Sherlock Holmes (I am quite a Holmes fanatic) and after that the great Agatha Christie. Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books are wonderful but they contain very little humor and unlike Stout, the solutions to his crimes are always due to some break in the case (usually thanks to Paul Drake) whereas Stout always put the clues to solve the mystery in his stories, you just had to think (I rarely guessed who the killer was, I almost always had to wait for the big reveal.)

This has been a really pleasant essay. I was crabby before I read it (had to go to traffic court with my son) but this pleasant stroll down memory lane discussing Rex Stout makes me want to go upstairs and dig around in my books and find some Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin to read. Thanks!

history of binge reading, from subjects, like exploration & explorers, to authors, to characters, including Nero Wolfe. For years now, however, I haven't even been able to keep up with my magazines, which tend to be on the heavy side, like Scientific American and such.