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I grew up in a Spanish California house, a style of architecture that was popular in Los Angeles before World War 2: a languid old home with rounded arches thick stucco walls a wrought-iron banister alongside the staircase to the second floor a red-tiled roof that summoned up an image of the sun-drenched Mediterranean …
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Back in my youth, I was a big fan of science fiction: Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and company, the early greats. Then something happened. The genre changed. Perhaps it was since the world had become vastly more complex and the future not so much fun to …
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One of the challenges of being a mystery writer these days, is that the early generations who created the genre were so fiendishly good. Agatha Christie, Arthur Canon Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Dashell Hammett, Ross McDonald and company are simply a hard act to follow – not to mention Raymond Chandler, who in my …
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In my opinion, the funniest writer in the English language may very possibly be P.G. Wodehouse, who is best known for his Jeeves novels – Jeeves the butler, that is, the ever resourceful “gentleman’s personal gentleman” who must forever guide his blundering young employer, the upper crusty …
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When it comes to books, my wife is an ultimate scavenger. A few years back, she went to visit a friend in Gallup, New Mexico, and came back with a boxed, two-volume, hardbound set of W. Somerset Maugham’s complete short stories, published by Doubleday in 1953, which she picked up at a yard sale for the stunning …
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My Favorite Cookbooks I heard recently on the news that supermarkets are losing market share in the U.S. and industrialized countries abroad to businesses that sell prepared meals, packaged foods which one can pop into the microwave. In the very busy world in which we live, people simply don’t have the time to …
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Like most readers, I suspect, in these busy times, I seem to do the majority of my reading about eleven o’clock at night, climbing into bed with a book after a very long day, perhaps with a groan or two of exhaustion. At such moments, I do not want James Joyce, probably not even Dostoevski; what I want is …
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As humans, we take ourselves fairly seriously, imaging we are in charge of the world around us. One of the pivotal moments in our history, anthropologists like to say, is when mankind learned to domesticate plants, becoming farmers instead of hunter-gatherers, thereby insuring a steady food supply and giving birth to …
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Welcome to Book Chat, a column in which we’re going to discuss many things bookish: chat with authors, talk about publishing, romp back and forth through the centuries, and more often than not recommend a pick of the week. Fasten your seat belts because we’re going to go from history to histrionics, biography to …
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