Blogroll

Book Review: Skylark Farm and The Exception

My recent interest in foreign fiction — works originally written in a language other than English — continues to pay dividends. In the last two weeks, it produced two wonderful works, Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm and Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. I’ll leave it to those smarter than me to determine if there’s any significance to […]

Another print v. “lit blog” spiel

It seems blog-based book reviewers and so-called “lit blogs” continue to perceived as threats by print reviewers. The latest example is an essay in today’s Boston Globe Ideas section by Sven Birkerts. Titled “Lost in the Blogosphere,” it makes a couple valid points, such as the fact that reviewing is not the same as criticism […]

NASA’s big hangover

My guess is the headache medication hasn’t been dispensed this heavily in NASA’s HR and PR departments since Lisa Nowak’s adventures in February. These two stories — worker sabotages computer destined for International Space Station and employee embezzles $150,000 — are bad enough. This one, though, is horrendous. A panel reviewing astronaut health issues as […]

Midweek marginalia

As I am the only one in my household (other than the dog) who has not read HP7 (I think I dropped off after or about book 4), I’ve had time to gather a few odds and ends from the ether.

One of the best prescriptions I’ve heard about. Gee, really???? (or duh!!!) (Via.) According […]

Armchair traveling

Given the amount of SF I’ve been consuming lately (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”), I’ve decided to embark on one of the many “reading challenges” that circulate in the blogosphere.

Largely because I first learned of it about the time of my post on foreign literature, I’m going to pursue The Armchair Traveler […]