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Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go To heal my heart and drown my woe. Rain may fall and wind may blow, And many miles be still to go, But under a tall tree, I will lie, And let the clouds go sailing by. Drinking Song from The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien. A while back I embarked on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. My progress has been slower than usual, because of reasons, but as ever I find myself loving this story deeply, and Tolkien’s luminous, lyrical writing continues to astonish and amaze me. I amDown the rabbit hole….

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I’m going to try, in 2022, to write a monthly recap of the books (and other things) I read each month. I had a good reading month and am well on my way to meeting my annual goal of 52 books! I track this on Goodreads, and I feel no qualms in including graphic novels in my reading; a good graphic novel is its own challenge and reward because the art demands attention as much as the words. I will also admit that I’m trying to get ahead of my Goodreads challenge a bit because I have some long “doorstop”Down the rabbit hole….

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There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them. —The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller In a real way, an era of my life can be defined by novels I read with the word “Bridge” in the title. This period started in the back half of my senior year of high school, when I read Richard Bach’s The Bridge Across Forever, a book (and author) with which I have a long and mildly complicated history: But back to that afternoon in the bookstore: the lastDown the rabbit hole….

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Cecily Strong is one of my favorite performers on what is a very strong present cast on Saturday Night Live. In fact, this particular season she is getting featured a lot more than usual, possibly because Kate McKinnon has been on a leave from the show while she makes a movie. Strong is brilliantly versatile and funny, most notably for the shrill bombast she evinces when she is impersonating FOX News “personality” Jeanine Pirro. Strong also did a recent bit during an installment of SNL’s “Weekend Update” where, while dressed as a clown, she discussed the fact that she had an abortionDown the rabbit hole….

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An interesting discussion erupted over on Twitter the other day, occasioned by this tweet: https://twitter.com/nakedvix/status/1448595705128529920 Almost exclusively the discussion hewed to one side of this argument: that it is, in fact, deeply silly to suggest that a reader is insulting an author by leaving a book unfinished, for whatever reason. One writer and book commenter and critic and reader after another came forth to insist that no, as a reader, you absolutely should stop reading books that for whatever reason aren’t clicking for you. You owe the author nothing, and there is utterly no insult to an author simply because one reader didn’tDown the rabbit hole….

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Sometimes people cite the lack of browsing as a reason why it sucks that the independent bookstore has fallen on hard times in these, the Days of Amazon and other online retailers. And that’s true: one of the great joys for me, as a bookish person, is wandering through the shelves of this bookstore or that, seeing what random things I may find that I didn’t even know I wanted (while likely carrying around a stack of things I already knew I wanted). Well, indie bookstores seem to be rebounding of late, but there’s another place where you can getDown the rabbit hole….

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It’s been my experience that any baseball fan will hate at least one of New York City’s two teams, either the Yankees or the Mets. I’ve never really hated either, which makes me an outlier, I suppose. I just like New York City too much to hate on its teams (though that can’t be the only factor, as I adore Boston the city and yet I’d like to see all of its teams fired into the sun*). Back when there were only four divisions in Major League Baseball, the Mets were in the same division as my team, the Pirates,Down the rabbit hole….

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Greetings, Programs! The last few years I’ve adopted a self-challenge on Goodreads to keep my reading on track: 52 books a year. And I’ve been successful, so, yay, me! Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. It’s fuel for stories, as much as food is for life. Writers who don’t read are kidding themselves. Anyway, if you want to see the roster of everything I read in 2019, feel free to peruse my Goodreads shelf for 2019. It was a good year for reading, and I didn’t suffer through too many slumps last year, which was nice. “Reader’sDown the rabbit hole….