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This year I have imposed a new rule: I will buy no books until our annual trip to Ithaca in the fall. I really really need to read up on my own library! I will make a couple of exceptions for special events, like Nickel City Con in June, where I’ll most likely want to buy some graphic novels. But other than that, I’m not buying books until October. Unless, of course, something really unusual happens, like, say…the folks at Taschen offering a sale in which a bunch of their titles are 85% off. Taschen makes gorgeous books. They are the creme de laDown the rabbit hole….

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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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One thing I forgot to mention the other day (aside from citing a visit to a specific Barnes&Noble) is that a big part of our Ithaca vacation each year is a book binge. I save up for quite a while and then…well, here’s what happened this year. This is from three different bookstores: the afore-mentioned B&N in Pittsford, and Ithaca’s Odyssey Books and Autumn Leaves (the latter being a wonderful used bookstore). And then what did I do on Monday? Why, I went to the library and checked out five books! Because, well, it’s what you do. Time to do someDown the rabbit hole….

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How can love persist in a world without memory? That’s the question posed by author Sarina Dahlan in her debut novel, Reset. A while back I received an advance copy of a this novel, and I’m happy to report that it’s a very good book indeed, with a premise that is haunting and intriguing. The setting is a human future, set an indeterminate number of years from now, in which humanity has been reduced to living in just four very large cities after a cataclysmic conflict leaves most of the world a scorched wasteland. In order to keep the seeds ofDown the rabbit hole….

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Yeah, I’m pretty much back to normal this morning. I’m not planning on testing myself again until tomorrow, but it’s really looking like I’ve weathered my own personal COVID storm pretty well. I’m one of the lucky ones for whom it was “just a cold”. Since the worst of my cold passed on Monday, I’ve basically been enjoying what is turning out to be a lovely August week–albeit, a week when I can’t interact with anyone except my immediate family. It’s like house arrest, but without the ankle monitor. Oh well! Writing is also starting to go passingly well again,Down the rabbit hole….

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Sheila O’Malley re-shared her post on the anniversary of Roger Ebert’s passing today, and I thought, why not do the same? Here’s what I posted the day he died. I still miss his writing. There’s something about those Chicago newspaper men…. I was trying to figure out something to write on the passing today of Roger Ebert, but nothing was leaping to mind, so I figured I’d just repost my original thoughts, from January 2012, on his book, Life Itself. I have loved and admired Ebert since I was nine, and his output of thoughtful writing even in the faceDown 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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(Re-upping this one after a discussion of Stephen King on Twitter, and specifically this book, made me remember this post!)   One odd bit of Star Trek lore that I didn’t know about until I read one of William Shatner’s Star Trek Memories books is that, during the 1980s when the Trek movie series was in “another sequel every two years” mode, Gene Roddenberry had a pet idea that he kept trying to get Paramount to adopt for whatever the next movie happened to be. This notion had the Klingons taking over the galaxy by going back in time toDown the rabbit hole….