Thursday, June 18, 2009

A round-up of today's reading

June 4th and 5th brought eight new books to my door. Six of those have been dispatched. Only Monica Ali's new book and Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie remain. Bradley is up next.

Today, I read a couple of chapters in The Complete Game by former Mets pitcher Ron Darling. The best of books on baseball combine something instructive about the game and a few wonderful anecdotes. Darling's book does exactly that. It is an extraordinary look into the mind of the major league pitcher.

I also read:

  • Susan Glaspell's Trifles. Written in 1917, this play about a farm wife who murders her husband holds up remarkably well.

  • Two short stories by Robert Crais. The stories, With Crooked Hands and The Dust of Evening, represent Crais' first published work. Both are works of science fictions. Crais later turned to mystery writing, where he established a name for himself with his characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.

  • An article in the June 22 The New Yorker on romance novelist Nora Roberts. I have never read Ms. Roberts, which makes me an exception among the novel-reading public today. The article reports that according to Forbes Roberts grosses $60 million a year -- that's more than Stephen King or John Grisham. She wrote three of the 10 best-selling mass-market paperbacks last year. 27 Nora Roberts books are sold every minute.




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