Four Decades of Books

I always associate The Mystery of the Silver Spider with Saturday nights. In early 1977, as my Three Investigators collection was getting...

Forty years ago, I read my first Three Investigators book. Now I have just finished reading my last one, The Mystery of the Creep-Show Cr...

"What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea." I first ...

It was a cold, wet and miserable day yesterday and work was slow. In the late afternoon, I decided to start a new book, one of the two or...

It’s funny how you can wake up one morning not even aware of something and yet by the end of the day you are absorbed in it. On Monday mo...

When I started reading, the most affordable books were Armada paperbacks. In 1977, they cost 35p, a far cry from the Collins hardbacks, wh...

Mary Virginia Carey wrote the first of her fifteen Three Investigators books, The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints , in 1971. She would ...

When I finished Villette on Saturday, it was my intention to go straight to the book on Henry Kissinger’s years in the White House. But ...

In January of 2012, one of the Facebook friends I’d made through reading Jane Shaw suggested reading a book by Angela Brazil. I felt a bi...

Yesterday, I finished reading Charlotte Brontë's Villette . This morning, I woke up still quite moved by it. A brilliantly told tale....

Over 700 pages long, this political tome is about Henry Kissinger and his influence on American foreign policy, especially during the Nixo...

When I started reading the Hardy Boys again, I was determined to get a hold of this book. The House on the Cliff is the second book in th...

In June, during my Hardy Boys nostalgia trip, I reread The Firebird Rocket. I got this book from John Menzies in 1979. It was written by V...

A few months ago I was introduced to Australian literature from the turn of the twentieth century. My friend Elizabeth suggested reading ...

This was one of the first books I read this year. Miles Russell makes a very convincing case for naming Charles Dawson as the perpetrato...

Yesterday I finished reading The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was only a few months ago that I found out that...

In June, I started rereading The Hardy Boys. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I read these books over and over. After thirty years, I...

A lot of negative things are said about online friendships. I often hear people showing disdain for Twitter and Facebook, claiming that t...

This book by Mary Ellen Chase is the first of the two novels.Virginia is in love with her Wyoming home but will have to leave it to go to...

I've never been one for poetry, but this one by Branwell Brontë is very nice. I think it's the simplicity of it that appeals to m...

This year I made a resolution to read a wider range of authors rather than rereading my favourite books. The result so far is quite impr...

This is the shortest book review I've ever written. Here it is in full as posted on Goodreads back in April of this year: "P...

Every year, an elite few manage to change their lives forever. They break away from the rat race and join that exclusive club to which only...