I’ll admit it, I’m a snob when it comes to comic books. Early in my reading career it became apparent that an inverse relationship existed between the number of illustrations in the book and the expected IQ of the reader. (i.e., more pictures meant lower IQ). As soon as I figured that out, I headed for chapter books at high speed. Oh, I still enjoyed a great illustration once in a while but I kn...
I am not Southern by birth. I was born in north Texas and raised in the west, in spaces known for harsh winds, wide horizons, and voices loud enough to get through the first and reach the second. Because of this I was a stranger in a strange land when I moved to the South and I worried I would always be an outsider. Over several years, I read a barrel load of books on how nuanced, complex and wonderful life...
I’m proud to say that a writer once cost me a job. At one time, the U. S. Air Force thought of making me a journalist so I could write for base newspapers. I had passed all the tests easily and was interviewing with an editor of one of the largest papers in the command, a young Sargent in love with uniform creases and rules. We were talking about veterans of various branches who became successful writers an...
Picking up a new book is like setting off on an unknown road: you never know where it will take you. In the late 1970’s, I was reading every non-fiction book I could find about Judaism. The religion fascinated me, a lot of my college friends were Jewish and I was deciding if I should convert. Of course, I would not leave the delights of fiction, no matter what faith I followed, so I added several novels by Jewish...
Science Fiction and Fantasy weren’t respected literary genres when I was little. That’s hard to believe in the age of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games but the fiction welcomed on the best-seller lists and the book award nominations tended to fall in the “could-be-true-but-isn’t” category. These were heavy tomes with heavy ideas by heavy hitters in the writing game: Faulkner, Katherine Ann...