Category Archives: Books 2010

First off, I should point out that this book has NOTHING to do with the two Alfred Hitchcock movies of the same name (1934 with Peter Lorre and 1956 with Jimmy Stewart). They just happen to share the same name.

In 1922, G. K. Chesterton took a break from his successful series of “Father Brown” detective stories to write a series of eight connected mysteries featuring a young writer named Harold Marsh and a cynical older detective named Horne Fisher. The connecting feature of each of the stories is that, for each of the crimes committed, placing the blame on the actual criminal would cause more harm than good.
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Ah, Tolstoy.

This is going to be a tough book to review, just like it was a tough book to read. It was written in 1877, and in Imperial Russia, both of which make it tough for a modern American reader. Every time I picked this up, it was an effort to wade back in. Tolstoy’s characters go off on interminable journeys of internal dialogue and philosophizing about the evolving role of nobility in society, on the virtues of hard work, of love and duty and all sorts of weighty important topics.
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This was a collection of three Nero Wolfe short stories that I picked up at a local used book shop. Each of the stories features the regular cast of characters – Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Inspector Cramer, and so on – and the stories follow the not-exactly-contiguous continuity that Rex Stout adopted after the first few books. The stories were first published in the early 1960’s, but they could easily be re-set anywhere from the 40’s to the 70’s.
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Out at the edge of a tottering empire, a traveling scholar has found a man that he believes was once the greatest magician adventurer of recent memory. This man was a brilliant bard, a notable swordsman, and one of the few to master the deepest magic – commanding the structure of reality by calling on things by their True Names. Unfortunately for the scholar, this man is now living incognito as a humble innkeeper, and he refuses to tell his life story to anyone. Only as evidence mounts that an ancient evil is stirring again does he break this silence.
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The latest novel in the Harry Dresden series, “Changes” does exactly what it says on the cover. It changes everything.
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