Cheeseburger in Paradise

Kansas City – in Kansas – on a Saturday night. We headed off to Legends, a vast shopping mall built around a racetrack and sportsfields. An island building in the huge carpark, Cheeseburger in Paradise was our destination. There were thirty hungry BookCrossers to be fed. Just one of those convention meals that arise.

Little house

Driving a Dodge between Kansas City and Oklahoma City, a small part of the way on Route 66, we booklovers were drawn to the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I and a precocious lad of three in the third seat row were the only males in the vehicle, with three generations of women my passengers. I merely operated the steering and foot paddles – all of the direction came from beside and behind me. Not to mention the occasionally snarky voice of the GPS if I made a wrong turn.

Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Further Tales of the City is the third in Armistead Maupin’s six-volume series of serial novels of San Francisco life in the Seventies and Eighties. The last glorious days of the sexual revolution, before AIDS ripped through the carefree city.
The action, as in the previous two books, centres around 28 Barbary Lane, the apartment block [...]

Cracking codes

Oh boy! Where was this book when I was a lad? I would have eaten it up entirely. I was always big on codes, and did my share of counting letters, learning weird alphabets and writing my secret thoughts in my diary so that only I could read them.
I don’t have any secrets anymore, certainly [...]

Further Sales

I’m into Book the Third of Armistead Maupin’s amazing “Tales of the City” series. And loving it.
The technique he uses is a familiar one, intended to keep the readers returning: keep on foreshadowing something exciting coming up. He delivers – eventually – but in the meantime something else has appeared on the horizon.
And he doesn’t [...]

More Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

Second book in the Tales of the City series. Armistead Maupin is hitting his stride with this one. He spins his little plots, teasing the reader along, sucking them in, until somehow, we’re edging ourselves along a catwalk high above a startled crowd and the horrific secret is revealed.
This book sparkles like the waters of [...]

Variable Star – Robert A Heinlein

Like Spider Robinson, I cut my science fiction teeth on Library Heinleins. They made it onto the school library shelves, they had to be good. And wholesome.
So it was a pleasant surprise in Books-a-Million in Kansas City to find a new Heinlein. I snapped it up at the bargain price of $4.93.
Written from an outline [...]