Christmas, 1992. We ate a spiced beef roast that I had cured with juniper, allspice and salt for two weeks and a Country Christmas Cake, a heavy, dark fruitcake swathed in marzipan that had been aging since October. I’m sure they were wonderful, but I can’t quite remember how…
In Les Miserables, it took Victor Hugo 1400 pages and Lord knows how many words to tell his story of cruelty, suffering, endurance, and redemption. A Day, a Dog (1999), created by Gabrielle Vincent, accomplishes the same thing in 60 wordless…
Just as music is art for the ear and painting is art for the eye, perfume is art for…
Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival 1961–1965 (Smithsonian Folkways). This three-disc anthology of live recordings contains some of the most powerful, soulful music ever made with or without benefit of amplifiers…
Reading Homer’s Odyssey is something I do once or twice a year. I have taught Homer’s classic…
It is the greatest John Wayne movie, and the greatest Western ever, which means, necessarily, that…
It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”
I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my…
I can’t stop looking at the photograph on the cover of A Shadow Falls (2009), the…
These were the top 10 stories published by Title Browsing; you can also dive into yearly archives: 2016, 2017.