04.19.2015 Community By the Book: April’s foolishness — a dose of drollery April Fools’ Day was a while back so I’m writing about April Foolishness. If you find anything serious in this, call the authorities. Blond guy answers the phone, listens...
03.22.2015 Community By the Book: A few belated words in praise of the Irish Just missed St. Patrick’s Day but I’m doing Irish stuff anyway. Before I continue you should know I’m going nowhere near Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which I keep in cold storage...
02.22.2015 Community By the Book: When dieting, some of us go by the book January has disappeared around the corner, taking with it the shreds of hundreds, maybe thousands, of New Year’s resolutions. I think any resolution that lasted, say, 13 days, was...
01.25.2015 Community By the Book: An assessment of a book-filled year 2015! I’m doing quickie overviews of the dozen books the Southold library book club read in 2014 — neither recommending nor dismissing, just personal impressions and conclusions.
11.23.2014 Community By the Book: Does the page count? It’s said that you can’t judge books by their covers, and you certainly can’t judge them by the four-color, over-the-top advertisements in various Sunday papers. Also, I’ve stopped paying...
10.19.2014 Community By the Book: Some good old words that deserve new life There aren’t many books you can buy in three different weights — the 100-pound version, the 30-pounder or the three-pound bantam weight — but the Oxford English Dictionary would...
09.21.2014 Community By the Book: There are plenty of baseball books, but football? Baseball season is coming to a close and football is now upon us. I’ve done columns about baseball books — the classics, like Malamud’s “The Natural,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s...
08.23.2014 Community By the Book: Good reading is all about the writing I’d forgotten the name of a character in a book and went to Wikipedia. I found what I wanted, but was struck by how easy it is to find...
07.21.2014 Community By the Book: Let the works speak for themselves I recently found two columns about books, the first amusing, the other a little troubling. The troubling one was about “trigger warnings,” notes of caution affixed to college reading...
05.18.2014 Community Columns By the Book: He’s having his way with wacky wordplay I’m without a theme or new idea so it’s mixed-grill time again. I like this sort of column — there’s no worrying whether everything hangs together, like in English...