Author Archives: smellincoffee

About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

Paradiso

Paradiso© trans. 2007 Anthony Esolen, original 14th century by Dante Alighieri544 pages including notes & appendices I’ve gotta hand it to Dante, at least the character Dante. I though I’d fallen hard for a woman, but against him there is … Continue reading

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Teaser Tuesday

Botanists tell us that the blossom is an evolution of the leaf–but they cannot say just why that particular bud should take from the same air and sunshine a fairer substance, a deeper color, a more permanent existence, and become … Continue reading

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Faces Along the Bar

Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920© 1998 Madelon Powers331 pages Men’s thinking on this issue seems to have involved an interesting mixture of solicitude and defiance. On the one hand, decent women should be … Continue reading

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Sparring Partners

John Grisham is the author of scores of novels of varying quality and two collections of short stories, if memory serves. Sparring Partners is a ‘novelty’, in that it collects three novellas, ranging in time from the 1980s to the … Continue reading

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Vein Pursuits

Vein Pursuits© 2023 Rhett C. Bruno & Jaime Castle322 pages | Audible version read by Roger Clark, 11 hours & change Cold as Hell introduced readers to James Crowley, an undead gunman who was killed trying to protect an innocent … Continue reading

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America’s untouchables and baseball

Shortly after the financial implosion of the late 2000s and the beginning of the ‘great recession’, physicist & banker Chris Arnade began long walks around New York City to contemplate the ramifications of his and his ‘industry’s’ reckless speculation and … Continue reading

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I have questions, Goodreads….

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May 2023 in Review

Another month gone, and — well, I’m a little proud of this one, primarily because I FINISHED THE SCIENCE SURVEY! My previous record has been August (2022), so hurrah. The year’s science reading isn’t over, of course, but now I … Continue reading

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Adventures with the Enemies of Science

The Heretics / The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science© 2014 Will Storr368 pages Outside ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. Will Storr will meet you there, because at this point he’s not sure that there’s … Continue reading

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Teaser Tuesday because it is in fact Tuesday and not Monday

I love three-day weekends, but boy do they throw the ol’ internal kenning of time and space off. Today’s top ten Tuesday prompt was ‘things that make me NOT want to read a book’, and I can’t think of much. … Continue reading

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