Still operating from behind here, because these past two years were insane. At least I found time to read again, even when conducting a workshop or working with student manuscripts. I didn’t find a lot to like, though, in April. I read a number of books that either didn’t end well or had characters that grated on me. One of them was in a romance series I had been reading. I was 100 pages in before I realized I didn’t like either person in the couple and couldn’t give a crap about whether or not they made it through their troubles. He was a whiner and she didn’t care about anyone but herself. It was an odd miss for that writer, but it did put me off her work for a month or two.
The good stuff is all below. Some short stories, a novel, and a nonfiction book. You’ll probably want to take a look at one or more of them.
April, 2025
Allen, John, “University Square Shopping Center,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2024. It was a bit of a shock to see a photo of the University Square Shopping Center in the On Wisconsin magazine, along with the news that the outdoor mall had closed 20 years ago! I remember when it was new and state-of-the-art. I saw a million movies there (probably not that many, but close), and learned to eat crepes in a really good French restaurant. I met friends in the other restaurants, and sat outside in the summer. I walked there all the time. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark there with a dear friend and my ex. It was the center of my life for about two years, when I lived and went to school right nearby. I’m sad…twenty years late!
Bell, David, “Four Funerals,” In These Hallowed Halls, Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane, editors, Titan, 2024. I have to confess: I was hooked from the title. When that happens to me, though, I worry that the story won’t hold the weight of my expectations. This one did.
Bovalino, Tori, “Phobos,” In These Hallowed Halls, Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane, editors, Titan, 2024. Marvelously creepy, with an expected, yet shocking ending. Well done.
Couch, Aaron, “The Russo Brothers,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 19, 2025. Fascinating interview with the directors of everything from Arrested Development to the upcoming Avengers movie. I love reading interviews like this from people in the trenches. Joe Russo has a great quote in here, which I’m going to develop in a Patreon post. He said,
We are in the biggest transitional moments in the history of linear visual storytelling. It’s very hard to say in this moment where it’s going because a lot of that is going to be dictated by the taste of Gen Z once they become the dominant consumers. And I don’t know that anyone knows what their taste is yet because they have been trained on a completely different model of consumption than we are used to. I expect radical change, I expect immersion, I expect a blending of virtual and linear, gaming and linear.
Read the entire interview. There’s a lot of gold in it.
Fargo, Layne, “The Ravages,” In These Hallowed Halls, Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane, editors, Titan, 2024. Well done and creepy story which had me hooked from the very first line. Lots of lovely twists and turns in this one, and the ending packs quite a punch.
O’Regan, Marie & Kane, Paul, editors, In These Hallowed Halls, Titan, 2024. If I had found this anthology sooner, I would have used it for the Gothic workshop. And yes, Dark Academia is a branch of Gothic. This book is a marvelous Dark Academia anthology, filled with a lot of good stories, some of which I have pointed out here. (I generally can’t discuss them without revealing the secret or the ending.) There were a couple that held me until the ending, at which point they got gross or stupid. But very few, which is unusual in an anthology, at least for me. This is one anthology I was sad to complete. It had some of the best reading I’d done all year (so far).
Robbins, Dean, “Entering The Twilight Zone—via UW-Madison,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2024. Here’s something totally cool that I did not know when I was visiting Madison a lot. Rod Serling gave the UW a collection of classic scripts and stories. Even cooler than that, he dictated. So, if you click to the article, you can find a link to a recording of his dictation. Nifty, nifty, nifty.
Rose, Sarah, For All The Tea in China, Penguin, 2010. Fascinating book on the history of tea. Yes, tea. How the British stole plants from China and built an industry. There’s corporate espionage here, and outright theft…but all of it occurring when people traveled long distances slowly, so they had to figure out how to keep the plants alive while getting them to India (or wherever) and then learning how to properly grow them. I don’t normally like botany, but apparently I like botanical history, particularly when its filled with betrayal and theft and near-death experiences.
Spencer, George, “Unsealing Ancient Mysteries,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2024. A computer scientist who got his PhD from the University of Wisconsin has spent his life trying to (gently) “unwrap” priceless ancient scrolls, so that we can read their materials. Everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to a new find in Naples is allowing him to test his program. Read this. It’s fascinating.
Streshinsky, Shirley, 
A Time Between, Berkley mass market paperback, 1985. Honestly, I would never have bought this book if I only saw the crap-ass cover that I have here on the blog. The cover that made me pick up the book is from the 1985 edition, and it’s a lovely image of a woman dressed in lavender gazing in the distance from a meadow. That suits the book a lot better than this thing, which is ugly. Maybe I don’t like it because the woman on the cover looks like my Aunt Esther at her most foreboding. Certainly the woman on this modern cover does not look like a character I want to spend any time with, and that’s important because it helps draw the eye. This one does not.
I have had the original mass market paperback (from a 1984 edition) on my shelf for at least thirty years, maybe longer. I bought it used because there’s a stamp from the used bookstore at the base of the hill near our house in Veneta. We moved away from that in 1995, but before we moved, I’d stop there every chance I got, usually on the way home.
This book survived a million cullings. I was going to read it “eventually,” and when I did, I was delighted. The book is set in the 1920s. It’s about a woman reporter who knows how to get to the right place at the right time but, of course, given the time period, she loses a lot on the personal side. The history is breathtaking, the characters are amazing, and the story has the right amount of pathos and heart. The book was definitely worth the wait, and I was sorry when it ended. That forced me to buy the bricks which are the modern editions of the rest of her books. She wrote four historical novels and three nonfiction books. Her first novel, Hers The Kingdom, was a Very Big Deal when it was published. I don’t remember what happened with the others, but I’ll get to them…maybe before another thirty years pass.
Wynne, Phoebe, “Playing,” In These Hallowed Halls, Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane, editors, Titan, 2024. Fiction about music is either impossible to read because it lacks detail or it sucks me deep into the story. This was one I had trouble putting down. The music is damn near audible. Well done.