The rest of the world may be unpredictable (earthquakes, tidal waves, polar ice-caps summarily melting, a snowstorm and a tornado on the same day in Colorado, 40-degree temperature drops in Boston in a 10-hour period, etc.), but one thing can always be counted on in a bookworm’s life: the need for acquiring more books. I […]

Our book today is Michael Pearce’s 1991 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, the fourth (and my favorite) in Pearce’s long-running series of novels set in Edwardian Cairo and starring a blandly resolute Welshman named Gareth Owen in his capacity as the Mamur Zapt, a strange kind of hybrid police detective-Secret Police Czar […]

Our book today is James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, the 2012 entry in his “Grantchester Mysteries,” his series of stories set in the picturesque 1950s English hamlet of Grantchester and starring thirty-something vicar Sidney Chambers, who’s a kind of mild-mannered amateur clerical sleuth in the tradition of C. K. Chesterton’s Father […]

Our book today is a slight little thing: a 1966 novel by Naguib Mahfouz with the title Tharthara Fawq al Nil, here translated into English by Frances Liardet as Adrift on the Nile. I’ve recently reread it as the slow, tidal process of my re-evaluation of this author works its way through my Brattle buying habits. […]

For our latest Great Moment, we harken back to the heady days of 1987, to Thor #380, with writing and page-layouts by the mighty Walt Simonson and very able artwork finishes by Sal Buscema. The issue is in many ways the climax of a storyline that had gone on for a year. In a fit […]

Our book today is something simply called Ancient Egypt, a slim 1942 volume from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; it began life as a fairly straightforward guidebook to the museum’s vast and impressive collection of artwork and artifacts from ancient Egypt, which a later editor very accurately characterized as “not the most extensive […]