Books

Every autumn I reread old favorites from Robert Parker, Rex Stout, Eric Ambler. 

And P.G. Wodehouse.

It’s hard to find a writer with a better grasp of the language than Wodehouse. 

For example:

Hardly anybody walks or comes into a room.

In Wodehouse World, they ankle, or sidle, or charge, or curvet.

Authors from our area have recently published four vastly different books.

‘Living Cancer’

Dr. Michael Weiner of Salisbury, Conn., was a pediatric cancer specialist for nearly five decades — and was also the parent of a child with cancer. 

The next time you misplace your glasses, lose your car keys, or can’t recall someone’s name, take heart. Forgetting is not necessarily a failure of your mind. It is a required function that helps your mind to work best.

If you want to hear Peter Lerman’s raspy, folksy delivery as an accomplished audiobooks narrator you can easily go to his website at www.lermanvo.com. There he promises “the truth and nothing but the truth” — as he specializes in nonfiction (and has done the audio recording for nearly 100 books).

It’s hard to comprehend that boyish and wryly hilarious Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, is 80 years old. 

Like many fanatic fly-fishers,  I have lots of books on the subject. I buy them. People give them to me. Some are wonderful. Some are outdated. Some are ridiculous. 

The world hasn’t really fully emerged from the COVID-19 quarantine yet. One way you can tell: There have been almost no library book sales this summer. 

The annual sale at the stately library in Norfolk, Conn., is an exception and the sale promises to be even bigger than normal: 

We caught up with author and angler Mark Kurlansky on Thursday, July 15, before he disappeared into the Alaskan wilds for a week’s fishing.

Kurlansky will be at House of Books in Kent, Conn., on Thursday, Aug. 12, 6 p.m. to talk about his new book, “The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly-Fishing.”