Rex Stout's "Disguise for Murder" is an 80-page story in the Nero Wolfe series. It is one of three stories in Curtains for Three, published in 1950.  The introduction to the book describes the contents as three novelettes, although I think 80 pages is more like a novella. No matter, it is an entertaining story. It was first published in The American Magazine, September 1950, as "The Twisted Scarf".  As usual, Archie Goodwin narrates the story. Some semi-regular characters are included: Saul Panzer, a free lance detective; Fritz, the cook; and Inspector Cramer of the NYC police ..read more

I had not planned to review this book, but then I realized that this is a bookish book, with the plot revolving around authors, publishers, and accusations of plagiarism. Rex Stout gets to poke some fun at publishers, authors, and even himself in this book. Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas about the private detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin. The series began in 1934, with Fer-de-lance, and the last book in the series, A Family Affair, was published in 1975, shortly before Stout's death. I have read all of the novels and the shorter works several times over the yea ..read more

I read these books in March. Both were good books and very different stories. Each was challenging to read at times, and both were well worth the effort. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout The story is about a woman, Lucy Barton, who was in a hospital in New York City in the 1980s for many weeks due to complications following an appendectomy. Her husband doesn't visit her very often because they have two young daughters at home and he has a job. Her mother comes to sit with her for a few days when she is in the hospital and they have some strained conversations about the past. This le ..read more

  The story takes place over the course of one day in the life of Ki-Yong, a South Korean with a wife and teenage daughter. Except that he is really a North Korean spy who has been in Seoul, working as a film importer, over 20 years, and has now been recalled to North Korea. About 10 years into his assignment in South Korea, the man who had run his intelligence group was purged; after that they had heard nothing from anyone in North Korea. For 10 years he has led a normal life but now it has been upended in one email; although Ki-Yong immediately begins following plans for his exit from ..read more

  The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Usually Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point, but for April's Six Degrees the instructions were to find a travel guide such as a Lonely Planet title or an Eyewitness title. So the first book in my Six Degrees chain will be Lonely Planet's Best Ever Phot ..read more

  My husband purchased Doctorow: Collected Stories at the 2023 Planned Parenthood Book Sale, and at his suggestion, I read some short stories from that collection, which is comprised of fifteen short stories written by E. L. Doctorow. Per the dust jacket, the stories were "selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015." I read the first five stories in the book, plus a later story I was especially interested in. Of the six stories I read, I only really liked two of the stories, but I liked those a lot, so it was a worthwhile experience. The ..read more

When I started reading The Glass Hotel, I thought that Paul Smith and his half-sister Vincent Smith would be the central characters. As the story opens, they are in high school. Paul resents Vincent because as a child she got to live with his father and her mother full time, whereas he only spent summers and every other Christmas with his father. He knows that is not Vincent's fault but he cannot let it go. They have a very troubled relationship. However, later it seems that Vincent and Paul are minor characters and the story revolves more around a very rich man, Jonathan Alkaitis, who Vince ..read more

In early March, I read The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville). Set in Ireland in the 1950s, it is the 2nd book about Quirke, a pathologist working in a hospital in Dublin. I read the book for this year’s Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.  Billy Hunt was in college with Quirke. They had not seen each for years; Quirke did not recognize him at first. Billy's wife has just died in a strange situation, and Billy does not want the death to be declared a suicide; he asks Quirke to see to it that she is not cut up (which seemed strange to me). Of c ..read more

  "Forgiveness Day" by Ursula K. Le Guin is a science fiction novella published in 1994, a part of Le Guin's Hainish cycle of books. I have not read any of the Hainish novels and I am not sure how much my unfamiliarity with those stories affected my reaction to this story. However, in retrospect I don't think that was the problem.  First paragraph: Solly had been a space brat, a Mobile's child, living on this ship and that, this world and that; she'd traveled five hundred light-years by the time she was ten. At twenty-five she had been through a revolution on Alterra, learned aiji o ..read more

  It used to be that most of the books I read were published before 1975; I also read many books published from 1976 to 2000. A smaller percentage of the books I read were published after 2000. As I looked back on my reading in the first two months of this year, I realized that 10 out of the 12 books that I read were published after 2000.  Since I enjoyed almost every book I have read this year, I don't think that is a bad thing. I am just wondering why and when my tastes changed and whether that will continue. I did read two books published in the 1950s, one by Graham Greene an ..read more