He’s got some great ones — I did a story on power ballads that don’t suck a couple days ago, and as soon as I hit “publish” I realized that it lacked something very important: there was not a single Springsteen song. I know that his songs don’t typically fit in the power ballad category, but…

It helps both you and your library — Local libraries and local bookstores coexist in an important literary ecosystem; most children develop a love of reading at their local library, which often translates to a love of independent bookstores as they grow up. As much as we love supporting those indie bookstores, however, few of us can afford…

Yes, there are a few — Power ballads have traditionally gotten a bad rap. Especially in the 1980s, they were often the only way for a hair metal band to actually break into the Billboard charts, which briefly expanded their audience but tended to cause either anger or eye-rolling among fans of their typically harder sound…

Fawlty Towers meets The Sopranos…in a bookstore — Following in the footsteps of Simon Dillon, over the next several weeks I will be sharing the first five chapters of the first novel in my The Last Word series. I may continue it with the second and third books, if only to keep me focused as I finish book…

You have to venture outside a some point — When most people hear the phrase “book club,” a few images spring immediately to mind. Some picture a group of old women reading Pride and Prejudice again as an excuse to fight over whether the Colin Firth’s BBC adaptation was better than the Kiera Knightley film version (Kiera is a…

Rate-A-Record #31 — The newest crop of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was just released, and as always there are some serious head-scratchers among them. I love Willie Nelson, but is he really what anyone would consider rock and roll? But it’s not artists like Willie getting in that…

A historical “what if?” — “Posterity will call you the great emancipator, a more enviable title than any crown could be, and greater than any merely mundane treasure.” — Giuseppe Garibaldi in a letter to Abraham Lincoln History, like life, is filled with the always interesting “what if?” questions. What if Napoleon had not invented…

Things I learned over the past month — When I started on the magical mystery tour that is writing full time almost two years ago, one of the things I considered to be a huge benefit was that I can write from anywhere. When I had my bookstore, I was tied to a physical location 10 hours a…

Here’s the first setlist — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kicked off the American leg of their 2023 world tour in Tampa last night, which means we got our first glimpse at what the setlist will look like going forward. He will invariably change it up some, usually by adding a song or…