Planning/Format

So, I intend to roughly follow Nick Hornby's format. Although his was a monthly column, I will try to update more or less daily, as this will allow me to cover more books and have a better memory as to each that I read. I will also post periodic updates of the books that I purchase. So, for the first of those, I will list the books that I bought in my two most recent trips to Half Price Books:

• Nick Hornby: The Polysyllabic Spree
• Nick Hornby: Shakespeare Wrote for Money
• Timothy Zahn: Night Train to Rigel
• Timothy Zahn: Cobras Strike
• Vikram Seth: Beastly Tales

The two Nick Hornby books are pretty much the same--The Polysyllabic Spree is described below, and Shakespeare is basically a same-again sequel. Night Train to Rigel is the first in a series of Timothy Zahn books to which I already own the second book, and Cobras Strike is actually a book I've already read in a collection called Cobras Two which, no doubt, will be discussed later in this blog. Zahn is one of my favorite authors, since I discovered him in one of the few Star Wars books that are worth reading, Heir to the Empire and its progeny, which introduced the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The Vikram Seth (author of A Suitable Boy) book is written in couplets, which intrigues me. I'm not generally one for poetry, but these are actually stories written in verse, like the old Latin poems that I translated in college. Not enough people write in verse any more, so I'm hoping that this will be good, and even if it's not, it is something that I bought with an eye towards a gift for my father.