Authors Electric

                                                          My Life in Libraries Moving from the junior to the senior library at the age of 13 was for me a rite of passage. I can remember the first book I borrowed from there,  Nancy Wake  by Russell Braddon, pictured. It didn’t have that vivid book jacket illustration, just a black and dusty cover with the title and author at the top of the spine. I had already read Russell Braddon’s  The Naked Island , a memoir about the author's trials in a Japanese POW camp, so I was keen to read more.   Nancy Wake, however, was somewhat different to my usual fare, causing my mother to raise a quizzical eyebrow when she asked to see what I had borrowed - a rite of passage indeed. Garston Library in Liverpool, near my then home from where I borrowed the book, was a place I frequently visited...

Taking out the garbage the other day, I noticed that our condo building's back-alley trash bin was nearly full. That was unusual for a Thursday afternoon. Our city sanitation crews - AKA, essential COVID-19 frontline workers - pick up punctually every Thursday morning. Oh well, I thought. Another dislocation of the Great 2020 Pandemic Shutdown. Imagine my surprise the following morning when checked the weather forecast online and saw that it was Wednesday! I had either overslept through five days or - as proved the case - I had zoned-out all of Tuesday thinking that it was Thursday! "I've just gained two days," I told my inamorata, Eleanor , who just rolled her eyes. "Another quarantine silver lining!" I declared. "Now I have an extra 48 hours to procrastinate on writing my AE blog post!" Am I being sarcastic? Rod Serling could have turned my experience into a Twilight Zone episode. But you could do that with almost anything nowadays. ( ...

I have met a lot of writers. Like real, published-by-big-houses, award-winning, best-selling novelists. Writers you know, writers that your kids have tests on, and writers that your kids read to avoid studying for tests on the writers your kids have tests on. Writers with Wikipedia pages I once had dinner with Joseph Heller because I told him at a signing that I was writing my Master's thesis on his work. I had to explain to Kurt Vonnegut at the same dinner that no, it wasn't because  Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't good enough for me. I didn't have a camera, so this picture of them with their wives (from an entirely unrelated event) will have to suffice. I used to play D&D with a World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award winner. I correspond regularly with another Bram Stoker Award winner. I've eaten several lunches with T.E.D. Klein . I used to work with the guy who wrote the Wishbone books . I am also good friends with both Kelley Wilde and our own Reb MacR...

I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that everyone else is as knackered as I am after Christmas. I didn't get much of a break, because I had some urgent writing jobs to finish (damn you, Buster Crabb!), some very large plates of Christmas pudden to consume (damn you, Father Christmouse), and the most appalling chest, throat and nose and ears infection which I assumed was terminal and everybody else cruelly categorised as man flu. (Damn the lot of you; it's a pity I didn't die. That [might] have wiped the smiles off...) Any road up, here I am, just out of me sick bed, struggling manfully to carry on, and worrying about me tax return. Does nobody care about me? Jan Stoker Funny you should say that, because maybe someone does. Or then again, maybe not. You be the judge. It was Wilf, possibly the most eccentric of my many eccentric sons, who is studying in Glasgow, but claimed to have got me the most original Christmas present of all time. What's mor...

It's taken a while to get here, but here we are: the last stage of my countdown of the top ten books and and series that have stayed with me thoughout my life. For those of you just joining me, this whole thing started a few months ago when a former student tagged me in one of those Facebook status games asking you to rank the top ten somethings that are important to someone somewhere. Admittedly "stayed with you" is open to interpretation. I mean there are some truly horrible pieces of writing that, try as I might, I cannot erase from my memory: The Bridges of Madison County , Twilight ,  Moby Dick . It could also refer to books I just can't get rid of no matter how many times I try to give them away: the Gideon bible, I'm Okay, You're Okay , Moby Dick . In the interest of being interesting, I chose to interpret the phrase as books that have had a significant influence on my life. It has taken me a while, far longer than I expected when I began, but this...