Neurotribes by Steve Silberman is what i'm reading now,very good

reading The Ascendant by Drew Chapman,very good...

The Travelers by Chris Pavone ,can't wait...

Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all.

CITY ON FIRE By Garth Risk Hallberg is what I'm reading now "i'm in a rich guys house,bring the duct tape and the guns"

My art teacher from Towson High School,i'll never forget him...

James Drake Iams is an accomplished watercolorist 

Prodigy's Cousin : The Family Link Between Autism and Extraordinary Talent,looks great....

Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm is a book I just finished...

Afternoon of the Elves: Janet Taylor Lisle: image from's Seattle Children's theater

Quickly Field Strip & Re-Assemble AK47

sounds great: Arcadia / Iain Pears,on reserve at NYPL...

LJ Reviews 2016 February #2

This complex, entertaining tale from British novelist Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost) involves time travel, British spies betraying one another, and apocalyptic scenarios all folded together in a number of interconnected story lines. Closest to our times is Henry Lytten, an old Oxford scholar, amateur author, and part-time spy for the British government. Unbeknownst to him, his friend Angela Meerson is really a psychomathematician who has invented a time machine of sorts and has traveled to Henry's time, roughly the 1960s, to escape betrayal and maybe death many years in the future. With her invention, she has created another universe called Anterwold, drawing on ideas from a novel Henry is writing. A young girl who lives near Henry and sometimes feeds his cat has accidentally stepped into this world and has started up the machinations of several plots and love affairs. Angela is being hunted on many fronts, in many parallel universes, and the powerful leader from her time is anxious to get his hands on her machine to use for his own ends. VERDICT Pears weaves a diverse group of characters and multiple worlds from the idyllic to the Orwellian to create an impressive and quite enjoyable mystery fantasy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]â€"James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

[Page 94]. (c) Copyright 2016 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a book i'm re-reading

Wired to create : unraveling the mysteries of the creative mind / Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire,just put on the reserve list at NYPL

this sounds fantastic! A Splendid Savage,the restless life of Frederick Russell Burnham by Steve Kemper

Janna Levin's How the Universe Got Its Spots : Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space is what i put on reserve at NYPL

CHEERFUL MONEY Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor By Tad Friend which i read a-while ago...

just finished:The Quest by Nelson DeMille

i read “The Invention of Everything Else,” By Samantha Hunt. a-while ago, very good...review by Louisa Thomas for The New York Times

The inventor Nikola Tesla is a historical novelist’s dream. He was the brain behind alternating current, radio, wireless communication and remote control. He was a friend of Mark Twain and a foe of Thomas Edison. Like Alfred Nobel, he had the hubris to believe he could invent a weapon that would ensure eternal peace. He tore up a contract with Westinghouse worth millions. After he died, destitute and forgotten, an F.B.I. agent wrote that the government was “vitally interested” in his papers. Tesla believed he had communications with Mars. He was extremely fond of pigeons. His every action gleams with a kind of guarantee: strange, but true.

Tesla isn’t the only oddball here. Indeed, Hunt’s narrative of New York seems populated exclusively by eccentrics. Its perspective alternates between Tesla and a quirky young chambermaid at the New Yorker, Louisa, who befriends the elderly inventor. Weakened by his failing heart, he needs an arm to lean on in order to make it to Bryant Park for the daily visit to his pigeon.

Louisa is happy to oblige: she finds his stories marvelous and, besides, she’s used to idiosyncratic men. Her father, Walter, a sweet but hapless New York Public Library night watchman, is obsessed with his dead wife. (“You look like your mother standing there,” he says to his daughter. But she is tired of looking like her mother.) Tesla and Walter are both dreamers. When Walter’s best friend, Azor, claims to have invented a time machine, Walter thinks his prayers have been answered. All he’s ever wanted is to return to 1918, to see his wife again.

Azor’s creation is ungainly but beguiling — a time machine because “it is too wonderful to be anything else. Fabricated from what appears to be scrap metal, the surface of the ship is pieced together in an awkward checkerboard pattern, squares of metal in all sizes and shades, some shiny, some dull, the pieces held together with rivets.”

This could double as a description of Hunt’s novel, a fantastic amalgam of plots that have cumbersome and fragile joints. Some, like a narrative detour involving Tesla’s brother, seem to serve no purpose at all. A few metaphors clank (“the question’s monkey wrench is nothing more to him than an annoying black fly that can be swatted away”) and “wonder” appears in one form or another far too often. But at the same time, the book, like that time machine, “is warm to the touch.” It fairly pulses with life.

Without mistaking idiosyncrasy for vitality, Hunt shows what it’s like to have a heart. Walter is weird, but his grief is real. Tesla — real or not — is absurd, but he’s also funny, and the intensity of his ambition is palpable. When these characters speak, you may not believe them. But when they feel, you do.

The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny is what i'm reading now,very good...

Decision at Delphi by Helen MacInnes is what I am reading now

my favorite david bowie records

reading:Hush by Laura Lippman,always enjoy her stories in Baltimore

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh is what i'm going to read next...

want to read:The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild

want to read: A STRANGE BUSINESS A Revolution in Art, Culture, and Commerce in 19th Century London By James Hamilton

want to read: Utopia Parkway : the life and work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon,updated