The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3 Paperback – March 29, 2016 by James Edward Deeds Jr.on reserve at NYPL

KALASHNIKOV RIFLE GUNFIGHTING: Trigger Management

just finished: Forty Thieves by Richard Perry "The tips you learn in a Perry novel are priceless: how to climb a staircase without making a sound" from NY Times

Reading:Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon "He is wearing cargo pants in a camo print whose color scheme is intended for some combat zone very remote, if not off-planet, and a T-shirt announcing, in Helvetica",(NY Times)

Pretentiousness : why it matters by Dan Fox,sounds great!

Pretentiousness is for anyone who has braved being different, whether that's making a stand against artistic consensus or running the gauntlet of the last bus home dressed differently from everyone else. It's an essential ingredient in pop music and high art. Why do we choose accusations of elitism over open-mindedness? What do our anxieties about "pretending" say about us? Co-editor of Frieze, Europe's foremost magazine of contemporary art and culture, Dan Fox has authored over two hundred essays, interviews, and reviews, contributed to numerous catalogues and publications produced by major international art galleries and institutions"-- Provided by publisher.

American Monarchy Party: The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gon...

American Monarchy Party: The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gon...: Booklist Reviews 2016 April #2 *Starred Review* You might want to get a firm grip on your socks before cracking open this one; otherwis...

The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales,sounds great! "a brilliant genre-blender"

Booklist Reviews 2016 April #2

*Starred Review* You might want to get a firm grip on your socks before cracking open this one; otherwise, Gonzales is likely to knock them off. It's very difficult to categorize this mind-bending novel. Is it comedy? Science fiction? Thriller? Spoof? Whatever it is, it's pure excitement. The story involves a shadowy organization called the Regional Office, described by its mission statement as "a barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing forces of Darkness"; as the book opens, the Regional Office is being attacked by those very forces. As the mayhem progresses, the focus zooms in on two women: Rose, who's leading the attack, and Sarah, who's fighting for her life defending the Regional Office (even as her colleagues are dying around her). The story jumps back and forth in time, showing us how Rose and Sarah became the women they are today: Rose is a trained assassin, Sarah is a potential killing machine with a cybernetic arm. The prose is lively and self-aware (the author clearly knows his story is way over the top and has fun with it for that very reason); meanwhile, though, the action is pretty much nonstop, and there's a thread of melancholy running throughoutâ€"Rose and Sarah might have been ordinary young women if certain events, and the machinations of highly placed individuals who saw them as weapons, had not intervened. All in all, a brilliant genre-blender. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

The Oxford Inheritance by Ann A. McDonald a book I just finished,good

Anne Fortier's Juliet is what I'm reading now

All things cease to appear / Elizabeth Brundage just put on reserve list at NYPL

more big bad Mick Herron

Real Tigers by Mick Herron is simply great

new Jack

King of Fear by Drew Chapman,just finished

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.