While I do enjoy reading short stories, I’m not the biggest fan of making my way through short story collections, especially those by the same author. I can imagine that it’s because I’m so used to reading novels that when I go from story to story, I expect the continuity that comes with going from chapter to chapter of a novel. So I guess that’s why it took me the better part of three years to read this collection of stories by Raymond Carver.

This book, which is an anthology of his short stories, is a holdover from college, a purchase required by a professor in my advanced fiction writing class. I can’t remember reading beyond just a couple of the stories back in the late Nineties, but I did remember that my professor was trying to use Carver as an example of a writer who could fully develop very…

How much do we accumulate and hold onto?  How much of it do we actually need?  In this episode, I take you behind my new endeavor and new blog, “The Uncollecting”, which is “One Nerd’s Efforts to Let Things Go.”  I talk about what brought me to want to consume and get rid of what I haven’t read, watched, or listened to, and go over four pieces of related popular culture.  First, there is a 2007 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which features Oprah trying to help a woman who had been hoarding.  Second is the show Clean House, which aired on the Style Network in the 2000s. Third is Netflix’s Tidying Up. Finally, there is the recent “Potter’s House” series on the YouTube channel Curiosity Inc.

You can find The Uncollecting blog here:  The Uncollecting

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My new year’s resolution being one of using and consuming what I have accumulated with an eye toward my mental health, I’ve also been thinking about what and how I eat and how that has an impact on my physical health. I’m 41 years old as I write this and it seems like my body has decided that it was finally time for all of the mysterious ailments and issues to come about.

And so I come to Barbara Kingsolver’s 2007 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. This is one that Amanda bought and read when it first came out and that I’ve been meaning to read ever since but which sat on the bookshelf (as these books tend to do). Spurred on by a conversation with my therapist where she recommended the book, I grabbed it and began reading shortly after New Year’s Day when…

As our mutual friend, The Irredeemable Shag, says, “Everyone has a Batman phase.”  I think that Stella is still in hers.  Mine started in 1990 and while I finally gave up Batman in the early 2000s, I’d say that its high point ended sometime around the middle of the decade.  The comics collected in this volume are from a few years before my phase; specifically, they are the first several issues of Detective Comics in the post-Crisis DCU.

I’d read a few of these both digitally and in print over the years, but most of my experience with this era of Detective was via the trade paperback for Batman: Year Two, which I had gotten from the Waldenbooks at the Smith Haven Mall back in the early 1990s.  Oh, and sometime in 1990 or 1991, I spent the $5 I earned from the only time I ever umpired a…