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…

I’m a sucker for road trip books, especially those that involve a journey across the U.S.  I think it’s because I’ve always wanted to do a cross-country trek and even in my younger years never got or took the chance.  Anyway, I’ve read a number of the classic trek tales: Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley in Search of America, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and even Kerouac’s On the Road (which, if I’m desperate, may get its own episode one day).  I even have had the chance to dig into less well-known works, such as the outstanding book Cross-Country by Robert Sullivan.  So, when Amazon offered up George Mahood’s Not Tonight Josephine at a deep discount (either $.99 or $1.99), I added it to my Kindle.

Mahood is an English travel writer who has written a number of other books and in this one, written in 2016, he recalls…