I am now officially a member of the Mystery Writers of America thanks to the book collecting column I do for Mystery Scene magazine.  Hopefully this means I will get to vote on the Edgars.  Now I have no excuse not to start my pulp detective novel.

The New Yorker book bench picked up my blog post from earlier this week on Downton Abbey and the largely forgotten Edwardian author Elizabeth Von Arnim.  Here is the original post.  Here is the New Yorker mention.

A blog post I wrote last week over at Fine Books has been making the rounds, so I thought I’d post a link to it here.  It’s called Weeding the Collection.

“The New Year is here and with it the flurry of resolutions that usually include some form of de-cluttering.  Did anyone else weed their book collection over the holiday?  I sorted through mine, pulling out a few odds and ends to sell or give away and a few others to repair (with my very basic book repair skills).  I was interested, therefore, in this essay in the Independent.  Tom Sutcliffe, one of their columnists, weeded through his library over the holiday (“…a year of unrestrained growth and ill-disciplined browsing had steadily diminished its utility and pleasure…”) and the act led him to reflect upon the role of the personal library in the age of the eBook. “

Continue reading here.