At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.
Since the fall of Twitter I have struggled to find a place to share links and online articles that I find interesting. I am really enjoying Mastodon though (and think it’s worth checking out if you haven’t). But now I am finding links there that I’d love to share more broadly. So I am creating small ”link round up” posts on the blog. Hope this ongoing series or posts surface some interesting news & thoughts for you.
I still haven’t seen the Broadway Books pilot being shopped around. Have any of you guys? Here is a link to the trailer and it’s been shown at a few festivals, but I can’t find it anywhere. Her is the synopsis: “In aggressively gentrifying Manhattan, a group of over-educated, under-employed bookstore workers struggle to keep their independent bookstore in business using increasingly desperate measures.” I remember the show Black Books which was fun (and very British) which took place in a bookshop as well. I’m hoping that Broadway Books is funny.
This week’s Nonfiction November festivities are being hosted over on the Volatile Rune blog, with the prompt being:
“Use this week to challenge yourself to pick a genre you wouldn’t normally read.”
Reading outside my areas of interest and comfort zone is never fun, but sometimes the discussions make it worthwhile. This one was a tough one for me, but I found two books in a category that I hardly ever read: entertainment.
I do read a good many books about music and musicians but not many about plays movies television mainly just because I don’t watch a lot of television, movies or plays. But one of the following books came highly recommended, and one is by a favorite author of mine.
‘The Literary Decade’ was published in 1971 (jacket design by Janet Anderson) with ‘The Improper Bohemians’ being published earlier in 1959.
I’ve been a fan of Allen Churchill ever since reading his books, The Literary Decade (it’s an all-time favorite of mine) and his book about the birth of Greenwich Village, titled The Improper Bohemians. He was such a wonderful writer.
So, based on those two fun reads, I tracked down a copy of his 1962 book called, The Great White Way: A Re-Creation of Broadway’s Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment. The book opens on November 12, 1900, on the corner of Broadway and 39th Street, and drops the curtain almost 20 years later with an actual funeral parade down the street mourning “how Broadway will never be the same”.
The 1962 edition jacket design by Vincent Torre.
The area was called ‘the great white way’ because Broadway was one of the largest installations of outdoor electric lights (replacing gas lamps) and while some of the names were familiar to me (Weber & Fields, Ziegfeld, Nat Goodwin), many of the streets and theaters are well known. I learned a lot about labor organizations and some of the driving forces behind Prohibition, which started a year after this book ends. The Great White Way was written in the 1920s so Churchill was able to interview some of the actors and theater goers from the era. Their stories added some needed humor.
What I enjoyed most were the bits about the theater owners and management. Some of those folks sound more like characters in a Raymond Chandler book than real-life people. Lots of fun. Churchill did a real good job with explaining the business side of the New York City theater business back then too. Lots of producers, directors, and actors are battling from different sides of the same coin.
The chapter titles hide the common thread of unions and labor abuses that flow between all the chapters.
There are a few pages of photo reproductions in The Great White Way, but not near enough for my taste. A missed opportunity to have shown off all those glorious playbills!
While I am no theater buff, I am an Allen Churchill fan and I enjoyed The Great White Way.
The other book was Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. This book, which came out in 2022, is the one that was highly recommended to me. The book is a collection of essays explaining how Tarantino’s love of movies and movie making is rooted in the 1970’s films he was exposed to from an early age (maybe too early an age?). I am not the biggest fan of Tarantino, but I did learn a lot from this book and appreciate his explanations “from behind the lens”. It was cool to understand scenes and shot sequences from someone who has thought a lot about this and read all the histories. Much of it really is an art form, but then much of it really is just crass humor trying to make a punchy and violent joke. Some of the humor was above my head.
The ebook cover for ‘Cinema Speculation’. Cover design by Joanne O’Neill.
I am confident that I would’ve enjoyed Cinema Speculation ten times more if I had seen even half the movies he referenced or half the actors. I thought Tarantino did a good job of showing through films made (not just explaining) how current culture and political climates inform the movies that get made and how they are ultimately received. I did add a few movies to my “to watch” list. And whether you are a fan of Tarantino’s work or not, you have to appreciate his passion and voice which drips from every page. They did a good job letting ‘Quentin the fan’ come through on this one.
And that’s it for the second week of Nonfiction November 2025. Head on over to Volatile Rune and see what else is being talked about. I’d love to hear what nonfiction you read this year.
I’m a tad late this year, but the first week is hosted by Heather over at Based on a True Story, and the week’s Nonfiction November prompt:
“Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?”
I had a really great year of nonfiction reading. Looking back over what I read, I see that most of the books I read were either recommended to me by people I know/blogs I follow, or I stumbled upon them as they were mentioned in other books I was reading. That was something new for me this year.
Usually, my nonfiction reading is spread out over lots of categories, and while I did read books about technology, music, politics, and philosophy, this year, I seem to have read deeper into a couple of specific topics, which was really fun.
One of the biggest categories of books I read is one I am labeling “books as resistance”.
With the popularity of books like Books Can Save Democracyand On Book Banning, in 2025, I can tell that I’m not alone in finding ways to let books help me surf through the world we’re living in right now. There’s something fortifying, motivating, and comforting (all at the same time) when you’re holding up a physical copy of a book, pen in hand. That analog time away from screens feels nourishing for some reason. And I really enjoy thinking about how much the tech platforms hate it because they can’t track what I’m doing. They can monetize my attention. While my impact of 1 zillionth of a penny on their profits isn’t much, it still feels pretty good.
Earlier this year, I happened upon a feature by The Pentagram Partners about Les Editions de Minuit, which was the very real secret underground book publishing operation in Nazi-occupied France. It was amazing. Jewelers turned typographers. Writers turning in coded manuscripts. Secret deadrops to get books distributed. All books that were banned by the Nazi government. It was amazing to think about.
The Pentagram Papers published the layouts of an early booklet chronicling the underground press.
The small printing presses were hidden in basements.
That same month, I happened across the chapter “Clendestine Presses 1: Moral” in Roderick Cave’s amazing The Private Press book. And sure enough, on page 97:
“Many of the editors and printers of the first resistance presses and newspapers-of Pantagruel, of La pensée libre—were caught and shot. But out of the failure of La pensée libre came a development which was to lead to the establishment of the most successful of all presses of the resistance: Les Editions de Minuit.”
A page from Cave’s The Private Press where it talks about the French underground publishers.
And it took off from there, talking about all the folks involved, including engraver/illustrator/journalist Jean Bruller. Bruller escaped Nazi Germany and came to the United States, where in 1968 the English translation of The Battle of Silence came out, with the author name of Vercors, which was his pen name during the war. It was fascinating. To think of folks valuing fiction and literature (like Faulkner, etc.) enough that they were willing to be hanged for publishing them.
Title page from Vercors/Jean Bruller’s memoir published in the late 1960s.
Les Editions de Minuit published 25 books during the war, and more than a dozen staffers lost their lives for their efforts. After the war, Bruller and crew divided what little money was left in their publishing operation among the surviving families of the folks who died. I loved this deep dive into books, resistance, and publishing.
So there’s a recap of some of the nonfiction books I read this year. I hope you’re keeping up with Nonfiction November this year. If not, head on over to Heather’s site post and see what else is out there. And please find a place to share what you are reading, even if it’s in the comments of any of the blogs participating this month.
The authors’ credentials are plentiful: record producer for Prince, doctorate degrees, literary awards, science and music awards… but you the whole time you’re reading you can tell – these folks love music. Which is something I can read about all day long.
The premise of the book is simple: all of us have unique “listener profile” defined by your brain’s handling of seven key dimensions that music has: Authenticity, Realism, Novelty, Lyrics, Rhythm, Timbre and Melody. Each one of those characteristics gets its own chapter explaining how your personal physiology, childhood, adulthood, language, etc. affects how your brain translates music into toe tapping, goose bumps, tears, smiles, screams, frowns and head bopping. It was fascinating and I’ve loved playing some of my favorite tunes recently and trying to pay attention to what Rogers and Ogas outline. It certainly has not made my actual tunes more enjoyable or anything, but the experience has been fun trying to figure out when I’m listening “with my head” versus when I’m listening “with my heart”.
This Is What It Sounds Like is full of percents and statistics. Some of my favorite are along the lines of when people here a song, a certain number of them visualize the musicians playing, some folks’ brains start up a movie in their head trying to storyboard the lyrics, some folks have memories triggered and if you’re of the right age you’re probably picturing the music video. Anyway, the authors have stats and some experiments to back things up all along the way.
The book is certainly full of opinionated takes which are fun to argue with (but debates I think I’d lose if were really face-to-face with someone who worked with Prince for so many years).
I think the book scratches the same itch when a foodie reads stories about the founding of famous restaurants and recipes or a cinephile reads how Alfred Hitchcock decided to frame certain shots. This Is What It Sounds Like will just make listening to music a little richer. And the book makes for great cocktail party conversation.
