The Best of Necromancy Never Pays

I got the idea for a "best of" post from Sophisticated Dorkiness, who points out that it's nice to provide new readers with a selection of the posts you like best, so that when folks new to your blog are visiting, you can show them something besides just what you've been posting that week.

To explain the name of the blog, I always have an abridged version of my first-ever post up on my sidebar ("Just say no to necromancy").

My recent post Record explains a bit about why I blog, and how the reasons I blog have evolved over the past year and a half since I started writing Necromancy Never Pays.

Here's an older post that tells you a little about me and what kinds of books I like, Interview with the Non-Necromancer.

This is a list of poems I think every educated person should know; many of them are available online.


To display the eclectic nature of the blog, here is a sampler of some of the various kinds of reviews I write:

--This review of a science fiction novel, Old Man's War by John Scalzi is one of my more amusing ones, mostly because of the subject matter.

--Here's a pre-Christmas post in which I talk about what's going on in my life and relate it to a poem, "Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is," by one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens.

--Look at this review of some non-fiction books about food, focusing mostly on Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

--This is a review of one of my favorite political novels, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley. Unfortunately, it's not yet outdated.

--Here's one in a series of cooperative reviews done "by the chapter" on an adventure through literary novels that I think is worth examining in detail, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

--I like this review of a young adult novel about zombies by Daniel Waters, entitled Generation Dead, because the author did, and also because I compare the main character to Huck Finn.

--Here's my idiosyncratic review of an anticipated literary novel (Francine Prose's Goldengrove) that ended up being only a tear-jerker, at least for me. Other literary types may say I'm not being sensitive to nuance and stuff.

--Here's my review of a motherhood memoir that tickled my fancy, Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother.

--I shouldn't forget at least one review of a mystery or chicklit novel. Here's one from the latter category, my review of Fifty is Not A Four-Letter Word.

--And here's a review of a good post-apocolyptic satire, Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.