the book blogs

For most of the time between 2005 and 2019 I was a member of the Amazon Books Editorial team. Nobody knows what that means, and it’s boring to explain. (The Seattle Times gave it a shot once.) But part of the job was writing bits and pieces for the Omnivoracious book blog, later “rebranded” as the Amazon Book Review. Many of these were best-of lists, “celebrity picks,” breaking book news, and plenty of corporate mash. But now and then I had a little fun and did what I wanted to do, even if I knew the Danielle Steel* crowd wouldn’t care. All in all it was a good, weird job, and I interviewed dozens of writers, musicians, adventurers, and various other People of the Scene.

In 2020, the Amazon Book Review moved to a new home. For a while, older material was maintained at amazonbookreview.com, but late in 2021, the old url was redirected to the new pages and everything I did there disappeared. But as guy who understands that Amazon doesn’t care about anything, I had preserved some of my favorites. This page is a sampling across a number of categories; to see everything, or everything in a category, use the “book stuff” navigation above. You may find an occasional broken link or formatting anomaly within the posts.

NB: Publishers and authors provided images for the original Amazon posts. Since this is not a commercial website, I have included them here, with attribution where available. (In some cases I used fewer than in the original blogs.) If I have done this in error, please contact me directly.

* I am not dragging Danielle Steel. I interviewed her over the telephone and she is genuinely a charming and classy lady.

outdoors & adventure

outdoors & adventure

music, art & culture

music, art & culture

books, writers & whatnot

books, writers & whatnot

outsiders & dystopias

outsiders & dystopias

lists & features

lists & features