My weekly column, My Reading Life, is live now. This week's rant is "Authors, Publishers, Reviews, and Amazon" at the link below.

I got steamed about this today because I'm very tired of being regarded as a creator's audience and asked, more or less peremptorily, to promote the creator's work in the exact and precise way that creator wants it to be done. I review books and movies and suchlike because I want to; because I love them, love the medium, love that sharing my enthusiasm or lack thereof can help a reader find or avoid something that they wouldn't have found or avoided on their own.

This rant is my response. Yes, it requires that you click on a link to read it; if that's too much trouble, by all means don't. Just don't say anything to me about it, since the idea that a mouseclick is an imposition on you doesn't say good things about you to me.

/rant *grrrrrr*

New Review! THE GOLDEN MEAN by Annabel Lyon

http://tinyurl.com/q6co8vf

This is history with balls. And wombs. Literally! Alexander pre-Great and Aristotle emerge from these pages as vivid, dirty-mouthed and -minded guys. Not exactly the marble-statue view of them, and better for all that.