Top of the Desk: What I’m Reading on March 1, 2026

Of the six books I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, half of them are still on top of my desk as I type this. That’s not to say that I haven’t read in and out of most of them, just that my wandering eye was caught by some new ones along the way. I did manage to finish The Best Revenge by Gerald Seymour and Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald and write short reviews of both. One hit and one miss out of those two. 

But three new ones joined the fun:

As hard as I try sometimes, I can’t totally avoid politics. Every so often, a politician catches my eye/ear for positive reasons. Louisiana’s Senator John Kennedy is one of those people. He seems to be a hardworking, dedicated politician, he’s smart as a whip, and he makes me laugh a lot with his quips. He’s kind of like what I imagine Mark Twain would have been like if he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate back in the day. I picked up How to Test Negative for Stupid on a whim, and finished it in three days (it’s short). More later.

The cover of C. William Langsfeld’s debut novel, Salvation, is what drew my attention to it at all. I probably would never have picked it up otherwise. The novel is set in a small Colorado town where one man ends up killing someone who has been his best friend since they were children. It’s not a question of who did it in this one, more a question of how things could have possible gone so wrong for these two. I’m almost done with it, but unless the ending of this one blows me away, it's going to end up just a three-star book.

I was looking for a misplaced book a few days ago - never did find it - but found this Alice Munro short story collection from 2012 instead. I admire good short story writers even more, I think, than good novelists. It takes a special skill. Dear Life was Munro’s last collection, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year for her “life achievement.”  I’ve only read a few of the stories so far, but they all seem to be set in Munro’s Canada during different periods of Canadian history. I’m really pleased that this one finally turned up again. 

In that same search, I also rediscovered A Passion for Books, a book I’d forgotten all about. I think I first read this 1999 compilation sometime in 2002, but I don’t remember many of the individual pieces. I’ve now re-read about a third of the book, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a combination of essays, fiction, cartoons, lists, etc. that covers every aspect of reading, books, libraries, book collecting, etc. The pieces are usually pretty short and easily read in a few minutes of spare time.

I’ve neglected a couple of the books on my last list in favor of these four new ones, but I am making steady progress in the C.S. Lewis book, Mere Christianity and The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager. I just watched a biopic on C.W. Lewis last night on Prime Video, and I’m really curious now to know more about the man and what made him who he turned out to be. I’m looking for a good biography on Lewis if anyone has any suggestions or a favorite. The Mark Twain biography hasn’t gotten much attention in the last few days, but I plan to get back to it soon.

So that’s where I’m beginning this new week. Where I’ll end it could look entirely different - and probably will.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional - Isaac Fitzgerald

 

I am a fan of memoirs, reading at least a dozen of them every year for the last decade or so. Sometimes I know a little (or a lot) about the author before beginning a memoir; sometimes I’ve never heard of the author at all. Isaac Fitzgerald was most definitely not someone I knew of before picking up Dirtbag, Massachusetts, and the more I read of the confessional essays that make up Fitzgerald's memoir, the easier it was to see why that was. 

Dirtbag, Massachusetts begins with Fitzgerald’s unconventional Boston childhood. As he puts it, Fitzgerald’s birth had the potential to destroy not one, but two families because although his parents were married when he was born, it was not to each other. That his parents managed to get together after Fitzgerald's birth at all, much less make a long, often loud, life together for so long is a whole other story in itself. Fitzgerald, a fairly accomplished juvenile delinquent filled with the inner guilt that so often comes with a strict Catholic upbringing (believe me, I know), would eventually leave Boston for the West Coast - where he became an even more accomplished adult delinquent, someone always living on the edge of what most would call acceptable society.

What follows is Fitzgerald’s unapologetic account of the years he spent boozing, doing drugs, bartending, bar bouncing, and working in San Francisco’s porn industry - both behind and in front of the cameras. If nothing else, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a frank revelation of one man’s lifestyle choices and how he survived (not necessarily overcame) each of them. And he would do it all over again - with pleasure. This is not one of those memoirs where an author wants the reader to learn from the his mistakes. This is one of those memoirs where an author simply wants to entertain and impress the reader with his experiences. 

It’s all very readable, and this reader is happy that Fitzgerald is somewhat of a success today, married and able to make a living from his writing without having to rely on “day jobs” to keep him afloat. But for me, reading Dirtbag, Massachusetts was a little like eating cotton candy. After I was done, I wondered what all the fuss was about.

The Best Revenge - Gerald Seymour

 

If James Bond has a direct opposite it would be Gerald Seymour’s master spy Jonas Merrick. Unlike Mr. Bond, Jonas never goes into the field to do any dirty work or to gather vital information about the threatening intentions of foreign governments. Jonas, in fact, so seldom leaves his desk once he arrives there promptly each morning that his colleagues have very little idea what he does all day long. Jonas is such a non-entity to the rest of MI-5 that he has become a joke. He has one friend at the top, and one or two nearer the bottom of the organization - and he likes it that way.

“Jonas had no university education, he had never in three decades with the Fivers been on a promotion course, he ignored summons to meetings where policy and progress were examined…And he was not sure why they still tolerated him.” (Chapter 4)

But, unbeknownst to almost everyone within MI-5, Jonas has probably done as much or more to protect the security of the UK and the West than anyone else in the building. And now, he’s on the verge of cracking a long-embedded UK Chinese spy network, one so important to China that heads are literally going to roll all around the world if Jonas is successful - and one of those heads just might turn out to be his own. Because this time, Jonas has become so deadly from his desk chair, that the other side is coming for him.

And Jonas is not ready for them - not even close. After all, he really doesn’t like dealing with actual people.

“It was the essence of Jonas Merrick’s professional life that he stayed huddled inside his cubicle, and had his phone and his computer, and his own library of paper files that he took home to read, the cat sprawled on his thighs. He would have claimed that the way he worked was to keep emotion and consequence at arm’s…” (Chapter 16)

Not this time, Jonas. Not this time.  

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The Jonas Merrick Series:

The Crocodile Hunter (2021)

The Foot Soldiers (2022)

In at the Kill (2023)

The Best Revenge (2024)

Gerald Seymour has also written thirty-seven standalone novels, the most recent being 2020’s A Damned Serious Business. Among my favorites of the standalones are: A Song in the Morning, Home Run, Killing Ground, The Waiting Time, Holding the Zero, and Rat Run. 

 

Reading: Is It Biology or Is It Environment?

My barber asked me last week if I go everywhere with a book in my hand. She's been cutting my hair for twenty years now and she remarked that she doesn't recall a single time that I sat in her chair without first closing the book that I carried in with me. She's right; I don't recall a single time either. (These days, it is more likely that I’m closing and e-reader cover than a physical book, however.)

That got me to thinking about the difference between avid readers and those who either don't read at all, or who only read one of the obvious bestsellers once or twice a year. I wonder what turned some of us into readers and left so many others unblessed with the inclination? Is it genetic? Are some us simply born this way and others not? 

It's kind of scary to think that something like a love of reading, something that has played such a large part in my life, was given to me through sheer, random chance. I have only one sibling, a non-reading brother, and I cringe to think that there was a 50-50 chance that I would miss out on the "reading gene" and that that little fellow would end up in my brother's DNA rather than in mine. Of course, he's probably just as happy being a non-reader as I am being a book nut since he has no way of knowing what he's missed. But still…the very thought shakes me a little.

I'm coming to believe that it is near impossible to turn a person who is inclined to be a non-reader into an avid one. Yes, you might be able to move them along the reading scale in that direction (as I’ve managed to do with my brother in recent years), but I don't believe that they will ever turn into the kind of book nut that so many of us were destined to be. That spark is either there, waiting to flame up when it's ready, or it's not there at all, and throwing all the gasoline in the world on it won't start a fire.

What has been your experience?

The American Library - Janet Skeslien Charles

      

     In October, 2024, we spent a couple of days in a Dallas B&B that had its own version of a Little Free Library inside the rental. A sign on the container invited us to take a book or two with us when we left, and to leave something behind if we had anything to contribute. The Paris Library is one of two books I took home with me at the end of that weekend, but I’ve just now gotten around to reading it. I tend to read a steady diet of historical fiction, and was a little burned out on World War II fiction, so I ended up putting the book aside when we got home - and immediately forgot I even had it until stumbling upon it a couple of weeks ago. (I still haven’t read the second book.)

      The Paris Library was published in 2021 by Atria Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint) and runs 351 pages long, including the Author’s Note. My impressions are mostly positive ones for this well-researched account of how the American Library functioned in Paris during World War II:

• Will appeal to a broad audience of readers
• Centers on a handful of nicely developed characters who evolve and change during the course of the novel
• Uses flashbacks to the main story while occasionally visiting the main character some forty years in the future
• The American Library almost becomes a central character itself 
• Explores the difficult choices Parisians were forced to make during the Nazi occupation of the city - and the hypocrisy of those who sometimes benefited from the tough choices made by others
• Based on historical figures, letters, and memories of those who were there
• Intensively researched for accuracy

     I was a little slow to warm to the characters and plot of The Paris Library, largely I think, because I found the writing to be a little on the dry side. Once I got deeper into the story and became clearer on which characters were destined to play the main roles, that all changed. I got more used to the author’s writing tempo and lost myself in the story. If you read this one, don’t quit on it too soon because the ending is a memorably intense one. For me, this is pretty close to a four-star book.

Inside The American Library in Paris

Photo of The American Library featured in the novel

Top of the Desk: What I’m Reading This Week

 I don’t seem to be finishing many books so far this year, but that’s not because I’m not turning lots of pages. Seems like I’m falling back into one of my old habits of immediately beginning to read a book rather than simply adding it to my TBR for later. The stack of partially read books on my desk seems to be multiplying on its own these days, and even though I read from each of them several times a week, I am slow to reach the final page of any of them. 

The current desktop stack is only this short because I did finish two books in the last couple of days:

Chernow’s biographies, of which I’m a fan, are well researched, complete, and very, very long. Mark Twain (2025), coming in at 1,033 pages of text, plus another 125 pages of footnotes and index, is no exception. Thankfully, Mr. Chernow has a very readable style, but at just over 300 pages into this one, I have a long way to go. (This books is so physically heavy, that you could injure yourself trying to read it in bed.) Mark Twain really comes alive in this great biography.

Blasphemy (2012) is a book of Sherman Alexie short stories that I just started reading last night. Alexie is a Native American (he, I think, calls himself an Indian) author perhaps best known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Another title of his that intrigues me, a short story collection I read in 2021, is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His stories brutally expose the problems so many Native Americans face to this day. He is a solid short story writer.

Gerald Seymour has been one of my favorite espionage thriller writers since I discovered a book of his in a London library in the mid-nineties. I loved his first book from the first page, and more than a dozen books later, he has yet to let me down. The Best Revenge (2024) is the fourth in Seymour’s Jonas Merrick series. Jonas is not your typical spy, he’s more of what his colleagues think of as just another MI-5 pencil pusher…but his pencil is a deadly weapon.

This is my first experience with anything by C.S. Lewis, and through the first three chapters I’m still not really into it. The book was produced from a series of radio talks Lewis did for the BBC during World War II. It’s not deep theology, more like sitting down with a neighbor across a cup of coffee every few days for a good conversation about how we should all try to live our lives. Lewis, at least in Mere Christianity, doesn’t talk down to his audience. I imagine that the British population really looked forward to these talks during the war. 

I read at least a dozen memoirs a year, but I usually know who the writer is before starting the book. Not the case with Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022). But no way could I resist a book with a first sentence like this one: “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” Turns out Fitzgerald is quite an interesting man who survived a chaotic childhood to do OK for himself. This one is very conversational and pages turn quickly. 

Just what I need, a book interviewing some twenty-two authors on “the books that changed their lives.” Nothing like that to add to my monstrous TBR list. Yep, just what I need. The Writer’s Library (2020) by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager turns out to be even more interesting than I expected it would be. The authors use the interviews to explore their personal literary comings-of-age, and leave me with a whole lot that I want to read for myself, books and authors that had barely, if at all, cracked my radar before now.

There’s something here to fit just about every mood I might find myself in for the next couple of weeks, but I would not be at all surprised to find one or two new ones sitting atop my desk by this time next week. I can’t wait to find out.