Mars Life (2008) by Ben Bova

I cut my reading teeth on ‘50s and ‘60s scifi authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, and a few others. Probably because so much of his output was aimed directly at the YA market, Heinlein is the one whose work I remember most vividly today, but all of my favorites had one thing in common: a relatively strong emphasis on the “science” part of the term “science fiction.” And that’s the kind of science fiction I’m most likely to enjoy and remember today even though I do like a well written space opera or alien invasion novel now and then. (My favorite scifi novel of the last few years is Andy Weir’s The Martian, a novel in which the science is almost a main character of its own.) 

Although it’s a little too light on the scientific details to suit me, Ben Bova’s Mars Life does place an emphasis on science over wild fantasy to tell its tale of a Mars exploration mission having to be shut down due to budgetary limitations. It’s come down to a choice of spending money on space exploration or on resettling the millions of people around the world who have been displaced by the rising tides of global warming. Not so hard a choice, really.

But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the team on Mars.

A team of anthropologists digging beneath previously discovered  60-million-year-old Martian cliff dwellings has just discovered an actual fossil in what they believe to be a small city located below the cliff dwellings. But that fossil, even with the discovery of an adjacent Martian cemetery filled with the bones of ancient Martians, will not be enough to save the project because the Mars project has more than just money problems - it has very powerful enemies actively working to shut it down for good. As in forever.

The New Morality, a dominant group of religious fundamentalists is so politically powerful that no politician running for office dares run without its endorsement. New Morality believes the type of archeological work proposed for Mars is a threat to its core religious beliefs. If God, or perhaps even another God, created a Martian population and then destroyed it what does that say about their own relationship to God? Is everything they believe about to be proven wrong? New Morality already has ensured that all remaining government funding has been pulled from the project, and now they are intimidating private donors to follow suit.

Mars Life is as much about politics and personal relationships as it is science fiction. It is a cynical look at what motivates peoples and governments and just how fortunate we often are to have a handful of good people turn up in exactly the right spot at the right time when we need them there most. Mars Life is unlikely ever to be considered a scifi classic, but it is an interesting look at what it might be like to be trapped on another planet with only a limited number of people around for support.   

(Mars Life, following Mars and Return to Mars, is the third book in Ben Bova’s Mars series.)

When Writers Are Less Real Than Their Fiction

I have been a reader for over 70 years now, and my opinion of the publishing industry has never been lower than it is today.  I realize this didn’t happen over night, that the industry decline was such a gradual one that its impact is only observable in a hindsight of several years. But sadly, I think we are in the middle of a perfect storm that will continue to degrade the quality of mass market publishing even well beyond the shameful level to which it’s already allowed itself to sink.

Vanity presses have always been around - but they are expensive enough that their collective output is relatively limited and easy enough for readers to spot. Most readers are unlikely even ever to  run across a vanity press product because bookstores seldom give them shelf space. But today, Amazon makes it possible for anyone (and I do mean anyone) to publish a book via its Kindle platform (KDP), plop a generic little e-cover on it, and place it for sale alongside legitimately published books, effectively making it impossible to browse the Amazon catalog in the manner readers used to enjoy browsing brick and mortar bookstores (the very stores Amazon and Barnes & Noble gleefully put out of business years ago). The number of quality books has not increased (if anything it has decreased), Amazon has just made them harder than ever to find in the reader slush pile.

So now, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, AI comes along and starts doing the writing for us. Just plug in primitive plot, a setting, be prepared to do a little tweaking to the output, and you can write your own novel at the push of an AI button. It has been estimated that something like two million AI-written books are going to hit Amazon in 2026 - and who knows where we go from there? 

I remember a BookBub poll from 2025, that had responses from something over 1,000 writers, in which almost fifty percent said they were using AI in their books. Something like ten percent even admitted that they had done little more than slap their name on the title page of the AI-generated book. Using AI for research, editing, grammar checking, etc. is one thing; using AI to generate whole plots or to do most of the writing is something else. Is it any wonder that the same books seem to be getting written over and over again? Just clone a recent bestseller, tweak it a bit, slap a new purple or pink cover on it, and throw it on the market for the rest of us to sift through. And if that doesn’t work, try again next month.

Legitimate authors, I think, are embarrassed by the state of the industry - even to the point of going out of their way to state that they wrote their books themselves. Not long ago The Authors Guild started offering a “Human Authored” logo for their members’ use, and I’ve heard of others using stickers saying things like “No AI Used,” “Not by AI,” or “100% Human-Generated.” I find it sad that writers have to “prove” their legitimacy this way, but I suspect that this is their future.

My own response to all of this is to read pretty much only the authors I’ve already grown to trust over the years, or to read predominantly from pre-AI back catalogs. Breakthrough writers are going to find me a much more skeptical reader than I’ve been in the past. I may miss out on some good writing this way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come out way ahead in the long run. Too, I will be a little less skeptical when it comes to literary fiction than to genre fiction - but that’s a whole other discussion.  

Dear Life - Alice Munro

 

Dear Life, published in 2012, was Alice Munro’s last book. She won the Nobel Prize the following year, becoming the first and only Canadian for having done so. At the time, she was called a “master of the contemporary short story,” and I very much agree with that assessment of her talents.

Dear Life contains fourteen short stories, the final four of which Munro tells us are based upon her own life:

“The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.” (Page 233)

Most of the stories involve small town women whose ordinary lives are forever changed by a chance meeting or occurrence they can never stop thinking about, sometimes even after they are the only one left who remembers what really happened.

In “Train,” my favorite of the stories, for example, a young World War II soldier returning to rural Canada, jumps off the train one town before arriving back in his hometown. He begins walking down the track in the direction he’s come from, and stumbles upon a rundown farm in need of numerous repairs. The woman who lives there alone asks for help, and the man ends up living there for years, never going home. But that’s not even the strangest thing about how their relationship evolves.

In another story, “Dolly,” the pre-World War II girlfriend of a woman’s husband coincidentally shows up at her front door one morning years later selling cosmetics door to door. Lives are changed in ways unforeseen just a few hours earlier. 

Over and over again lives are changed in an instant.

These are stories where sheer chance changes everything for the small town characters involved. Some are led into life-changing experiences by people wandering through their lives on a whim; some are powerfully impacted by the single decision they did or did not make; some wish they had escaped small town Canada when they had the chance; others wish they had never left. The stories are about real people living during and around the World War II years, a time when many were seeking ways to change - or put back together - their lives. It is a time when nothing seems impossible - so chances are taken.

Surprisingly, the least affective stories for me are the autobiographical ones, probably because I could not forget they are somewhere between memoir and short story. As a reader, I found myself wondering over and over where the truth stopped and the fiction began. That is probably not something that will bother all, or even most readers, but it kept me from losing myself in the stories enough to really enjoy them. 

Alice Munro is an excellent short story writer, and I look forward to reading much more of her work. Luckily, she wrote fourteen collections of short stories and one novel between 1968 and 2012. Lots to look forward to.  

The Reading Week Ahead - March 9, 2026

 Yesterday’s time-change really did a number on me. I woke up “late” and then felt sluggish all day long even though I ended up getting the same number of hours of sleep I normally get. It’s going to take me another couple of days, I think, to get into the sun’s new rhythm, and I really wish we would choose one time or the other and stick with that one for the duration. I did manage to get some reading in but my concentration level was so low that I would have a hard time today telling you what I read yesterday.

The stack of books on my desk is not going down, but at least their faces are starting to change now. I finished up C. William Langsfeld’s Salvation a few days ago, and was disappointed that the ending couldn’t save the book for me as I had hoped it would. The plot is really good, and for the most part well executed, but I had a difficult time fully believing in most of the characters, unfortunately even to the main character. I’m so conflicted by the way I feel about this one that I probably won’t do a more formal review of it even though sometimes it’s in the writing of a review that I finally come to a decent understanding/appreciation of what I’ve just read. 

The other book I’ve recently finished is Senator John Kennedy’s How to Test Negative for Stupid. This one really made me smile a lot, and as I said earlier, Kennedy is my idea of what it would have been like to have Mark Twain in the Senate back in the day. I hope to do more with this one in a few days, but here are some of the more Twainish quotes from the book:

“…sometimes it takes Congress months to get nothing done."

“…you don’t have to be crazy to serve in the senate; they will happily train you."

“Washington D.C. is often like high school but no one ever graduates and the media is stuck in permanent sophomore year."

You get the idea.

I’m still reading from three other books in the stack but it will be a while before I finish any of those, especially the Ron Chernow biography of Twain. I’m about 350 pages into that one now, and that’s barely one-third of the way through.

And of course, I added a couple to the stack to take up some of the slack of the three I finished this week. I’ve not taken easily to Agatha Christie novels in the past despite having started several of them over the years, and can claim only one Miss Marple mystery as actually having been finished. So I’m going to try my first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Maybe Christie will click for me this time around.

I’m in the mood for some solid science fiction, the type where the “science” is the key part of the equation, and I know that Ben Bova is one of the best at that style. Mars Life is set in what seems to be the near future, but a future in which the first fossil ever has been discovered on Mars just when the government has decided to pull the plug on the whole program because of massive flooding problems on Earth. I’m only about 65 pages in, but already the characters are starting to distinguish themselves via their individual backstories. So far, so good.

This is going to be a week of doctors and, I hope, lunch with some old high school buddies back in my hometown. Ironically enough, as of the last several days a couple of new Long Covid symptoms have popped up: loss of smell and a wide distortion of taste. Perfect timing for a lunch out with old friends, but you have to just laugh at life sometimes. 

The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager

 

The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives consists of twenty-two author-interviews during which Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager ask the authors a set series of questions. Twenty-one of the interviews are conducted in person, and one, that of author Donna Tartt, via email. Despite the questions all being pretty much being the same from author to author, Pearl and Schwager manage to turn all of the in-person interviews into genuine conversations with the various authors (and one poet) they visit. The Donna Tartt interview is by far the stiffest of the twenty-two and clearly demonstrates the limitations of email interviews as compared to the in-person variety.

No matter who is being interviewed, whether the author is young or old, famous or lesser known, these four questions are key parts of the conversation:

“Did you come from a reading houselhold? How did you learn to read and at what age? Were you a voracious reader as a child? What were your favorite books as a child."

 Oftentimes, too, the interviewees are asked about their favorite classic and contemporary authors, what they read, if anything, while they are involved in their own creative process, whether they limit their pleasure (as opposed to research) reading to certain genres - if they read genre literature at all, which authors influenced their own work, and if there had been one book in their lives that convinced them they wanted to become writers also. 

Pearl and Schwager helpfully attached a summary to the end of each interview listing the key books and authors mentioned along the way. Each of the lists is headed up something like: “Some Books and Authors in Donna’s Library.” 

It is difficult to read The Writer’s Library without comparing your own early reading experiences to those being recounted by the various authors. You can’t help but wonder how your own early childhood experiences compared to theirs, or how differently your own life may have turned out if one or two key people had not appeared in your world just when they did.

I never really expected to finish The Writer’s Library when I first began reading it, figuring that it would soon become repetitive and predictable - and probably boring. Well, I was wrong. Pearl and Schwager’s enthusiasm for their project was so contagious that most of the authors they spoke with were soon so caught up in the fun of the whole thing that I never grew bored. And, despite having already read many of the books referenced in the twenty-two lists, I still managed to come away with a substantial lists of books and new-to-me authors of my own that I’ll be exploring for weeks to come. I enjoyed this one.

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.  

88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

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.

What We Left Unsaid - Winnie M. Li

Sometimes I think I live for road trips, but not just any old road trips. I like to get out and wander aimlessly for two or three thousand miles before doing the same thing on my way back home. That kind of trip has led me to countless unexpected places, and to friends I would have otherwise never known over the last several decades, and it’s still one of my favorite things in all the world to do (although I had to skip doing a trip in 2025). 

And that is what led me to Winnie Li’s What We Left Unsaid, a novel about three middle-aged siblings on a drive from Chicago to California to visit their seriously ill mother. First, though, I fell in love with the cover because of the way that it so perfectly captures the serendipitous spirit of a four-wheel ramble across America. I wanted to experience someone else’s road trip, and I did that. But that’s not all there is here.

====================================================

My What We Left Unsaid impressions and takeaways:

• The basic plot (three rather estranged Asian American siblings forced to spend days together on a cross-country drive) is a solid one,
•  Flashbacks to their last road trip together, when the three were children, effectively explains their current family dynamic,
• Too much of the plot heavily depends on coincidence, and this many critical coincidences start to feel overly contrived and forced before very long,
• Li tries to hit every hot-button social/political issue on this roadtrip of about a week’s duration: overt racism, gun violence, gender issues, gay marriage, politics with a definite anti-Trump tone, it’s all there,
• the ending is predictable enough to be disappointing because most readers will see it coming long before the novel’s “big reveal,” is officially unveiled, and
• despite the book’s almost 400 pages, the last quarter of it seems rushed and overly (and very negatively) stereotypical.

Overall, I was disappointed in What We Left Unsaid despite enjoying its road trip aspects. It proved to be too one-sided for me to suspend my disbelief long enough to buy its message. All the “good" guys in the story are exceptionally “good,” and all the “bad" guys are exceptionally “bad.” Li’s failure to include any grey areas or characters in her tale leads to the book’s predictability. And that’s my main gripe about this one. Reluctantly, I’ll give it three stars because it did keep me engaged enough to finish it.

Is Book Lust a Sin?

    

     My bookshelves have long since reached the point where a book has to be somewhere removed from the shelves before I can add any recent acquisition. And even then, it’s still a matter of shifting books around until a spot opens up in the appropriate section of my shelving. I’ve even tried the periodic book-purge in which I’ve found new homes for ten or twenty books at a time, but that method almost always immediately sends me out book-shopping again until all that wonderful free space is filled. 

     So, in practical terms, the rule around here is “one book in, one book out.” And that’s gotten harder for me to do because the individual  choices are getting to be more and more difficult to make now. It's beginning to cut too close to the bone. Rather ridiculously, my answer - despite my aversion to buying e-books from Amazon - has been to buy e-books from those vendors that allow me to download backup copies to my computer, vendors like Kobo and a few publishers that sell directly to readers. (More on this later if anyone is interested.)

     Shelf space problem solved. Whole new problem created. 

     Since the Year of the Plague (2020), I’ve bought more e-books every year than I can possibly ever read. As of this moment, there are 1,659 e-books on my Kobo reader, with a paltry 335 of those actually having been read. A handful of others have been abandoned after failed efforts on my part to find them readable, but that still leaves something over 1,300 unread books on the reader. 

     And I keep on buying them, and buying them, and buying them. 

     They are not all new books; in fact, well over half of them are back catalog choices that I’ve gotten at really good prices. (Is this starting to sound more like an addiction now and not just a harmless hobby?) I see that I purchased over 30 books in January, and already this month, another 10. The best that I can say about them, is that they are a fairly diverse bunch of books - and that I’ll never, ever, run out of things to read. 2026 purchases include:

• Eight books from Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series
• The new Michael J. Fox memoir, Future Boy
• Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, historical fiction about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son
• The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman’s fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series
• Michael Connelly’s eighth Lincoln Lawyer book, The Proving Ground
• Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley book, A Slowly Dying Cause
• The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of Harper Lee short stories and magazine pieces
• Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre memoir of being sexually exploited by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew, among others
• Clown Town, Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses book, along with six earlier pre-Slow Horses books from his back catalog
• Eleven books from Martin Cruz Smith’s back catalog

     And of the thirty-three purchased so far this year, a whopping five of them have been read.

     That’s pretty typical of what I’ve been buying now that I’m tending to binge-read certain authors that catch my eye. If I particularly enjoy a book and rate it a rare five-stars, I find myself wanting to know instantly what else that author has published. And then I want to read them all. But 1,659 e-book purchases in a little over five years is crazy. 

     Book lust has to be a sin…right?

     

     

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

 

What you need to know about this one:

• Published in 2006
• One of Tan’s lesser known novels
• Less detail about Chinese history and culture than in author’s more popular books
• Focuses on 11 American tourists who disappear into the Myanmar jungle on Christmas morning
• A satirical look at American tourists (these are all from San Francisco) who naively place themselves in grave danger while expecting their good intentions and American citizenship to keep them safe from harm
• Comic at times, deadly serious at others, even when one sixteen-year-old boy reluctantly becomes a god for the tribe that kidnaps the group
• Not what most expected from Amy Tam after The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Bonesetter’s Daughter

I imagine that this was quite a change-of-pace novel for Tan when she published it. I like it (not love it) because of the interesting characters she develops so well over the course of this 472-page story. If you like literary fiction, you are probably going to enjoy Saving Fish from Drowning.

Slow Reading, Re-Reading Old Favorities, and Just Turning Pages

 I must be feeling better. 

I’ve only noticed that in the last few days. Some of my old energy has returned and - even though my health situation is still a precarious one - I opened up my own blog today for the first time in months. Just reading some of the old posts and comments brought back so many great memories, that I wanted to say hello to anyone out there who might still be reading book blogs.

I’m sad to see that so many of my old favorites seem to have disappeared or drastically cut back on blogging for their own reasons. That makes me realize just how long some of us have been doing this and how many good friends have come (and sadly) gone over the last twenty years or so.

So this is just a HELLO! to the book community, or what’s left of it. I’m not sure how long I will continue to feel so much better than I have in months, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still here and reading. 

My reading has changed over the last year or so in that I’m doing very little reviewing and have decided to read strictly for my own personal pleasure. I’m doing more re-reading than ever, more slow reading, more nonfiction, and just generally enjoying my reading more than I have in a very long time.

I’ll stop here because I have a feeling this post is akin to putting a note in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. It may just sink to the bottom of the ocean - or with a little bit of luck, it will find it's way into the hands of a few readers and old friends.

So here goes...