Bookish (2025) - Lucy Mangan

 

Lucy Mangan’s Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is Mangan's follow-up to 2018’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which covers the author’s childhood reading influences and experiences. Bookish picks up with Mangan’s teenage reading years and concludes in what the author calls her middle-age ones (she is 52). 

“If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we stop considering their situations, relationships, reactions, choices and morals, if we stop exercising ourselves imaginatively, if we stop asking ourselves, ‘What if…?’ and ‘What would I …?’, then we cut ourselves off from inward avenues of growth, exploration, adventure."

 Lucy Mangan is a dedicated reader whose relationship with books goes far deeper than all but the most dedicated of readers can imagine, so Bookish is as much a love letter to books, authors, bookstores, libraries, and publishers as it is a memoir. I get the impression that when Mangan is not reading, she’s thinking about reading as she anxiously makes her way through the day’s assigned tasks. 

It is not surprising that Mangan depended heavily upon her reading to prepare and guide her through the stages of adulthood: falling in love and finding a life partner, beginning a career, motherhood, and the ultimate grief that accompanies so much of anyone's lifetime. In addition, the book explores topics such as “formative novels,” genre fiction, “reading the canon,” dystopias, “studying the classics,” guilty pleasures, romance novels, crime fiction, and creating "a library of one’s own.” 

My own favorite chapter of Bookish is its tenth, entitled: “A Library of Ones Own: Curating a Book Collection.” It is great fun to experience Mangan’s joy and “all is right with the world” feeling as she turns a small outbuilding behind the family’s second home into a personal library and hideaway all her own. The amount of physical labor involved in sorting and shelving 10,000 books, much less all the labor that preceded the shelving, was staggering, but I can easily imagine the grin on Mangan’s face as she worked and envisioned what the finished space would become. 

But even the most avowed of book collectors, sooner or later, has to face the fact that enough is enough, and that there will never be enough space to keep every book that comes into their lives. So with a goal of culling at least five percent of the books she moved to her new library, Mangan approaches the purge this way:

“So the great culling of my mid-forties began. It was a long job and it couldn’t be subcontracted out, because the decisions could only be taken by one individual- me, hi! - one individual book at a time…I held each book in my hand and wordlessly communicated with it…If we still had something to say to each other, if we still had a connection, the book stayed. If there was silence, I thanked it for its service, wondered who the killer had turned out to be after all and pitched it into the charity box."

 If the above paragraph is a little bit like an arrow to your heart, Bookish is for you. You will get Lucy Mangan and consider her a kindred spirit, a friend you haven’t met yet. 

Future Boy (2025) - Michael J. Fox & Nelle Fortenberry

 Michael J. Fox was only 23 years old in 1985 when he pulled off one of the craziest Hollywood stunts of all time. For about three months, beginning on January 15, 1985, Fox worked simultaneously on two major projects: completing the third season of Family Ties during the day while shooting his scenes in the first Back to the Future movie at night. He managed this by working five days a week from roughly 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Family Ties before being hustled over to the movie set for several more hours of work. It didn’t hurt that Michael was only 23 years old and fearless.  

In Future Boy, Michael tells us how he managed to pull it off.

Michael J. Fox (the “J” was added to his name because another Michael Fox was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild) caught the acting bug in Canada during junior high school, and by age 15 he had landed a major role in a Canadian sitcom called Leo and Me. By age 18, he had dropped out of school for good and moved south to the U.S. with about $3,000 in his pocket. Michael was not exactly an overnight success although he did manage to pick up guest shots on a few television shows like Lou Grant and Palmerstown U.S.A. 

But still, a few years later Fox was near penniless, had sold his furniture to buy food, and even sometimes used dumpster diving as a way to find free food. He finally caught his big break with Family Ties, but memories of those early days were still fresh enough that Fox was determined to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. So, feeling young and invincible, he jumped with both feet into the work schedule that would ultimately turn him into a superstar. 

And he did it.

Future Boy is particular fun for fans of  Back to the Future or Family Ties, but even those who only know Fox because of his more recent pubic struggles with Parkinson’s will respond to the actor’s likable and heartfelt approach to the memoir. Reading Future Boy is akin to sitting across the table from Fox while he tells you stories about those three months - and that he uses an often-humorous, self-deprecating approach to his casual storytelling makes it all the better. In addition to Fox’s stories, the memoir includes some fresh interviews with cast and crew members, including an account of Fox’s remarkable relationship with Eric Stoltz, the actor he replaced in the role of Marty McFly after Stoltz had already completed five or six weeks work in the role. 

Michael J. Fox is an easy guy to pull for, and this glimpse into his behind the scenes life makes for fun reading. Now, though, I wish he would give us a similar look at how he has managed to deal with Parkinson’s for the last thirty-five years. 

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox (11-19-22)

What I’m Reading This Week (6-8-26)

 During the past two weeks (since I’ve done one of these “what I’m reading” posts), I’ve finished up four very different books:

• The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout’s latest literary novel,
• Future Boy - Michael J. Fox’s memoir about working simultaneously on the third season of Family Ties and the first Back to the Future movie,
• Bookish - Lucy Mangan’s account of her evolution as a reader from childhood to middle age, and
• A Rip Through Time- Kelly Armstrong’s time travel novel about a young female Canadian detective who gets trapped inside the body of an 1850s Scottish woman who almost became the victim of a serial killer. 

I enjoyed each of the four to one degree or another, but I’m still looking for what will be only my third five-star book of 2026. Either I’m grading harder than ever this year or I’ve been unlucky in my choices. Either way, the search goes on.

I’m at various stages of completion in Chernow’s Mark Twain, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The only possible five-star book I see there is Mark Twain, but the jury is still out on that one. I have, in the meantime, started a few others:

John D. MacDonald is an author I loved reading in my late teens and early twenties, but I don’t think I’ve read him since. And it’s been so long ago now, that even if I accidentally re-read something of his, there’s almost no chance that I’ll even notice it. A Purple Place for Dying has already been an eye-opener in the sense that Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional P.I., is so blatantly sexist a character. I hadn’t realized just how different the ‘60s were from today in that way. 

The Dying Light, the fourth book in Ann Cleeves’s Detective Matthew Venn series, will be published at the end of September. I’ve read the first three books in the series - and I’m a longtime fan of Ann Cleeves - so I have high hopes for this one. It certainly gets off to a rousing start as the first chapter opens with the discovery of the drowned body of a 17-year old girl at the summer home of her missing friend.

I first read this Jules Verne classic when I was 13 or 14 years old, so I imagine that this reading will impress me a lot differently than that first reading did. Back then, it was all about the adventure. This time around, in this George Makepeace Towle translation, I’m most enjoying the humor and the characters themselves as Fogg and Passepartout scurry around the world with Detective Fix in constant pursuit. I have vague memories of seeing a movie version of Around the World in 80 Days during my childhood, too, something else I want to look into further. 

I fell in love with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s four-book The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series a few years ago, but I’ve never read any of his short stories. The City of Mist is a collection of ten of those stories, and they all sound very similar in theme and tone to the novels, so I’m anxious to get to them. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be re-reading all four novels if these stories turn out to be as good as I suspect they are.

We read Animal Farm in junior high school, as I recall, and I remember being fascinated by it, especially once I figured out what Orwell was actually doing here. The teacher didn’t do a lot of prep work, allowing us instead to read the book on our own for most of the first week. It was fun to see the “light bulbs” turning on one by one around the classroom as the week came to a close. Then, the real fun began.

I’m especially looking forward to finishing Blood Meridian this week. I can’t remember when I’ve worked as hard understanding a novel as I have on this one - probably when I finally managed to read all of Moby Dick a few years ago. It’s really been a chore, and I’m wondering why I’m not reacting to Blood Meridian the way all the critics keep telling me I should be reacting. 

Have a great week, everyone.

The Things We Never Say (2026) - Elizabeth Strout

 

The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.

“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything - everything - looked different."

Artie Dam is the kind of high school history teacher who is remembered by former students for decades. Artie has everything going for him. On the surface at least, Artie has settled down into the kind of steady life that others can only aspire to. He’s been married to the same woman for decades, loves his teaching job and his students, has a grown son who seems to be doing well, and is often found solo-sailing his own boat out on the bay near his home. 

But Artie Dam, surrounded by friends and family though he might be, is a deeply lonely man who feels that he really doesn’t know even the people closest to him, and truth be known, Artie even feels a little bit suicidal at times. Then even that uncomfortable world gets turned upside down on Artie after he learns a deeply buried family secret that further convinces him that no one ever really knows anyone else. The final straw for Artie comes with the 2024 election. He dreads the election as it approaches, and when it’s over he’s left with the feeling that everything familiar to him is slipping away.

In the end, Artie figures out that being alive is a “private thing” for all of us, that our real pains, truths, and thoughts are things that no one else will ever fully be able to understand or even have access to. This is a novel about loneliness, communication, and connection, and Strout leaves the reader with a lot to think about despite how short, at only 220 pages, The Things We Never Say is. 

This is another beautifully written Elizabeth Strout novel, but it is not destined to be one of my favorites of hers mainly, I suppose, because the way that Artie and, with one exception, everyone around him reacts to the 2024 election does not feel realistic to me. I found it hard to believe how deeply obsessed and self-destructive the people in Artie’s life allowed themselves to become immediately upon announcement of the official results. For me, it feels a little heavy handed even as a literary device. That said, The Things We Never Say is an Elizabeth Strout novel, and Elizabeth Strout proved a long time ago that she is incapable of writing a bad novel.  

Abandoned Books - Jan thru May 2026

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.

In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:

This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I really had high hopes for it since it was a National Book Award semi-finalist at one point. But I found Chain Gang All-Stars extremely difficult to read because its author decided to go all “pronoun crazy” on me. This is a “woke” book by any definition, but my only problem with it was tying to figure out if “they” and “them” were supposed to be singular or plural. The plot was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me working so hard to figure out what easily could have been made obvious by simply using pronouns the way they were meant to be used. I got tired of re-reading whole paragraphs just to be sure that the author was only talking about one person instead of multiple ones.

I was looking for an Australian novel when I started reading A Hundred Small Lessons, and was drawn to this story about an elderly woman forced to leave her family for health reasons. Unfortunately/fortunately, the home she’s placed in is within walking distance of her old house, and she keeps coming back even though a young family has moved in. It’s probably me on this one, but it just became too much of a “Hallmark movie” to keep me turning pages…too predictable.

This one seemed like a natural fit for me, so I have now given its second, and final chance. Turns out that I don’t get much of a sense of the author’s “passion” from this collection of bookish essays he’s written over the years. Frankly, I found them to be very dryly written, and a little bit dull if read as a steady diet. I’m sure that many people have loved this one, and can tell me that I’m wrong about it. I’ll grant them that. Just not for me.  

I abandoned Every Day I Read for exactly the opposite reason that I quit on A Passion for Books. The South Korean author of this one took such an overwhelming cutesy approach here that I quickly realized I am not even remotely close to being part of her intended audience. I imagine this one got a big push on BookTock, exactly where its intended audience hangs out for a good time. For me, it was just too simplistic and obvious to get me past the book’s first few pages.

The Black Wolf is, by far, my biggest disappointment of the year. (Maybe it started with what I consider to be a pretty horrible cover.) I made it all the way through Penny’s 50-page recap of her previous book (barely), and then waded right in to her preachy anti-business, anti-American diatribe on global warming and Canadian sellouts willing to ruin Canada in order to enrich themselves. This one is a real downer of a story.

Rule of the Bone is my other big regret for 2026. I’ve had a copy of this one around the house for years, and this was my second attempt at reading it. I was surprised, or maybe not really all that surprised, I suppose, to end up quitting on it this second time around just a few pages past where I quit on it the first time I tried to read it. Russell Banks manages the near impossible here: a particularly repulsive storyline that still manages to be boring as heck.

I really didn’t get very far into this one. I will probably catch some flak for saying this, but I’ve grown weary about every book, movie, or television show being required for political correctness reasons to have at least one, or maybe a handful of LGBQT characters at the forefront. I’ve nothing against anyone’s personal life, not my business, but I think the group is overrepresented now to the point of ridiculousness - and, in the long run, that’s to the detriment of the very population being highlighted. Call it LGBQT fatigue, if you will. 

That’s it, so far. Looks like I’ll probably come in around 15 abandoned books again this year, right on schedule. How many do you guys give up on each year on average? I used to force myself, when I was much younger and had way more reading years still ahead of me than behind me, to finish every book that I began, but those days are long gone.

The Little Liar (2023) - Mitch Albom

I’m really not all that much into audiobooks these days, but I do still enjoy them anytime I’m driving alone for more than just a few minutes at a time. The extra focus that audiobooks demand keeps me more aware and alert than I otherwise would be by just listening to music while I drive. So I put Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar to good use last month. I chose an Albom book mainly because he is one of those writers whose stories are sraightforward enough that they don’t require a focus level that might be dangerous at 75 miles per hour. That he does such a wonderful job narrating The Little Liar himself was a bonus I didn’t expect.

Mitch Albom books tend to be a little gimmicky, and this one is no exception. This is a story about an eleven-year-old boy in Salonika, Greece, who has never in his life told a lie. We know this to be true because the book’s narrator is none other than Truth itself, and Truth tells us that young Nico Krispis is simply incapable of telling a lie. We, as readers, believe it - and so does everyone in Nico’s Salonika community.

But Nico’s determination never to lie backfires on him when the Nazis invade Greece and a devious German officer exploits Nico’s reputation for unfailing honesty to trick the boy’s fellow Jews into calmly boarding the trains that are to take them to faraway concentration camps. Nico believes that the families are being relocated to new towns and jobs where they can safely ride out the war, and that’s what they believe when he tells them it’s true. He’s believes what he’s been told by the German he’s befriended, and that’s what he tells everyone at the train station. It’s only when Salonika has largely been cleared of its Jewish population that Nico figures out the truth. And when he does, he is so horrified that he never tells the truth again.

There are four main characters in The Little Liar: Nico; his older brother Sebastian; Fannie, the little girl both boys are in love with; and the German officer. The four characters go their separate ways after leaving Salonika for the camps, but they are far from done with each other. Albom tells their stories in rotating segments focused on each's post-war life until the moment forty years later that they finally meet again for their final confrontation.   

The Little Liar is a story about lies, devastating guilt, reluctant forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and hard-earned redemption. It reads like a deceptively simple parable requiring a fairly strong suspension of disbelief at times, but it still manages to pack a surprising punch. 

Godfall (2023) - Van Jensen

 

“No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"

But that’s not really what happens.

Instead, as it approaches rural Nebraska, what turns out to be an alien corpse falls slower and slower before rather gently landing just outside Little Springs, Nebraska. No one dies. No one is even injured. But almost immediately, a swarm of military personnel, FBI agents, scientists, cultists, foreign spies, and conspiracy theorists hits Little Springs - and Sheriff David Blunt’s problems are just about to begin. In the end, the Sheriff will be lucky to survive the invasion of his little town, because almost immediately people start to die - and it looks like the string of murders is directly connected to the massive, supposedly dead, alien.

Godfall is not as much of a science fiction novel as its title and basic plot might lead readers to believe it to be. It is much more a solidly crafted police procedural in which the Sheriff, with a mixed bag of help and opposition from the FBI and the military, tries to catch a serial killer who is relentlessly picking off his victims one by one. That so many of the killer’s victims are townspeople personally closest to Sheriff Blunt makes it all the more urgent that the killer be stopped quickly. The job would be a lot easier, though, if Blunt could tell the difference between those he can trust and those who are lying to him.

This is a well done mashup of the science fiction and murder mystery genres that will probably please fans of the mystery genre a bit more than it will please science fiction fans. In truth, the scifi here is really rather limited in comparison to the space given to catching the town’s serial killer. It helps that the novel’s characters are distinctive enough to keep them all straight, with Sheriff Blunt and his journalist cousin being particularly well developed ones.

If you are a fan of both science fiction and of mysteries, Godfall is definitely one you should take a look at, but even non-scifi fans will enjoy this one.

A Brief Visit to College Station Pays Off

College Station, home to Texas A&M University, is only about 75 miles from my front door, so I enjoy driving up there every few months to see what might turn up in the city’s bookstores. Even though I ended up doing more selling (I hope) than buying this time around, I did come home with five additions to my home library. I’ve decided to begin selling off my collection of Civil War books, nonfiction and fiction alike, and a little indie bookstore in Bryan (College Station’s neighbor) has shown some interest in those. So there’s that.

The new book I’m most tickled about is the 1943 wartime edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Buried Clock, shown above. Despite its age, there is no spotting or discoloration on any of the book’s 250 pages. Considering that this Grosset & Dunlap edition is just a cheaper edition of the William Morrow "Victory Edition"of the book, that’s a pleasant surprise. The inside flap of the book jacket says this in red letters:

This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.

The book’s copyright page adds this:

* VICTORY EDITION*

 The typographical size and format of this book are in accordance with the paper conservation orders of the War Production Board.

I saw almost a dozen other Perry Mason books from the same era today, but the pages in all of them were so discolored that I passed on buying any but this one. From the drastic difference in its condition compared to the others on the same shelf, I don’t think it was acquired by the store from the same seller. 

I also found three Carlos Ruiz Zafón paperbacks published in the UK. Two of them The Prisoner of Heaven and The Angel’s Game are part of Zafón’s well known “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series, a series you should definitely try if you haven’t already done so. Because I’ve not read any of Zafón’s shorter work, I’m particularly looking forward to the third, The City of Mist, a slim collection of eleven of the author's short stories. The covers of the three are very similar, so I’ll just share this one to give you an idea of what they look like:

And finally, there’s this collection of critical essays by Harold Bloom on the key works of novelists ranging from Cervantes to Amy Tan. If I’ve counted correctly, there are 77 essays, sorted by birth year, with Cervantes being the oldest and Tan the youngest. I’m really curious to see what Bloom had to say about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian because I’m still very underwhelmed by it at the 60% mark. I can tell that the collection's previous owner, a female with beautiful handwriting, started reading the collection with great intentions - but she seems to have lost interest pretty quickly. I hope I use the book more than she did.

I really enjoyed the day, so much in fact, that I plan to make a similar trip up to Huntsville sometime in June or July. Sam Houston University is the school in that town, and Sam Houston is very much a part of that city’s history. I haven’t visited for a couple of years, so it will be fun to visit Sam’s gravesite and the spectacular museum dedicated to his memory again. And maybe they have a bookstore worth visiting now…who knows?

What I’m Reading This Week (5/26/26)

 While I did finish two books last week, Godfall by Van Jensen and The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, it seems like I’ve been doing way more " book grazing” than I usually do. When I grow temporarily weary of a book, instead of just picking up another book I have already invested a lot of reading time into, I find myself reading the first chapters of  random books or maybe a short story or two from some anthology I have on hand. So this week calls for a little regrouping on my part.

I’m almost 500 pages into the Twain bio, but the steam has kind of gone out of that one for now, so it’s slow going. And to one degree or another, I’m also struggling with Blood Meridian and The Camp of the Saints. On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say is going well, especially as I get deeper into the family dynamics of that one, and it’s the one I hate to put down right now. 

My book grazing, though, has given me some options for what I will be turning to next:

Future Boy is a relatively brief memoir from Canadian actor Michael J. Fox. This is not anything approaching an autobiographical length memoir; rather, it primarily covers the months at the beginning of Fox’s Hollywood career during which he was simultaneously working on the first Back to the Future movie at night and finishing up the third season of his very popular television series, Family Ties, during the day. Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, and Fox has such a natural, likable screen personality that my curiosity about how he managed to pull this off at such a young age made Future Boy impossible to resist for very long. 

I am a total sucker when it comes to books about books, especially the kind written by people who turn them into mini-memoirs along the way. That seems to be what Lucy Mangan has done with Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. To this point, I’ve only read the Introduction to the book, but I’m finding it almost conversational in style, and I have high hopes for it. I particularly like this quote from the intro, “…if you read without self-consciousness or snobbery, you are liberated: free to enjoy whatever comes your way and makes you happy…” That is exactly the reading philosophy I’ve employed most of my life, and I recommend it to all new readers - or light readers - I run across.

I’ve been on a time travel novel kick lately, so A Rip in Time easily caught my eye. It’s not the most “serious” take on the subject, but I’m definitely having fun with it so far. The basic premise is that a young detective from the US goes to Scotland to be with her dying grandmother, but while there she is targeted by a serial killer and nearly strangled to death. She survives, but wakes up in 1850s Scotland inside the body of another young woman from that time period who was strangled by the same man in the same place. It’s been fun watching her figure out how to adapt to her new circumstances while trying to come up with a way to travel back to the present. Of course, she’s going to try to catch the killer. That’s just who she is despite the new body she’s wearing. 

I have quite a few short story anthologies like The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2022) around, but I tend to forget that I have them. In an attempt to force myself finally to pay some attention to books like this one, I’ve placed it prominently on top of my desk. I plan to dip into it when the short story mood strikes me - and I hope to find some “new” mystery writers to explore further that way. There are 21 stories in the collection, so that seems likely. 

That’s the plan for this holiday-shortened week. I hope that you all had a great Memorial Day celebration, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say this week. 

The Dentist (UK 2020) (US 2025) - Tim Sullivan

 Where it comes to the things I like most about crime fiction, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, Sullivan writes the kind of methodical, steady paced police procedural that has become harder and harder to find in recent years because today's publishers seem to prefer publishing crime thrillers in which every other chapter ends with a shocking twist or ciffhanger designed to keep the reader turning pages as fast as possible. While those can be fun for a while, a steady diet of them can  get me to the burnout stage pretty quickly. I much prefer procedurals like The Dentist that give me time enough to think right along with the investigative team working the crime.

But it gets even better.

The Dentist is book one in what is currently an eight-book series featuring DS George Cross - and it’s the Cross character that transforms an already solid murder mystery into something truly exceptional. Cross, you see, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a subset of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a disorder with some symptoms and traits that cause him severe social interaction problems and others that make him into the almost perfect detective. 

Among the more problematic traits are: 

• an extreme difficulty making or maintaining eye contact,
• taking all conversation literally because of an inability to recognize sarcasm, implied meanings, puns, or jokes,
• a difficulty reading facial expressions and knowing when and how to enter or leave conversations, 
• being exhausted by the extra effort required to survive any kind of social interaction, and
• anxiety generated by crowds, noise, or particular smells. 

On the other hand, Asperger’s allows Cross:

• a strong memory for details related to topics he takes an interest in,
• the expertise to recognize order, pattern recognition, structure, and routines - and the ability to sense when those have been disrupted, along with
• a talent for splitting goals into precise step-by-step lists that give him great pleasure to complete.

While I found DS Cross to be a very sympathetic character, and  admired his efforts to compensate for his social shortcomings, I also appreciated the typically dry British humor that was generated by Cross’s habit of taking everything around him so literally. Never was the humor mean spirited, and it only made me like the Cross character even more. This is a fun detective series that I intend to fully explore over the next months. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/18/26)

 I turned a lot of pages last week but ended up only actually finishing one book, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist. I really like the way that Sullivan develops his characters, especially Cross who suffers from Asperger Syndrome, and I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the DS Cross series soon. 

I’m over halfway through Godfall now, and I’m still trying to answer one of the questions I had coming in: is this a mystery or is it a scifi novel? At this point, the author seems to be focusing more on the serial killer who has come to town along with the alien, but I’m really looking forward to how he ultimately resolves the issue of a three-mile-tall alien dropping from the sky. 

I’m struggling a bit with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but that doesn’t surprise me much. I struggle with McCarthy in exactly the same way that I struggle with Faulkner. Those long descriptive sentences demand so much concentration that I can only read the book when I am most alert. So if I don’t read from Blood Meridian early in the day, it’s just as well that I pass on it for the whole day. Otherwise, I often end up reading the same long paragraph two or three times to make sure that I haven’t missed something important. The result is that I’m only about 130 pages into this one.

I’m doing my monthly 200-mile round trip drive for lunch with friends from my high school graduating class this week so, in addition to Godfall and Blood Meridian, I’ll be adding a new audio book to get me through those four hours of driving - plus these two:

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, and I’ve fully explored her Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge worlds now, especially getting a kick out of the way she intertwines the two worlds. I’m always ready for more about those ladies, but The Things We Never Say is a standalone focusing on a 57-year-old high school teacher called Artie Dam who is struggling with a kind of deep loneliness that would surprise his friends and students. The real irony is that Artie is married to a therapist. This one has been well received by Strout fans and critics alike.

The Camp of the Saints seems to be quite controversial these days. It is a French novel written in 1973 by Jean Raspail that predicted the open borders situation that the world is dealing with today. I’m only about thirty pages into the novel, but it begins on the morning that a fleet of ragtag boats is arriving on the beaches of France with almost a million impoverished Indians onboard. The novel was out of print for a long time, and a 2025 reprint was taken down by Amazon a couple of weeks ago over an “offensive content” issue before it was re-listed due to the feedback the take down received. I decided to see what the big deal was for myself. Is this a racist rant or is it a prophetic novel…or can it be both, I wonder. 

I’ve chosen The Little Liar by Mitch Albom for Wednesday’s road trip. I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but this one seems to be different from the others of his I’ve read. It tells the story of an eleven-year-old Jewish boy duped by the Nazis into working with them to convince his neighbors that they have nothing to fear when boarding the trains to “new jobs and safety.” He only figures it all out after his own family is “herded into a boxcar” headed to Auschwitz. This sounds perfect for what has become a rather boring drive over the years…not too complicated, but not too mindlessly silly either. 

So that’s it for the next few days. I look forward to seeing what you all are up to.

Return to Sender (2025) - Craig Johnson

 

Return to Sender is the twenty-first book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I’ve read every single one of them. I’ve also watched the entire Longmire television series, so you can definitely consider me a fan of Craig Johnson’s work, someone quite familiar with Walt and his surrounding cast of characters. But as much as I still look forward to the next Walt Longmire mystery, there’s one thing I learned about the stories a long time ago: they are strongest and the most fun when Walt doesn't go all solo on us. Walt is just a better sheriff, man, and fictional character when he has Henry Standing Bear, Vic Moretti, Lucian Connally, Ruby, and Cady Longmire around to shake up his personal life a bit. Johnson always produces a good, solid mystery thriller for his readers to enjoy, but what makes them special for longtime fans are Walt’s interactions with all the other series regulars.

Unfortunately, Walt’s gone and done it again in Return to Sender. This time he’s off on his own working undercover as a mailman in a remote county of Wyoming as he tries to find a mail lady who disappeared while driving her regular 307-mile route. Walt is not very good at undercover work, as he himself readily admits, so he’s outed fairly quickly by the locals even though for a little while he thinks he’s fooling them. His search soon leads him to a weird UFO cult in the middle of the Red Desert called The Order of the Red Gate that the mail lady seems to be connected with somehow. But, while looking for her, Walt learns disturbing details about the cult and its leaders that will make it near impossible for him to rescue everyone there who needs immediate rescuing. And he’s on his own because even the county cops are not able to offer him a whole lot of timely help way out in the middle of the desert. It’s pretty much up to Walt and Dog, his loyal canine, if this one is going to end well. 

Thankfully, there are a few pages near the middle of the book where Walt joins Vic, Henry, Cady, Ruby, and Lucien in Cheyenne for a black-tie reception. It’s only an overnighter, but it is a welcomed break in what is otherwise merely a solid mystery thriller that could easily be read as a standalone novel instead of as the most recent book in a popular two-decade-old series. Johnson seems to be going that direction more and more - and that’s kind of a shame.

Time and Again (1970) - Jack Finney

 It’s strange to me how some books can stick in your mind so firmly that even after more than fifty years you still remember the very first time you became aware of their existence. Time and Again is one of those books for me. 

My wife and I were living in Houston in mid-1972 and had driven about 110 miles back to the two little towns we had been raised in so that we could visit our folks for the first time in several months. Port Arthur had recently opened up a new library near my in-laws that caught my eye, and I decided to drop by for a quick look. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to borrow any of the books, but still couldn’t resist browsing the shelves for a few minutes anyway. But I never even made it to the shelves that day because a brand new copy of Time and Again was sitting on top of a little display between the front door and the shelves I was headed toward. The book looked interesting so I settled into a nearby chair with it for a closer look, and would hardly move again for the next two hours before reluctantly putting the book back where I found it and leaving the library to pack for home. And I was so curious about how Finney’s story would end that I bought my own copy as soon as I could make it to a Houston bookstore the following week. 

That’s the exact copy of the book I just re-read for the first time since 1972.

Finney’s story is not one involving time machines, wormholes, or parallel universes, and in a way, that makes it all the more believable. His time-travelers are specially recruited men and women who can immerse themselves into period-correct settings until they are able to use self-hypnosis to travel back in time. Si Morley is one of the few recruits actually able to pull off the stunt, and after a brief foray to 1882 New York City, during which his visit  does not impact the present, he is allowed to return to January 1882 with strict instructions that his is to be only an observer, that he is not to interact with anyone he meets. Well, that’s easier said than done.

Si takes a room in a boardinghouse where he is smitten by Julia, niece of the woman who owns the home. He knows that nothing can come of his feelings for Julia, but when he learns that she is engaged to a man Si knows will destroy her life, he does his best to make sure that their marriage will never happen. 

“Observe, don’t interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project…where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia’s life wasn’t long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn’t stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn’t do it here either."

Could Si, by dooming their potential children never to be born, be negatively impacting the future? It’s a chance he’s willing to take, but when the project bosses do a complete one-eighty and task him with doing something in the past that will have historical significance in the present, he begins to doubt himself. Now what does he do?

Time and Again would be great fun even if this were all there was to it, but there’s more. What makes the book so special, in my estimation, are all the sketches and historical photos used to illustrate the 1882 world that Si is traveling back to. (My particular favorite is a photo of the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty sitting on the grounds of Madison Square before the statue was fully assembled where it stands today.) The attention to detail makes it easy to imagine the very different New York City that Si is trying to figure out, and survive, all by himself. 

This was a successful re-read. I come away from it with a deeper appreciation for what Finney accomplished with Time and Again, if maybe a little less excitement than then I felt the first time around. And that’s on me. After all, I was in my twenties the first time I read the book, and I’m in my seventies now. A lot has changed, not me the least. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/11/26)

 Reading four or five books at the same time often means finishing two or three of them within a day or two of each other, and that’s what happened to me last week. I finished Time and Again, Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and Return to Sender, book number 21 in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series all within a few days. And while I continue to read John Chernow’s Mark Twain bio, I’ve been neglecting it for at least a week now. Instead, I’ve started three new ones all pretty much at the same time:

The Dentist is the first book in Tim Sullivan’s DS Cross series. As of the moment, there are eight books in the series, but I’m just now beginning to explore the Cross character mainly because of the tremendous enthusiasm Cathy over at Kittling: Books has been showing for the series for the last few months. I’m primarily drawn to the series because its central character, George Cross, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that his fellow cops can tolerate only because of the guy’s tremendous talent for solving murders. I’m really enjoying this first book.

Godfall is just too weird to ignore. This one is a sci-fi murder mystery, and I’m not sure yet which genre is going to be most emphasized. Picture a three-mile-tall alien (who seems to be dead) crashing into a remote part of Nebraska. The sheriff of Little Springs now has to contend with all the government agents, scientists, and cult weirdos who descend on his little town - along with a string of murders that seem to somehow be connected to the town’s newly arrive giant resident. I’ve only read the opener so far, but I find Van Jensen’s writing style very comfortable and I’m looking forward to getting deeper in…soon.

I’ve only read two or three Cormac McCarthy novels, but have been meaning to revisit his work again for a while now. I picked up this copy of Blood Meridian last year, so it seems like a good place to jump back in. McCarthy’s prose has always seemed a little intimidating to me for some reason, but I’ve found the first three chapters of Blood Meridian not to be that way. It’s about the “Kid,” a fourteen-year-old drifter from Tennessee who stumbles into the bloody, nightmarish world that was the Texas-Mexico border in 1850. McCarthy’s books can be very brutal, and this one is no exception. 

These three are going to get the bulk of my reading time for the next week or so unless I end up abandoning one of them, something I don’t see much chance of happening with this bunch. The fun part of beginning three books within something like a three-day window is waiting to see which one, if any, ends up dominating my reading time because it hits me harder than the others. That ends up happening more times than not. I hope you all have a great reading week ahead of you. Have fun!

Buckeye (2025) - Patrick Ryan

 

Buckeye is a multi-generational family saga following the evolution of  two small town Ohio families from the 1920s to the 1980s. The book’s central character is Cal Jenkins, a young man who is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Still dejected because he is physically ineligible for World War II military service, Cal marries Becky, a hometown girl who sometimes is able to make minimal contact with the dead, a talent that compounds Cal’s feelings of his own inadequacy. The other family in the story is comprised of two outsiders who move to Bonhomie as adults: Margaret, who grew up in an orphanage, and Felix, who was transferred to the town after receiving a job promotion at another Ohio location. 

The two families become indelibly linked on VE Day when Margaret goes to town for some shopping and suddenly starts hearing loud chatter and cheers on the street. Sensing significant war news, she rushes into Cal’s hardware store hoping that he has a radio she can listen to the good news on. Then, in celebratory excitement, Margaret impulsively kisses Cal on her way out of the store, and that single kiss ignites a spark that will directly impact the lives of everyone in both families for at least two generations. 

Because of the risk of spoiling the novel for future readers, I’m going to stop with just those plot details.

Patrick Ryan, despite his tendency to do as much “telling” as “showing” in his storytelling, creates several memorable characters in Buckeye. Cal, because of his insecurities about not being enough of a man to fight alongside his friends and neighbors, seems very real. Becky is a goodhearted woman who finds meaning in her life by connecting the dead to those they left behind, never charging a dime for her time or services. Margaret’s coming-of-age story in the orphanage is one that deserves a novel of its own, and Felix, her husband, is a man desperately struggling to determine exactly what kind of man he wants to be for the rest of his life. Each of the four are as interesting as they are different from one another, but it is when they begin to interact that the sparks really begin to fly.

Buckeye is a novel about keeping secrets from those closest to you, and how keeping those secrets can create enough guilt, resentment, and anger to destroy the very relationships you were trying to protect in the first place. It explores the definition of masculinity and comes up with some surprising conclusions. It is about small town America during World War II, an era during which people knew their neighbors along with most of their secrets - and all the good and the bad that came with that closeness. Buckeye is a longish novel in which whatever action there is can seem to develop very slowly at times, and I considered abandoning it at one point, but the characters, and their predicament, kept me coming back. And I’m glad I did. 

Stand Proud (1984) - Elmer Kelton

 I first read Elmer Kelton’s Stand Proud sometime back in the eighties,  and that was plenty long enough ago for this re-read to feel like I was reading it for the very first time. I remembered almost no details concerning the book’s plot, and had only a general memory of how much I enjoyed the story the first time around. It turns out that Stand Proud explores a theme that Larry McMurtry and quite a few other writers of westerns have explored in their own fiction over the years: what happens to violent men who outlive their usefulness to society once times have changed for the better. 

Frank Claymore is one of those men.

During the Civil War, Frank had been one of the young militia men who stayed home to protect Texas settlers from the deadly raids of the Comanche Indians who were still not willing to cede Texas to the newcomers. The situation was so desperate that the Confederacy had to stop conscripting men from that part of the state so that the small farms and ranches could survive the war years. Twenty-two-year-old Frank was one of those small ranchers himself, but all able-bodied men were required to put time in with the militia - and he put in more than most.

Frank came out of the war years with three things: a wound that would plague him the rest of his life, the location of a remote grassland valley that he would claim for himself, and a mortal enemy and competitor for everything he held dearest. 

And now, over 40 years later, Frank sits in a courtroom to be judged by a jury composed of small ranch owners who resent him and all he has claimed for himself. He is accused of murder, but is still determined to play by his own rules, damn the consequences. And it’s not looking good for him.

Each chapter of Stand Proud opens on a day of Frank’s trial, followed by a longer section from Frank’s past. This allows the reader to compare the young Frank Claymore to the elderly version, and to learn the truth, in detail, about what is being testified to in the courtroom. This construction works remarkably well to explain what kind of man Frank is and why someone as respected as he once was could find himself in a mess like this one so near the end of his life. 

Stand Proud is nothing like the stereotypical pulp fiction western readers unfamiliar with the genre too often think of when they think “western” novel. This is a character-driven story in which relationships and longtime grudges drive all the action, a story where disagreements are more likely to be settled by fists rather than by guns. Kelton’s later novels, such as The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboy’s Quit, and The Good Old Boys brought ever more realism to his stories about the cowboying life and its relationship to an ever-changing Texas landscape. The Western Writers of America once went so far as to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.” I might not go quite that far in my praise of the man, but I will tell you that his fiction has entertained me for a long, long time. And that I appreciate him. 

An American Outlaw (2013) - John Stonehouse

 An American Outlaw is the first book in John Stonehouse’s popular series featuring US Marshal John Whicher. There are now eight books in the series, including one novella, with the latest novel Wolves of the Evening, having just been published in March 2026. This is my first exposure to the series so I don’t know how typical An American Outlaw is to the other seven books, but I’ve been told that Stonehouse writes them as standalone stories that can be read in any order the reader prefers. 

In this first one, Gulf War veteran Gilman James (a distant relative of the famous outlaw Jesse James) comes home to find that two of his childhood buddies never recovered from the mental and emotional wounds they suffered in the same war. They are broken men, and James wants to help them. But that takes money, lots of it, because no one else seems much willing to give these men the kind of help they have every right to expect from a grateful nation. 

James is a man with few prospects of his own, but he will do whatever it takes to get his hands on however much money it takes to help his friends put their lives back together. The icing on the cake is that he plans to steal all of that money from the very people who have directly made their lives so much worse than they should be. James and his two buddies start a series of armed robberies in Lafayette, Louisiana that all falls apart in a little West Texas bank, and now US Marshal John Whicher, along with numerous other law enforcement officers, is determined to stop the men before they can cross the Mexican border. 

Whicher is a veteran investigator who tries to stay one jump ahead of whomever he’s chasing by getting inside their heads deeply enough to anticipate their next move. That skill works well for him but sometimes, as in this case, Whicher can become too empathetic for his own good. And that’s dangerous.

An American Outlaw is a shoot-em-up manhunt story in which the action seldom slows down. Along the way, though, Stonehouse effectively visits the themes of war’s toll on those who do the actual fighting, loyalty, and the gray areas between guilt and innocence. John Stonehouse gives his readers a lot to think about between the gunshots.

What I’m Reading This Week (4/30/26)

 I finished two of the five books I was reading last week (reviews to come eventually - I hope), and I made decent progress on two of the others. I finished my re-read of Elmer Kelton’s Texas novel, Stand Proud, along with listening to the rest of An American Outlaw, the John Stonehouse audiobook I started during my recent day trip to Beaumont. The Kelton book, I’m relieved to report held up pretty well, so now I’m planning to revisit more of Kelton’s work when I can work it in. The Stonehouse book, on the other hand, good enough thriller that it is, was not quite “deep” enough to make me want to pick up another book in this series any time soon. And, I’m still chugging along on the Twain bio, “chugging” being the key word in this sentence. 

Just when my re-reading of Jack Finney’s Time and Again was starting to make me a little nervous, it took off again for me. I found the introductory chapters to be fun, but the next several chapters seemed to get a little bogged down by long descriptions of what the main character saw during his first venture into the past. Lots of building and street descriptions that just went on for too long to suit me. But now that I’m past all of that, the real fun has begun, and I remember why I loved this one so much the first time around. 

Buckeyes is living up to everything I’ve heard or read about it. The main criticism has been that it is one of those novels that do more “telling” than “showing,” and that is certainly the case here. Plus, there are very few even longish sections of dialogue, so this 473-page novel can take a while to get through. But the plot is a fairly complicated one about two couples and their sons that I can’t help but be intrigued with. I’m 80% of the way through their story now, and I find myself reading quicker and quicker so that I can find out where each of the six characters end up. This is a good one.

I started Return to Sender, book number twenty-one in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series a couple of days ago. I’m a little disappointed to find Walt doing his crime-fighting so far out of his home county again, but I’m hoping that the regulars join up with him at some point - the sooner the better. Walt is doing a favor for someone he considers family by trying to find a woman who disappeared somewhere along her 307-mile mail delivery route in the Red Desert four months earlier. Some are saying that Johnson is starting to repeat himself now; I hope to find that this is not true. But…yeah, maybe so.

I’m excited about some of the books that are near the top of my TBR now and will probably be reshuffling that list a bit in order to move those up to the top even quicker. No matter how quickly, or how much I read, I always feel like the next book is going to be the one I will remember forever. Wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013) - Haruki Murakami

 

Although this is just my second experience with a Haruki Murakami novel, I’ve learned that he is immensely popular in his home country of Japan. In its first week alone, one million copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage were printed - and by the end of its first month in publication, all but 15,000 of those books had been sold. And from what I’ve read, this is not uncommon in Japan for a new Haruki Murakami novel. 

“A unique sense of harmony developed between them - each one needed the other four and, in turn, shared the sense that they too were needed."

 

Tsukuru Tazaki is a thirty-six-year-old designer of Tokyo train stations who has been in a relatively deep depression for the last sixteen years - ever since the day he was mercilessly kicked out of the close-knit group of five high school friends that had sustained him through the ups and downs of his high school years. Tsukuru was the only one of the five to leave home to attend college in Tokyo, but he managed to stay part of the group by returning on weekends and holidays to spend almost the entire visits home with his friends. His family barely saw him. 

But suddenly, and totally without warning or any kind of explanation from any of his friends, Tsukuru was cast out of the group. Today it’s as if Tsukuru is stuck in some kind of emotional loop because he still feels such a deep pain from being cast out of the group that he sometimes considers suicide to be his best option. But now, Tsukuru has a new woman in his life who will not commit to a deeper relationship unless he finally confronts what happened to him all those years ago. She wants to start with a clean slate.

So Tsukuru is off on a quest, one that could finally give him the peace he needs to get on with the rest of his life - or not. 

I didn’t know what to expect from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage when I began it, and that’s probably a good thing because I likely would not have picked it up if I had. This is a novel about loneliness, rejection, and self-identity. It tells a rather dark story, and maintains a hint of sadness even as Tsukuru edges closer and closer to learning the truth about why he was so suddenly ostracized by four people he once considered family. It is beautifully written and translated, and if you are in the mood for something like this, it will leave you with a lot to think about.

What I’m Reading This Week (4/23/26)

 Although I have five books going this week, they are not the ones I expected I would be reading after just purchasing over a dozen new ones a a few days ago. Of course, my long term reading of Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain continues, but the other four that I’m reading were not in my immediate plans before…suddenly they were. I did abandon one last week that I had high hopes for, Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks. That one just turned out to be more depressing than I can handle right now, and I grew weary of every single character in the story. Had no sympathy for any of them, including the main character who is just a misguided kid with few prospects in life. That was my second attempt to read Rule of the Bone, and I quit only about 30 pages farther in than I quit on it the first time around. There won't be a third try. 

In addition to the Twain bio, these are the four I’m reading now:

Buckeye was just destined to jump to the top of my TBR. Everywhere I looked for several days it seemed that someone was talking about this Patrick Ryan novel. The tipping point was finally reached when I read Susan’s review of Buckeye over on her blog The Cue Card. I’m over 40% of the way through the story now, and I’m enjoying it despite Ryan’s somewhat dry approach to storytelling. The best thing about Buckeye to this point is the quirkiness of Ryan’s characters; the worst is how slowly it’s all coming together. But maybe that approach works well as a whole, so I’m not going to judge him on that approach just yet. I do now understand, however, why so many readers seem to have given up on this long novel before finishing it.

I mentioned Time and Again to someone last week and then couldn’t stop thinking about how much I enjoyed reading it back in 1972. So I finally gave in and just started re-reading it for the first time in over 50 years. That’s the first edition cover of Finney’s classic time travel novel, so if you go looking for it today, it will look very different - especially after its move tie-in cover. This is the book that made me a life long fan of time travel fiction, and through the first two chapters it is holding up very well to my memories of that first reading. 

Over the years, I’ve spoken many times about Elmer Kelton’s western novels. I’ve read most of them now, including the juveniles, so when I read Kelton it’s almost always a re-read. Stand Proud is no exception. I first read it in the mid-eighties when I was just becoming a big fan of Kelton’s writing, and honestly, I remember very little about it. As it turns out, it’s the story of an early Texas settler now near the end of his life who is own trial for the murder of a man who has been an enemy of his for about 50 years. It takes place in the present, with flashbacks to the 1860s when they first became such heated enemies. I’m almost halfway through it, and although it’s moving a little slower than I remembered it, the story is holding up really well.

I drove over to Beaumont last week for lunch with a few old friends I graduated high school with some sixty years ago, and I needed an audiobook to keep me entertained and awake for the 200-mile round trip drive. Without much research, I downloaded An American Outlaw, the first book in John Stonehouse's (if that’s not a pen name, it’s perfect for someone who writes this kind of book) eight-book series featuring US Marshall John Whicher. Turns out that it was a great choice for a road trip because it is so gritty and action packed that my mind seldom drifted from it for more than a few seconds at a time. It reminds me of the kind of thing that Craig Johnson writes, and I’m a big fan of Johnson’s work so it’s a good fit for me. I’m not much into audiobooks these days, so I still haven’t finished it, but I plan to soon.

So there you have it. I do have a couple of new ones sitting firmly atop my TBR for next week, but I’m enjoying my re-reading so much right now that I might just revisit my shelves again before I get to those.