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.

Small Things Like These (2021) - Claire Keegan

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a difficult book to review without inadvertently straying into spoiler territory almost immediately. It comes in at fewer than 130 pages in total, putting it firmly in novella territory, and elimination of spoilers from the conversation leaves little but generalities to talk about. The problem is not with the generalities themselves; they are all positives. It’s more that without ruining the book for those yet to read it, it’s impossible to get much into the novella’s actual plot. 

But here goes an attempt to give you enough of the bare bones of the plot that you can decide for yourself if Small Things Like These is a story you want to experience for yourself.

It’s 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who makes regular deliveries to his customers, lives and works in New Ross, a town in southeast Ireland very much culturally dominated by the Catholic Church. Bill is a decent man, the father of five young daughters, and he works hard and long to provide for his family, especially now during the Christmas season when even just a little extra income can make all the difference in the world to their lives. Everyone knows him and respects what Bill does for the community while often taking a personal financial hit in order to ensure that none of his neighbors suffer during the harshest winter months.

And this is a harsh winter. It’s cold and gray outside, the shipyard has been closed for so long that people are struggling to pay their bills, and they depend on coal deliveries to keep their families warm through the worst of it. Bill is working harder than ever, but has little to show for his extra efforts.

Then just a few days before Christmas, Bill has his world view shaken while making a last minute coal delivery to the local convent. What he learns about the harsh reality of life inside that convent leaves Bill with a decision to make that is powerful enough to change not only the course of his own life, but that of his wife and five daughters, forever. Now the question becomes will he look away for his and his family's own good, or will he have the courage to do what he  knows is the right thing. 

Small Things Like These has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it actually did win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. There is even a 2024 movie adaptation of the novella staring Cillian Murphy that I would like to see now because of its great reviews. 

For something so short, this one packs quite a punch. Especially that last sentence.

Read a Book Today - Somebody Has to Do It

 I can’t vouch for the methodology behind the survey that generated this chart, but it pretty much reflects the numbers I’ve been seeing over the last few years from numerous other sources. The takeaway headline is easy to spot: The top 4% of readers by themselves read almost half the books read in this country in any given year. But the saddest takeaway, by far, is that 40% of U.S. adults don’t read a single book per year. Not. Even. One.

I suppose that’s at least partially attributable to the fact that we have so many choices today when it comes to learning new things or just entertaining ourselves. The internet is a treasure trove of learning possibilities that offers free college lectures, documentaries, movies and television shows, online degrees, instructional videos covering everything imaginable (YouTube is indispensable when it comes to these), etc. But come on. 

According to the arts.gov site (National Endowment for the Arts), the reading slide started back in the early 1990s, and has never really stopped. There is, in fact, some indication that the downward trend may have started as early as 1982 with small, unremarkable yearly drops over ten years that really became more noticeable in 1992 when the yearly percentage drops accelerated to a degree that they could no longer be ignored. Another startling NEA statistic claims that “daily leisure reading” had dropped from its 2004 peak of 28% down to 16% by 2023. That is a drop of over 40% in less than 20 years, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it happened during the Netflix age. 

The scariest thing about this trend, though, is that it is proving true across all age groups, even children. 

So what if the problem is that it is just too much work to read for pleasure if you find it difficult even to read at all. Average reading scores in schools have been slipping for a while, and it looks like that trend, too, is going to be a long one. It is said that the average reading level among all adults in this country today is at roughly a 6th grade level. I don’t know about you, but that scares the heck out of me - and it explains a whole lot about what’s wrong with the world today. 

When the Light Goes (2007) - Larry McMurtry

 

When the Light Goes is the fourth book in Larry McMurtry’s five-book Thalia, Texas series. The main character in the series is Duane Moore, who was a high school student when introduced in the first book in the series, The Last Picture Show. In this one, Duane is in his sixties, and he’s feeling a bit mortal even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself yet. 

Duane's wife has been dead for two years, his son has taken over the family oil business, and Duane has pretty much become an eccentric recluse who just rides all over the county on his bicycle. And then Duane senses himself coming back to life a little when his son hires a brilliant young geologist who specializes in finding productive oil reserves in fields thought already to have been played out. It doesn’t hurt that she’s as attractive to Duane as she is brilliant.

But Duane is not a young man anymore, and his heart has other ideas about his immediate future.

McMurtry published only two novels after When the Light Goes, and by this point he was starting to explore end-of-life and legacy issues in his fiction. Duane urgently needs open heart surgery if he is to survive much longer, but he is largely ignoring the problem despite his steadily worsening condition. Despite the age difference between Duane and Annie, their love story is mostly a heartwarming one, and McMurtry is honest and blunt about whatever problems (be they sexual ones or compatibility-based ones) the age difference does cause. 

The interesting thing about what Duane goes through, is that McMurtry himself lived through a very similar situation at age 55 when he had quadruple bypass surgery. He was connected to a heart-lung machine for something like five hours, and came out of the experience a broken man. He felt that he had truly died on the operating table, and that his old personality had shattered and was never coming back. McMurtry even hung the term “largely posthumous” on himself - and he believed it to be an apt label. He went into a deep depression and spent over a year lying on his sometime co-writer Donna Ossana’s Tucson couch and staring out the window. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t write, and was completely unable to read for pleasure. Ossana probably saved his life by finally getting him to co-write Streets of Laredo with her at her kitchen table. But whether McMurtry ever completely got over the experience is another question.

I suspect that the fictional relationship between Annie and Duane was one very meaningful to McMurtry, and I think that adds some significance to When the Light Goes that the novel would not otherwise deserve. This is not one of McMurtry’s best books, but it is one his fans will want to read in order to extend the Duane Moore story for one more chapter, if for no other reason.

Latest Book Haul: From How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder to Around the World in Eighty Days

 After buying almost nothing for most of a month, I’ve been on a little e-book buying spurt the last couple of days. I’ve purchased a combination of recently published books, older books, and back catalogs from some of my favorite authors. Among them are:

I can’t even begin to count the number of short stories I’ve read over the years, but I can’t recall a single one by Lorrie Moore. Lately, though, I’ve run into her name everywhere I look, and it’s all extremely positive about her skills as a storyteller. So now I have to see what I’ve been missing. I’m not sure how many stories are in this collection, but the book is almost 700 pages long, so plenty enough to satisfy my curiosity. (2009) 

I’m on kind of a nostalgic quest to find the style of science fiction that I enjoyed as a kid, mostly stories about aliens and the exploration of distant planets - and most definitely not the Star Wars kind of shoote-em-up thing. Godfall (2023) seems to fit. Instead of the massive asteroid that seems to be headed for a direct hit on Earth, a three-mile tall alien corpse gently falls into a small town in Nebraska. Then, after the local murders begin, the sheriff in charge of keeping order in that small town has to figure out the link between the murders and the dead alien. This is book one of a trilogy. 

I’ve heard lots of good things about How to Commit  a Postcolonial Murder, and thought it might make a good change of pace read. It’s a recent debut novel, but I’m hoping the AI impact on it is minimal and that Nina McConigley actually put in the work herself. It’s the story of two Indian-American sisters who decide that their uncle, fresh from India, needs to die - sooner rather than later - for a good reason.

I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to read this Sherman Alexie memoir, but I grabbed a copy after my recent review of his short story collection Blasphemy. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is said to be a raw account of Alexie’s childhood in which he addresses the culture of sexual violence on the Spokane Indian reservation on which he grew up - including his mother’s rape as well as his own double rape. I’ll have to be in the right mood for this one, but I hope to learn more about how this kind of sexual aggression is so commomnly passed from generation to generation. (2017)

I have fond memories of reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days when I was a kid, so I decided to pick up this 100th Anniversary Collection Edition. It was brought back to mind last month when I stumbled on an adaptation of the novel being featured on Prime Video right now. I only watched the first episode of that new series, but the book has been on my mind ever since, so I grabbed a copy. (1873)

I read a lot of pulp fiction when I was in my teens, including the more popular westerns of the era. One writer I kept coming back to, because his books seemed more realistic to me even then, was Alan LeMay. The Smoky Years is a 1935 novel that he wrote about the range wars that caused much of the violence associated with the peak of the cowboying days. It tells the story of a cattle baron trying to hold on to his empire while being challenged by a newcomer to the area. The characters are of LeMay’s usual gritty variety, and in the end The Smoky Years turns out to be a revenge story. In addition to this LeMay title, I picked up copies of: Thunder in the Dust, West of Nowhere, and Winter Range. (I already have copies of his two classic: The Unforgiven and The Searchers.)

Unless the buying bug hits me hard again, that’s all the book-buying I intend to do in April. But May’s a whole other month...

Haruki Murakami, Russel Banks, and Larry McMurtry Hit the Reading List

Over the past couple of weeks, my currently-reading list has shrunk all the way down to four books. And even one of those is my perpetual-read, the Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow of which I reached the forty percent mark just today  - with still over 600 pages left to go. I have, though, added three very different books to my current reads, and I’m enjoying each of them:

I’ve only read Haruki Murakami once before, and that was his 1Q84, a kind of dystopian, parallel universe take on Orwell’s 1984. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is very different from that one. Tsukuru is a young Tokyo college student whose four lifetime friends (two boys, two girls) back home suddenly ghost him. He gets a brief message to that effect from one of them, and they disappear from his life. Now at age 30, he is still scarred from the experience and looking for answers. 

I’m a fan of Russell Banks novels, but even though I got hold of a review copy of Rule of the Bone way back in 1994, I’m yet to read the darn thing. So here goes. HarperCollins describes the book this way: “The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you, because to them, to all of them you’re just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.” From what I’ve seen from Chapter 1, the unnamed narrator is fourteen when the story begins, so I suppose this is a coming-of-age novel of sorts. 

Larry McMurtry’s When the Light Goes is the fourth book in his “Thalia, Texas" series, a series also called by some the “Duane Moore" series. Duane is the central character in McMurtry’s famous The Last Picture Show, and by the time this book opens he’s gone from around 17 years of age to about 65 years old. Duane, though, is still pretty much 17 in his head, and he still calls his own shots in life. This one ends with Duane undergoing major heart surgery, an experience that McMurtry himself had a difficult time getting past emotionally. I’m curious to see how McMurtry handles this part of the novel, considering the terrible depression that resulted from his own experience with the surgery.

I’ve also purchased a handful of e-books I want to talk about, but I’ll save those for a later post. Including the back catalog of one of my favorite western writers, Alan LeMay, it’s turned out to be a pretty big handful. 

Blasphemy (2012) - Sherman Alexie

 

Blasphemy is a collection of thirty-one short stories written by a favorite storyteller of mine, Sherman Alexie. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Alexie got caught up in that whole “Me Too” movement back in 2018 after perhaps as many as fifty women came forward to say that he had sexually harassed them. The ensuing fallout was real and deserved: scholarships with his name on them got renamed, for instance, and although Alexie publishes weekly on Substack these days, I don’t know of a single major publication of his since his 2017 memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. I have been told that some bookstores refuse to carry even his previously published work now. That’s quite a fall from grace for someone who has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway, the PEN/Faulkner, and the PEN/Malamud among other awards. 

Myself, I have been able to separate the man’s work from his personal life (at least to this point), but I think it is only fair to mention all of this because I know that many of you, perhaps even most of you, will not want to do the same. Thus the full disclosure.

Some of the stories in Blasphemy were previously published in magazines such as Harper’s, Narrative, and The New Yorker. Each of the stories features Indian (as Alexie himself calls his people) characters and settings, most of them being of the Spokane tribe. Alexie himself grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation about an hour from Spokane, Washington. 

Alexie has a special talent for creating fully-fleshed characters within the space of just a few pages, often using a cutting sense of humor and irony to make the characters or their situations more relatable to his readers. Here are a few examples of his style: 

“So I felt sorry for the protestors who believed in what they were doing. They were good-hearted people looking to change the system. But when you start fighting for every Indian, you end up defending the terrible ones, too.” (From “Cry Cry Cry”)

 

'“I saw you in my head,” Frank said. “You’re supposed to be dead. I saw you dead.”

“You have blurry vision,” said Harrison”’  (From “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church)

“After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.”  (From “The Approximate Size of my Favorite Tumor”)

'“Your father was always half crazy,” my mother told me more than once. “And the other half was on medication.”’  (From “What My Father Always Said…”)

The stories in Blasphemy range from lighthearted ones to deadly serious ones, and some of them can be difficult to categorize because Alexie always manages to see a good bit of dark humor where you might least expect to find it. Some of the stories are set on the reservation, some in Spokane, and a few in Seattle, but no matter where they take place, Alexie’s characters are all fighting the same fight for survival. And the odds always seem to be stacked against them. 

 For example, in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” he says of his main character:

“The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams."

And in “Protest” he offers this observation about a character:

“Jimmy’s last act was to disappear, and that was probably the most Indian thing he had ever done."

A Sherman Alexie short story is always interesting despite the inherent despair that he so often writes about. Alexie can be particularly revealing when writing through the eyes of a white character interacting with the Indians he knows so well, an approach he often uses, and one that works well for him.

So there you have it. If you still want to read Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy is a good place to start. He is, I think, still an important writer for readers who want to get a close, frank look at the Native American culture of today. That he let himself down, and disappointed his people to the degree that he did is sad for all concerned - especially for his victims, most of whom were fellow Native Americans.

Louise Penny Made Me Do It - And I Really Wish She Hadn't

 

Louise Penny made me do something today, I never dreamed I would be doing in a million years: abandon her latest novel, The Black Wolf, at the eighty-page mark with no intention of ever picking it up again. Now I only wish I could get my $30 back.

I have been reading Penny for years, and have read eighteen of the nineteen novels she’s published prior to The Black Wolf, enjoying them so much that she became one of my go-to authors a long time ago. But maybe I should have seen this coming because I did struggle at times with The Grey Wolf, the novel preceding this one. I hoped, however, that since I read that one during a period in which I was struggling to concentrate on just about everything I read, that the problem was with me and not with the book.

Penny quickly nipped those hopes in the bud by kicking off The Black Wolf with a fifty-page rehash of The Grey Wolf plot - a plot that tended to bore me the first time I was exposed to it. It’s all a too fantastical conspiracy theory in which those at the top of Canadian politics conspire with American businesses to allow millions of Canadians to be poisoned for corporate profit. In the process, Canada’s pristine forests and lakes will also be destroyed, and it is only a “Hail Mary” moment from Inspector Gamache that saves the day. Making it all read even worse, the tone is at times overly preachy and condescending, and the book’s pacing is dreadfully slow. But I made it through, and kind of dreaded the promised sequel.

Well, that sequel is The Black Wolf. And this one doubles down on everything wrong with The Grey Wolf.

I made it through the fifty-page Grey Wolf recap, albeit all the while getting grumpier and grumpier as I read on. And now I’ve waited another thirty pages for something new to happen, only to read numerous times that “something bad is coming.” Well enough of this. The last two books have made for such slow reading that now I’m not even sure that I’m willing to take a chance on book twenty-one in the series when it is eventually published. 

Penny has become so political in her messaging that her books are not fun for me anymore. The Black Wolf has just enough of an anti-American tone and global warming hysteria to it that I find it more irritating/boring than entertaining. And I spent my money to be entertained, not preached at. From what I understand, Penny even canceled her American book tour launch of The Grey Wolf after Trump was elected, effectively, I imagine, sacrificing a few thousand book sales in the process. While I may admire her dedication to her principles, this is not the kind of “escapism" that I want to spend my time or money on.

And that makes me sad because Inspector Gamache has been one of my favorite fictional characters for twenty years - and Three Pines one of my favorite fictional settings. 

Hamnet (2020) - Maggie O'Farrell

 

“History gives you the facts, and fiction gives you the truth of the facts.” (Unattributed quote from Nancy Pearl in The Writer’s Library)

I bought Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet a couple of years ago but forgot I had a copy until reminded of it by the recent release of the book's movie version. That’s a problem I often have with e-books: “out of sight, out of mind.” But I suppose that’s story for a another time.

Hamnet impressed me in several ways, but what really surprised me most about O’Farrell’s construction of the novel is how secondary a character William Shakespeare turns out to be. Too, O’Farrell's central character, despite the novel’s title, is Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, not Hamnet, his son. And unless I missed a particular reference or two, even when the author or one of the book’s characters refer to Shakespeare, it is never by name, always only as “the husband” or “the tutor,” etc. It is Agnes who holds this family together in the roughest of times, and everything of consequence that happens in Hamnet either happens directly to her or the focus shifts to how she reacts to the event.

Hamnet is the story of a young man, eager to get away from his domineering and abusive father, who falls in love with a slightly older woman, herself living under the thumb of a stepmother whom she intensely dislikes. Despite the disapproval of both their families, the two find a way to marry, and they live for several years with the man’s parents while having three children of their own. Shakespeare, though, finally reaches the breaking point with his father and leaves for London - supposedly to extend the family glove business into that market. Instead, he finds work in the London theater, and only returns to Stratford three or four times a year. He is, in fact, in London in 1596 when his twins, Judith and Hamnet, fall ill with the plague. Hamnet would not survive. 

Hamnet is a touching story, but it is not nearly the tearjerker I expected it would be. I was far more impressed by how fully immersed I became in the late sixteenth century environment created by O’Farrell. The daily doings of the village, the relationships between the townspeople, the superstitions, and the general humanity of the characters all felt so authentic to me that I completely lost myself in that world for hours at a time. Hamnet is the kind of historical fiction I enjoy most, and it is my favorite read of 2026 to this point in the year. 

The Exorcist (1971) - William Peter Blatty

 

I still remember standing in line outside in the dark back in 1973 for a couple of hours waiting for my chance to see the movie version of The Exorcist - and how you couldn’t finally walk inside to your seat without feeling at least a little sense of dread. I had read William Peter Blatty’s novel the previous year, so I knew what to expect, but the buzz around this movie was so hyped up that everyone wanted to see it as soon as they could. And the movie lived up to its publicity: people were fainting in their seats, running out of the theaters in shock, and even using the barf bags that some theaters were handing out at the door. 

I was pleased to find that my re-reading of The Exorcist last week did nothing to cheapen my appreciation for the effect that the novel has had on so many people over the years. (I haven’t seen the more recent remake of the movie, and can’t compare the two versions, but now I’m curious.)

It all starts innocently enough.

Chris MacNeil is done with her own work on a movie being shot in Washington D.C. but decides that she and her daughter, Reagan, will stay on in their rented Georgetown home until everything is formally shut down on the movie. Chris and Reagan have made friends both on and off the set, and living in Georgetown has been a good experience for both of them. But after twelve-year-old Reagan is possessed by an ancient demon, their world turns into a nightmare. Numerous doctors fail to help her daughter, so Chris straps Reagan down in her bed and watches her turn into an unimaginable monster - one filled with superhuman strength and  rage - while she searches for another solution.

Desperate for help, and even though she is an atheist, Chris finally turns to a Jesuit priest she’s befriended, a man who is himself skeptical about the legitimacy of demonic possession. And the battle is on.

Blatty’s novel is a well researched one based partially on a 1949 Maryland exorcism he heard about while in college. Too, Blatty was Jesuit educated, and he quotes extensively from books on the subject, including the Rituale Romanum, the 1614 Catholic book of rites that details the exorcism procedure that has been followed for centuries. My one criticism of the novel, in fact, is that the pacing of the exorcism section gets a bit bogged down by all of the historical explanation offered in the midst of the horror being described. 

Because The Exorcist so explicitly details the horrors being inflicted on the body of a child, it is not an easy novel to read. The novel is far more appalling than the movie for that reason - and the movie is most certainly a gut-punch. So, beware of this one.

Lawn Boy (2018) - Jonathan Evison

 

I didn’t realize what a can of worms I was opening up when I decided to read Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. I don’t remember running across it at all when it was published in 2018, and it really only caught my eye now because of its unusual cover art. Only after finishing Lawn Boy, did I learn (in the author’s short essay at the end of the novel) that it is largely autobiographical. This is a book the author poured his heart and soul into, but it came back to bite him in a serious way.

The premise of the novel is this:  23-year-old Mike Muñoz, half Mexican, half white, lives with his single-parent mother and grossly overweight autistic brother in a dump they can barely afford to pay the rent on. It takes every penny Mike and his mother can earn just to keep the family sheltered, fed, and clothed even at the low standards they are forced to accept. Mike’s mother is a waitress who often works two jobs; Mike cuts grass and trims hedges for a landscaping company. Mike, though, despite barely making it through high school, is capable of more, and he knows it. But he can’t stop working his low-paying job long enough to better himself without causing his entire family to crash and burn.

“I read at least two books a week, sometimes as many as four. Call it self-improvement. You see, old Mike Muñoz would like to figure out who the hell he actually is, what he’d actually like to do with his life. He aches to be a winner. I’d like nothing more than to spread my proverbial wings and fly…"

Mike is largely self-educated because he spent so much time in a library while taking care of his autistic brother during the summers before he went to work full time to help support the family.  He wants more for himself and his family, but he doesn’t see a way out of the poverty trap he’s in. And he’s angry about it.

“After all, most of us are mowing someone else's lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless."

Lawn Boy is Mike’s coming-of-age story, and it’s a fun one filled both with little victories and major setbacks along the way. Eventually, the little victories begin to add up, and Mike starts hanging on to some of the gains he makes.  

Mike’s story, ultimately, is a satisfying one, but I was often distracted by just how super- educated Mike appears to be. One minute he’s quoting Camus while trimming hedges, the next he’s explaining capitalism’s faults to the reader. It’s as if he’s read every philosopher, economist, and historian who has ever put pen to paper. He’s read it all, and he remembers it all. It was a matter of degree for me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief right up to the point that I just couldn’t go any farther and began being distracted by Mike’s amazing breath of knowledge. Then, that was all I could think about every time he opened his mouth.

Lawn Boy, as it turns out, had a rough debut, even being banned in the school libraries of several states because of its sexual content (none of which is really all that explicit). Because one sexual incident took place between two 10-year-old boys, the novel was banned as “pedophilic" by some, “pornographic” by others, and even called “grooming” by a few. The sensationalist Tucker Carlson labelled it as graphic child sex on one of his on-air rants, and from what I understand, Evison even received a few death threats at the height of the hysteria over Lawn Boy.

Having read it eight years after all the stink others attached to it, I find all of this both disturbing and surprising because my only complaint about the novel is how I reacted to Mike’s general brilliance despite him being entirely, randomly self-taught. That distraction led me to experience Lawn Boy as just a pretty good novel, and not a particularly realistic one at that. Evison is a good writer (I’ve read two others of his novels), so I don’t really think he was going for realism. This is more a fable-like story than anything else. And unlike me, you might love it for exactly that reason.

The Reading Week Ahead - March 23, 2026

 Despite having seven books going last week, I still found myself in a bit of a reading slump because even though I finished one of the seven, Ben Bova’s Mars Life, I found it tough to get much into any of the other six at all. The only other one that I found consistently engaging was Ron Chernow’s 1100-page biography of Mark Twain - and I’m going to be reading that one for a few more weeks before it’s done. I find it ironic, too, that the title of the one book I abandoned for good was A Passion for Books, the essay compilation edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. 

And, I added these two:

Lawn Boy (2018) is the third novel by Jonathan Evison that I’ve read, having previously read The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance. I’m near ninety percent of the way through Lawn Boy, but this one is not grabbing me quite the way the previous two did. I’m finding it hard (for reasons I’ll get into later) to buy-into the lawn boy character, and since he’s the main character (as well as narrator) of the book, that tiny bit of disbelief is present on every single page. That’s been a problem.

I expect that just about everyone out there is familiar with the plot of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, but it’s been more than 50 years since I’ve read it or seen the movie version. While the plot is not exactly new to me, I find it interesting to see how Blatty builds the book’s tension so effectively by dropping numerous hints along the way of all the dark evilness to follow; and how explicitly he describes all the horrible things that end up happening to the young victim. I turned up my 1971 Book Club edition a couple of days ago and started turning pages. I’m still turning them.

I stalled on Sherman Alexi’s short story collection, Blasphemy, for a while after reading the fourth story in the book, one so sexually explicit that it managed to offend me even at this age. But I knew I couldn’t give up on Alexi, he’s just too good a writer to make that mistake with. I’ve since read three of the longer of the thirty-two stories in the collection, and they are all truly excellent.

I haven’t read much lately of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie but I still consider them as active reads. And then there’s Chernow’s Mark Twain - that one is starting to seem eternal.

Shy Girl, an AI Generated Novel, Is Being Yanked from British Bookstore Shelves

 

Big Five publisher Hatchette has decided to pull Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl from British bookstore shelves, and will not be publishing the novel in the United States at all because the publisher is now convinced that Shy Girl is largely AI generated. This is a first, but it will almost certainly not be a last unless publishers get more serious about vetting the manuscripts they take on for publication. 

According to accepted AI-detection software, the novel is approximately 78% “machine made.”

According to The Sunday Times (London):

"Hachette picked up the rights to Shy Girl, attributed to an author called Mia Ballard, after it rose up Amazon’s sales chart of horror-fiction after being self-published in February last year. (emphasis mine)

At the time the publisher said it had worked with Ballard on “refining her brilliant novel’, describing it as a “gory horror and razor-sharp revenge thriller”.

 …

According to The New York Times, she said that it was an acquaintance she had hired to edit her original, self-published version who had used the technology."

So there we have it. A self-published novel starts climbing the Amazon charts rapidly enough to get the attention of a major publisher; that publisher fails to do its due diligence and publishes the novel as legitimate; the author blames the scam on an “acquaintance” who helped her out with the book’s editing; the “author” is prepared now to sue everyone involved. 

This is no little thing. This was allowed to happen by a major publisher, and that publisher only took action after the internet was already full of rumors about the novel being an illegitimate one. 

We all know that this is just the barest tip of the coming iceberg of scam writing. Amazon has been terrible for avid readers in so many ways; this is the latest, but it probably won’t be the last.

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.