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.