What I’m Reading This Week (6/20/26)

 The four books I finished up in the last couple of weeks were kind of hit and miss:

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - this one proved to be more difficult, and way less impressive, than I anticipated, as you can tell by the review I’ve already posted,
• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - a re-read that I think was even more fun than the first time I read this classic,
• Animal Farm by George Orwell - an almost perfect reminder of the dangers of socialism and communism that should be required reading in every high school and university in the free world, and
• The City of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - the author’s last work, a collection of eleven short stories, that I have to admit disappointed me a little.

A couple of the usual suspects are still with me, including The Camp of Saints, an eerily prophetic book about the impact of sudden mass migration on the West. And of course, I’m still reading the Twain biography, which seems to be turning into a year-long project now. The other two holdovers are John D. MacDonald’s A Purple Place for Dying and Ann Cleeves’s The Dying Light, two very different murder mysteries. I’m nearly finished with both, but as usual, I still haven’t figured out who the bad guy is in either of them.

And these are the four new ones I’ve started reading:

From Here to Eternity, the 1951 debut novel by James Jones that won the National Book Award and became a huge bestseller. It follows a U.S. Army infantry company stationed in Hawaii just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’ve neither read the novel, nor watched the big movie version of it, so I’m very curious about this one. I do know that it caused a bit of a sensation because it threw around “f-bombs” on a scale highly unusual for the time.

The Cyclist is the second book in Tim Sullivan’s D.S. Cross series. Cross is a brilliant detective on the autism spectrum whose style is as off-putting to his co-workers as it is to those he meets during his investigations. The titles of each of the books in the series reference the victims, as far as I can tell. I’ve only just started reading The Cyclist, but I find George Cross to be as fascinating a lead character as I did in the first book in the series.

I read George Meegan’s The Longest Walk for the first time in the late eighties, and that experience was one of the main drivers in my lifelong fascination with books about long walks or long road trips. Meegan began his long walk on the southernmost tip of South America on January 26, 1977 and almost seven years later, on September 18, 1983 he finished it on the northernmost beaches of Alaska. I’m just over 60 pages into this re-reading of The Longest Walk, and I’m already in awe of what Englishman Meegan and his Japanese wife endured.

Eifelheim is the one that has surprised me the most so far of this whole batch of books. It’s a clever mash up of historical fiction and first contact science fiction that seems to have been really well researched. In this instance, first contact is made in the year 1348 and the local German priest is the first human to make contact with the insect-like aliens who have crash-landed in the forest surrounding his village. Lots of scientific theory, medieval history, and theology in this one.

We’re going to be a little busier than usual around here next week, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for reading, but some of these are going to be hard to resist for long. I hope you all are doing well and enjoying life. Read on.