What I'm Reading This Week (7/17/26)

 As far as my reading goes, this last couple of weeks has really been hit or miss for me. I've found it hard to concentrate even when I've had a little time for myself, and that's caused me to change some of my book choices as I try to find books a little less concentration-demanding. I've really only put one book aside for the long term, however, and that is the huge, in every sense of that word, James Jones novel From Here to Eternity. No matter how hard I try to get into that story, it's just not working for me at all right now. I've temporarily tabled a couple of others (The Longest Walk and the Mark Twain bio), but plan to get back to those sooner rather than later. 

On the positive side, I've made surprising progress with the controversial French novel The Camp of the Saints that I've been reading for a while now. And pretty decent progress on the book on Cajun history I've been reading, The Acadian Saga. Misleadingly, I did also finish three books in the last couple of weeks, but I was already relatively near the end of two of those (The Cyclist by Tim Sullivan, Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth, and Eifelheim by Michael Flynn).  

These are the new ones I've started in the last few days:

A lot of you probably have already read Donna Everhart's Women of a Promiscuous Nature because I remember seeing it reviewed on several blogs a few weeks ago. It's historical fiction focusing on that period in American history (well into the 1940s and 1950s, it seems) during which husbands or fathers of sexually active females could solve the "problem" by having the women institutionalized. The first couple of chapters haven't hooked me yet, but I'm still hoping this one will grab me soon.

I think this new collection of Walt Longmire short stories is scheduled to be published in early November. Have Courage is one of several Christmas story collections that Johnson has published over the years, and I've read them all, I think. There are thirteen stories in Have Courage, covering different periods in Longmire's law enforcement career from the early seventies to the present day. Each story is set either on Christmas Day or thereabouts. Walt Longmire stories are, for me, fiction's equivalent of comfort food.

Charles Dickinson has been one of my favorites since the eighties even though no one would ever describe him as anything remotely close to prolific. I first read Crows around 1992, but it was published in 1985. Honestly, I remembered very little about it when I started this re-read other than how much I enjoyed it the first time around. And now, 83 pages into it, Crows is still reading like a book I'm reading for the first time. Great characters, quirky family, good story...loving this one already.

So Old So Young follows a group of college friends for about 20 years, starting in 2007. This one got some pretty good early press when published a few weeks ago, and that's when it caught my eye. I'm hoping it's not just another one in a long line of novels that use this exact set-up, but I'm already beginning to have some doubts. The writing is good, so I'll keep going for another 50 pages or so before deciding whether or not to DNF So Old So Young. It's hard to show much patience right now, and that's probably not fair to Grant Ginder.

So that's me for the next couple of weeks. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your reading time. Make the most of it!

What I’m Reading This Week (6/28/26)

 This past week was not the one I expected it would be. I’ll keep it short, but here’s what happened. Two Texas Highway Patrol troopers rang our doorbell on Tuesday night around ten to tell us that my wife’s only brother had been killed in an auto accident about three hours earlier. Because my wife is her brother’s closest living relative, we have been going almost non-stop for the last few days making all the necessary arrangements. The funeral is tomorrow - all of this is taking place out of town - but the process of putting all of his affairs in place will take months. 

I had very little reading time last week, and won’t have a whole lot more anytime soon, but I did finish a 1964 novel by John D. MacDonald called A Purple Place for Dying. The novel reads like a near-satire of the genre, but I’m not sure if that’s what MacDonald intended at the time it was published, or if it has just aged badly. 

I was looking for some lighter reading to add to the books I have in progress right now, and remembered reading that several of you have already read Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. I love the premise of an 81-year-old serial killer with a sense of humor. It sounded like fun, and through the first 45 pages, it’s proving to be exactly that. I’m still to the point of getting familiar with all of Mabel’s neighbors and her childhood background, but it’s already quite a cast of memorable characters. 

One whole side of my family tree traces its North American roots to Nova Scotia and the years in which the British were expelling the French settlers from that part of Canada. I know that history in a general fashion, but have been getting curious to learn more of the details. Dean Jobb, at least so far, seems to be a pretty readable historian, and I’m looking forward to getting some answers about the expulsion that saw half my family end up in southern Louisiana where it met and married the German half. Acadian Saga is one of the better histories on Cajun history that I could find.

That’s if for now. We are leaving town again in the morning, and even though it’s only a two-hour drive, it’s one I’ll be making over and over in the next few weeks. I’ll be checking in and out as I can, and I look forward to seeing what you are all reading. 

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. 

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.