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. 

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. 

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.

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.  

What I Most Miss About Bookstores - Part I

 

What I miss most about having half-a-dozen favorite bookstores to make regular visits to is the pleasure of shutting out the rest of the world for an hour or two while slowly making my way through shelf after shelf of books I'd never seen before. Whichever book caught my eye next was going to, at least for a few minutes, feel like a new gift to be opened. I couldn't wait to see what was inside "the box." 

Sadly, those days are long gone. In the Houston suburbs I now have relatively easy access to two Barnes & Noble big box bookstores, but except for their physical layout they are pretty much the same. And neither of them offers any real bargains anymore other than the same handful of discounted books I can find in any Target store in the country - or even in my local Kroger grocery store, for that matter. Knowing that I'm unlikely to be able to carry home for much under $30 any book I might fall in love with (even though I didn't even know I was looking for it when I came into the store) takes away most of the joy of exploring the shelves. Instead of walking away with four or five new books on each visit - some from the now non-existent remainders shelves - I might come home with one, or none, nowadays. Let's face it, all of us read a lot of books or we wouldn't be talking about them so much, but most of us can't afford to pay $100 for four or five new ones every couple of weeks. 

So I don't browse much anymore, and when I do I often (I know, I know...that's not the thing to do) come home and place an order with Amazon. And I always come home at least a little bit angry about what Barnes & Noble has turned itself into after so ruthlessly driving all the competition right out of business like it did.

But I've found a solution of sorts. And in Part II, I'll tell you what that is and how it's worked for me for the last thirty days. 

Bookstore Tricks

 

I finally found the time and energy to make it out to a couple of bookstores today. There are three good ones relatively near me, but I ran out of time before being able to swing by the indie shop that I like best. I shopped at Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books, and as usual, the experience left me a combination of frustrated, disappointed, and a little bit angry - the exact opposite of how I used to come away from shopping at B&N and Half Price Books not all that long ago. 

First stop was Barnes & Noble, a chain in which I've spent thousands of dollars over the years. Nothing much has changed, really, since my last visit except for the even greater sparsity of customers. Maybe three of us walking the floor and three or four others sitting with coffee and magazines. I did end up buying a copy of James because I'm so tired of waiting for my library copy (I was still number 36 on the waitlist after weeks of waiting). But the letdown in B&N is always the same: no current books on sale to speak of unless you consider $3 off a new hardback to be a game-changer, and absolutely no publisher overstock on sale. So instead of coming away with an armload of books the way I used to (usually for about $50 in total), I carried only my first edition copy of James away and still spent over $30, counting tax and the little magnetic page markers I also bought. 

I should add that I'm not at all a fan of those 3 for the price of 2 or buy one get the second for 50% off "sales" because I often end up buying something I really don't want to read just to get the discounted price on the one or two I did want to read. 

But that's not even the worst of today's visit. I was reminded again of just how poorly the Barnes & Noble "Rewards" program is run. In order to get a ten percent discount via the card B&N issues, a reader has to get ten "stamps" to their account, with each ten dollars spent earning one stamp. I've used the card several times now, and I'm convinced that B&N thinks we are all a bunch of dopes because the stamps are based on the ticket total for "eligible" purchases, whatever the definition of "eligible" is in this case (I do understand why tax should not apply). Every time I've used the card I get peeved because B&N refuses to round up the total spent to the nearest ten dollars that earn a stamp. For instance today, I spent $29 before tax and still was only given credit for two stamps. I figure I've missed out on almost as many credits now as I've earned, and I think that's wrong, if not insulting.

As for Half Price Books, this will be brief. I refuse to sell to Half Price Books anymore because I consider their offers even more insulting than B&N's reward program. Well today I found a book I sold to them a while back (my name is inside this one) for 50 cents marked $7 on the shelf. Honestly, that just made me laugh at myself for being too lazy to have refused the offer and carry those books back out to the car.

But it's not all doom and gloom today. Some of you know that I've been undergoing a lot of medical testing for almost 90 days now. I had another two-hour session yesterday that revealed that he autoimmune disease difficulty I've been having with my eyes has as mysteriously disappeared (at least for the moment) as it mysteriously first appeared early this year. The condition did leave me with what appears to be some permanent damage in the left eye, but the right one is back to normal.  So it's a happy day...and I need to keep reminding myself of just how lucky I am today, B&N and Half Price Books be damned. 

Mick Herron's Sense of Humor

 

Mick Herron jacket photo

I'm nearing the end of Mick Herron's The Secret Hours and the book is fast approaching its climax. But Mick Herron being Mick Herron, suddenly out of nowhere come's this little zinger on the world we live in today - and it made me laugh out loud when I least expected it:

"De Vries is a well-connected man. Rich, party donor, friend of prime ministers. Meaning virtually untouchable, unless he did something stupid like disrespecting Trans people on Twitter."

Keep in mind that this bit occurred in the middle of a very serious and confrontational discussion between two key players in the story. This is exactly the kind of sense of humor that makes me laugh, and it's a big reason I read every Mick Herron book I can get my hands on.  

 Of course, I do concede the point that I might just have a very warped sense of humor.

Is Michael Connelly More Popular Than Louise Penny or Craig Johnson or...

 

Some of you may have noticed that I keep separate bibliography tabs at the top of my Home Page for ten favorite authors of mine - along with an eleventh tab listing all the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners by year. In looking over my "Last 30 Days" recap that Blogspot provides, I've often wondered if the number of page views for each of the author tabs accurately gauges current reader interest in this small group of writers:

• Michael Connelly - Bosh series, Lincoln Lawyer series - 63
• Louise Penny - Gamache series - 45 
• Craig Johnson - Longmire series - 40
• Ian Rankin - Rebus series - 40
• James Lee Burke - Robicheaux series - 33
• Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove - 31
• Ruth Rendell - Inspector Wexford series - 30
• Elizabeth George - Inspector Lynley series - 26
• Ann Cleeves - Shetland series,  Vera Stanhope series - 20
• Ann Tyler - quirky standalones - 18

I suspect that the readers most likely to stop by Book Chase do so because they see some of the titles I've reviewed. That would have a lot to do with why Ann Tyler is at the bottom of this small sample. Too, Larry McMurtry and Ruth Rendell are both deceased now, so I would expect some drop off in interest in their body of work now that they won't be producing new titles for the best seller lists (the out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing). But really, I think this is pretty much what I expected from this particular grouping.

What do you think? Does this 30-day sample accurately reflect who's hottest at the moment among these great writers? (I love statistics, but I know they can "prove" anything.)

Do you guys write in your books? Why not?

 

With the exception of my college years, I spent the first 60 years of my reading life treating books as if they were my first born children. I read them so carefully that, if they were bound correctly in the first place, they looked as nice when I finished them as they did when I first cracked them open. I think it all started when I attended a Catholic parochial school for my first seven years of schooling. Books truly were precious in our tiny school library, and the Dominican nuns in charge made sure that we all knew it. Books were equally precious in my childhood home, as I was really the only one who was much of a reader at all, and often used my entire weekly allowance to buy books for my own tiny library. 

I've been a book buyer my whole life and, believe me, as book prices rose higher and higher over the decades, I really had to juggle the budget sometimes in order to bring new books home. But I did it - and the cost alone ensured that I took great care not to ruin any of them, especially by writing anything in them, including my name. 

But then I discovered used-book bookstores, and that discovery made me realize just how common and over-printed most books really are. They are kind of like that new car you drive off the lot only to realize that you've just eaten a whole year's worth of depreciation before you even get to make the first payment on it. The minute a book leaves a bookstore, it loses most of its monetary value. That's just a fact of life unless you're shopping in a rare books bookstore.

I would still never write in the first edition of any book that gets a very limited first edition pressing. Some of those have potential to become collector's items, and I have many debuts on my shelves that have done exactly that. But any book that gets a first printing of 100,000 or so is fair game, as are most instructional books, history books, business titles, etc. Those are doomed never to have any resale value, and their real value comes from the knowledge inside them. 

So about ten years ago, I began writing notes to myself in certain books (beginning with, I admit, "sticky notes," so that I could retrieve the info when I needed it for some reason - or just wanted to check my memory against something I'd read in a different book. Soon enough, I took to highlighting certain passages just like I had done in college and making my own notes in the margins in ink (although I do use an erasable pen just to keep it neater). And now I can't imagine not doing it even to novels that become or almost become bestsellers. 

Now, it can all be taken to the extreme, the way a New York friend of mine took it there about fifteen years ago. She absolutely hated flashbacks so much that she would dismantle a book so that she could rearrange the chapters so that the two plot lines could be read separately. First she would read the flashback chapters, and then she would tackle the current day chapters. She had a bookshelf filled with books held together by rubber bands because she was a big fiction fan and the alternating-chapter construction is so common in modern fiction. It worked for her, so who was I to argue with her about ripping up brand new books?

Heck, I even remember a couple of times that she took to solving mysteries by building her own police-like crime board filled with sticky notes and strings showing the connections between various characters and events. I doubt that anyone other than the authors understood those mysteries better than her when she was done. That woman was a hoot, and I absolutely loved talking books with her before she "ghosted me" for a reason I've never figured out...maybe I needed to make my own "crime board" to figure out what happened.

Anyway...do you guys write in your books? If not, why do you think that is; I know that library books are off limits, etc. If you do write in them, when did you begin doing so, and was it something that evolved gradually over time as it did for me? Let me know how you feel about writing in your books.

Totally Frustrated and Saddened by What I Find at Barnes & Noble (And What I Don't Find) Nowadays

I very clearly remember the feeling of stepping into a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a feeling that I was certain to leave the store with at least four or five books in my arms. I remember just how much fun that was. The problem is I can't remember the last time it happened.

However, a quick look at Wikipedia tells me it was probably not too long after Elliott Management Corporation acquired the company for $683 million back in August 2019. B&N remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Elliott's to this day. Elliott also owns and runs the huge Waterstones Booksellers chain in the UK, and the problem is that the new owners decided to use the British bookselling model on Barnes & Noble rather than using the American model on Waterstones. 

That means effectively that everything sold in either chain is priced at the recommended list price that the publisher chooses or it is put on sale in one of those "buy one at full price, get another at 50% off, schemes that I seldom use (in effect, that means paying 75% of list for each book). I lived for several years in London and frequented Waterstones because it seemed to be everywhere I went, but I probably didn't make that decision more than a half-dozen times in all those years because the "second book" part of the deal was limited to just a handful of books similar to the one I really wanted at the moment.

That used to be not such a big problem at B&N (even in London), though, because of the always-arbitrary selection of bestsellers that they chose to discount in both hardcover and softcover versions. Look at this picture:

This is today's bestseller grouping from my local store. If there's a similar grouping for softcover books, I never ran across it. Now admittedly, there are a couple of books here that may actually be worth reading, but B&N has so obviously tailored the list to highlight the lowest common denominator of reading tastes that I hardly ever find anything on that shelf that I want to take home with me. If you're not into thrillers by the usual suspects, you're pretty much out of luck. (If there's a similar selection of nonfiction, YA, and children's books, I missed those, too, because I don't really shop those departments.)

Remember those fun displays of what I call "remainders" from major publishers that B&N used to place so prominently in their stores? Well, don't hold your breath until you pluck some current fiction or nonfiction from the chain's new, horrible Book Annex groupings. Clue: you're going to die first. Those displays are only made up now of stale, cheap reprint editions in the nonfiction area, and of classics in the fiction area. (That could very well be because publishers don't do the huge print runs like they used to - meaning that the remainders stock is limited from the source.)

I used to count on going into a B&N and walking out with five or six one-or-two-year-old previous bestsellers for about $40 and another two current books that I paid near full price for - along with a couple of magazines. All for about $80 or $90. And I did that every 60 days or so. 

Now look at these photos from the store this morning near noon and ask yourself what is missing from each of them:

If you guessed "people," you win the prize. There were actually fewer people in this large store today than there were workers (I think I counted four other people plus about 4 small children).

Don't get me wrong; I want to see Barnes & Noble do well. They are, after having effectively run all of the other bookstore chains either completely out of business or out of my area, now the only major bookseller available to me. I hope that the B&N braintrust figures out that their new marketing strategy is not going to work...especially during a period of hyperinflation like the one we are experiencing right now. If they don't, they are doomed just the way they helped make sure that all the competition was doomed.

"Cutting the Cord" and Saving Money in the Process

This has unexpectedly turned into a weekend of very little reading...but this time,  I'm OK with that. It's taken several hours of web research and set-up time, but we have finally cut the cord with traditional "cable TV." In the process, we've cut our cost by around $80 per month while gaining a video menu much more suited to what we enjoy watching - and the picture is finally coming in at the quality AT&T uVerse has been promising us but never delivering.

Oh, we also upgraded our AT&T-provided internet speed to the maximum offered for the same price we were paying for less speed because promotional offers were available that AT&T keeps secret from longtime customers already paying the same cost for less speed. That, and our so-called "landline," is what AT&T is now providing us.

So what do we have now? Well, for $80 less (plus the around $20 worth of Federal taxes associated with it), we now subscribe to Hulu plus Live TV, Discovery Plus, and Hallmark movies. In addition, we get a bundled price through the Hulu subscription for Disney+ and ESPN+. You can probably see that some of the choices were my wife's and the others were mine. She loves the old Disney classic cartoons; I love all the extra live sports events on ESPN+. She loves the Hallmark movies and all the programming that comes with the Discovery Plus connection. I love the fact that the SEC network is part of the live programming offered so that I can keep up with the Texas A&M Aggies and the rest of the conference.

We both love that all of our local channels are available through Hulu Live (with the exception of our local PBS station). We love the cloud DVR that gives us 200 hours of recordings we make off of live TV broadcasts (I've already saved A&Ms 20-3 win over Auburn yesterday). And we love all the on-demand programming that comes with the various services. Because the local channels are streamed via Hulu, there's no $50 antenna to buy for the local stations, which used to be the only way to cut the cable cord and still have access to local stations.

But most of all, I love the picture quality that streaming delivers as compared to what AT&T was delivering via its fiber optic network. The difference, in some cases, is astounding. My televisions have never looked so good. 

In addition we were already subscribed to Prime, Acorn, and BritBox. So, yes, we are still spending too much money on entertainment...but now it's first rate, and more importantly, we are not overpaying for things that just cluttered up the menu. And there are no contracts on any of this stuff; we can cancel or "pause" the services whenever we want to without being tied to the calendar. I suppose it's all still an expensive extravagance, but hey, it's a whole lot cheaper - and better - than it was on Friday.

Now I need to tear myself away from the screen and get back to my reading.

Does a Graphic Novel "Count" as a Book Read?

 I have a question for everyone that would be best presented as a poll question, but since Blogger software doesn't make that an easy thing to do (at least I can't figure out how to do it), let's just do it the hard way.  

In all the years I've been reading, the number of graphic novels I've read may now have finally used up all the fingers on one hand. And the one that accomplished the trick was not really a graphic novel; instead,I would call it a graphic biography. It was this 155-page "comics biography" of science fiction author Philip K. Dick:

Despite my admiration for several of Philip K. Dick's science fiction novels, I knew almost nothing about the man's personal life before I picked up this condensed version of his life. To the book's credit, I feel that I now have a solid feel for how all of Dick's personal problems with mental illness, drugs, and alcohol so directly influenced his work - and resulted in five marriages. I may not have a lot of hard, factual detail to back up my impressions but the illustrations added a great deal of depth to the limited text, and I'm pleased with how much better I now know Philip K. Dick, the man. 

So why do I still feel guilty about counting anything but the longest graphic novel as a "book read"? It even took me a few years to stop feeling guilty about counting audiobooks, so maybe this is not even an issue for most readers. 

So my question is this one: Is it legitimate to count a graphic novel that you spent maybe 90 minutes with as a book read when compiling your numbers for the year? 

I will be happy with a simple "yes" or "no," but would appreciate any comments you want to add to your votes. Thanks for participating.

Book Memories: What You Remember and What You Forget

I stumbled upon a 2018 article from The Atlantic this morning that reminded me of exactly why I began Book Chase back in 2007. Even before I went public with my efforts, I had been writing very short "reviews" to myself for a while of the books I was reading because I realized how little I was retaining of them despite enjoying them so much while turning their pages. 

The problem seemed to be getting worse, but I was not ready to call "aging" the culprit, especially since everyone I knew, despite their own ages, readily admitted to the same thing. I more readily blamed it all on the emergence of e-books and all the other reading all of us do on our computers (and now even on our phones). Nothing seemed to sink in the way it used to do, nor did it stick around as long.

In the article mentioned, Pamela Paul (who was the editor of The New York Times Book Review at the time) explains her own reading memories this way:

"I always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object. I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me; what I don't remember - and it's terrible - is everything else. 

The article goes on to discuss why that is for so many people, but it so precisely described my own reading memories in 2007, that it surprised me to think that someone in Pamela Paul's position would have the same problem. Luckily, I've gotten relatively better at remembering what I read, and I attribute that to two things: "reviewing" to one extent or another everything that  I read, and having learned to concentrate much, much more effectively on what I read electronically. 

As a result, I think I love reading...and books...more today than I've ever loved them in my life. That's really saying something, because I've been a confirmed book-nerd since I was about four years old, and that was a long, long time ago. All of this tells me that even after Book Chase is no more, I'll be writing reviews on scraps of paper for a (hopefully) long time to come.

(Do read the article if you're interested in more of what Julie Beck has to say about her own experience. The Atlantic allowed me to read the full piece despite me not being a subscriber to the magazine.)

On Distractions and Mixed Emotions

This is one of those days that I'm filled with mixed emotions, even to the point of not being able to focus on the things I need to be doing. It is, of course, the twentieth anniversary of the 9-11 murders, a somber day to be sure, but an anniversary (considering recent events in Afghanistan) that fills me with a whole new kind of regret. So today I feel guilty about not wanting to think much at all about what happened to all of us all those years ago.

Instead, I'm focusing on the little things that are happening all around me right now, like finally getting my car back from the body shop after four weeks of waiting for a new headlight to arrive so that the repairs could be completed. The covid pandemic has caused our supply chain to be crippled in a way that the world's interconnected economy is obviously still struggling to overcome. Four weeks for a headlight to make it to Houston from the supplier is ridiculous! The fellow-who-hit-me's insurance company ended up paying almost a $1,000 in rental car payments on a repair that the shop only charged $1,605 to complete. But now, after a month, it feels like I'm driving a brand new car...and I don't have to putter around in that boxy little Kia Soul anymore.

And college football is back. It feels so good simply to type that sentence. As I do every season, I have high hopes that my team, the Texas A&M Aggies, will have a great season. It doesn't always happen...make that it hardly ever happens...but I always hope that this will be the year. The problem is that A&M competes in the same conference and same division as Alabama, a team that seldom loses more than one game a year. That means that finishing second is almost the most we can ever realistically hope to achieve. Still, I can't wait to see how the Aggies fare against Colorado this afternoon in the second game of the season.

And I visited a couple of used-book bookstores last week and came away with some good stuff. At one store, I found a 1965 copy of Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang and even though the book was minus its jacket, I am happy to have it on the shelf. I also found an unread copy of Ian Rankin's A Song for the Dark Times in the same shop, and despite already having read and loved it, I added it to my Rankin collection. 

At a different shop, I came home with three books I didn't even know I wanted when I walked through the doors - love when that happens. One is a signed copy of Sherman Alexi's 2012 short story collection called Blasphemy. Alexi is a native American author whose work I've really enjoyed in the last few months, so I'm looking forward both to reading this one and adding it to my permanent collection of short story compilations. 

I'm also a huge fan of Gerald Seymour's books and was happy to find an unread copy of one of his novels, The Walking Dead, that I was unfamiliar with. Thankfully, just so you know, there are no zombies in this book. This is the story of a British secret service agent who is sent to Saudi Arabia on an anti-terrorist suicide mission. Seymour writes some of the best thrillers of this type imaginable, so I'm really looking forward to reading this one. To show how highly Gerald Seymour is thought of around the world, The New York Times says of him, "The three British masters of suspense, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré, have been joined by a fourth - Gerald Seymour." I agree.

The third book I picked up in that bookstore was the last one I reviewed here: I'd Rather Be Reading, a book I responded to with a different type of mixed emotion. I don't exactly regret purchasing this one, but...well, you get it by now. 

The highlight of my book-buying week, however, was the arrival of a copy of The Library of America's volume of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. This one is over 900 pages long, and I've already read it three times, but I know I'll want to read it again. This is a novel I first read in high school, and I feel as if it is the one that made me fall in love forever with crime novels. Even though it is fiction, because of Dreiser's style and the nature of the crime he describes, it reads very much like a true crime book at times. And the physical book itself is absolutely beautiful - as are all hardcover books coming from Library of America. As the 121 LOA books on my shelves clearly shout out, Library of America is my favorite publisher of them all. 

Well, it's almost game time, so I'm going to fix a quick lunch and settle in for that. Maybe tomorrow, I'll be ready to think about this twentieth anniversary of the tragic mass murder of September 11, 2001, at least in small doses. I just can't do it today, so I'm purposely avoiding tuning in to certain television channels. 

Twitter Is Fixable...Facebook Not So Much

I spent a few hours this week eliminating some of the aspects of the internet that can always be guaranteed to ruin my mood, if not my whole day. I love the internet in many ways, and I can't imagine daily life without it, but certain apps and many, many people I run into on the net are no longer worth my time or patience. For that reason, I've been doing a lot of internet spring cleaning this week. 

I started with Twitter...not all of Twitter, though, only the people who go there just to use a hit-and-run technique to viciously smear those who are not "woke" (I hate that word) enough to suit them. Now, I enjoy the "book people" on Twitter a lot, most of them anyway, so I started blocking everyone who says anything nasty - or just stupid - about others in order to make themselves look good (the kind of "virtue signaling" we've all heard so much about). "Blocking" is a relatively easy process on Twitter, and after having blocked almost 450 accounts, I now have a fine-tuned Twitter feed that is all about books, college sports, and jigsaw puzzles. Sadly, not all "book people" made the cut, though, because a few prominent authors are among the most self-absorbed virtue-signalers on the planet. But now I can actually look forward to clicking on Twitter to see what the chatter is all about.

I wish it were that easy with Facebook, but the powers-that-be who run Facebook are so obsessed with censorship of viewpoints they disagree with that I've grown tired of the whole Facebook experience. I deleted my Facebook account on Monday, and my only regret is that I've lost my Book Chase Facebook page in the process of deleting my main account. Facebook censors (who call themselves fact checkers) decide not only what "truth" is, they decide how much exposure your posts are going to receive, and what posts (even from friends) you will be allowed to see. But I don't have to worry about that anymore because now I won't be seeing anything posted to Facebook or adding to even the book-conversation there anymore. And I feel as relieved about that as if I had just yanked a splinter out of my thumb.

I'm tired: tired of political correctness, tired of "wokeness," tired of cancel culture, and tired of having to work so hard not to offend a bunch of morons on both sides of every argument. It's just all gotten too silly for me to bother with anymore. So it's goodbye to Joyce Carol Oates, Don Winslow, Stephen King, Greg Isles, Rebecca Makkai, Attica Locke, Tim Hallinan, and Brad Thor, among over 400 others who refuse to stop displaying their own brand of group-hate to the world so regularly. The "400 others" include every politician or news person on Twitter who makes it to my Twitter feed because I no longer trust a one of them to tell me the truth, and I don't want to hear about their books anymore.

I don't need Twitter or Facebook for "the news." I get my news from multiple sources from all over the world so that I can compare "facts" and interpretations of those facts from varying viewpoints. The "Twitter Books" app I've created for myself turns out to be a pretty good app. Twitter and Facebook...not so much. 

The Times Have Never Been Better for Readers

The 3 shelves beneath each of these groups of 4 are equally stuffed beyond capacity.

Do you guys ever get the feeling that, even though you are probably reading more right now than you ever have, the stacks of un-read books you have waiting around for your attention are growing faster than ever, too? I spent some time this morning sorting through the unread books I have acquired this year, and I can guarantee you that's the case with me. All of the shut-in time resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has given me the time to read more book blogs, newspaper book sections, and book magazines than ever before. The result: I'm buying books way faster than I can possibly read them, and I probably won't ever get to some of them at all. 

So far in 2021, I've acquired:

• 18 Hardcovers
• 10 E-books
•  5 (electronic) ARCs
•  7 (physical) ARCs

In addition to these 40 books, I have a grand total of 17 library books waiting to be read before check-out time runs out on them. While all the bookstores were shut down, I really got used to making use of my library system's search engine and the fact that the system has a reciprocal agreement with two of the neighboring counties to share books across county lines. So much choice...and that was even before the bookstores reopened. Now, it's really crazy. 

The scary part of all this is that I've read a grand total of 8 of the 40 books I've acquired so far this year - and I've abandoned one other of them for good out of sheer boredom. That leaves 31 unread books, and the year isn't quite halfway over yet. Oh, I know it's a nice problem to have (other than the space required and all), but at this pace, I'll soon be searching for a Book-Addicts Anonymous meeting somewhere around here. 

In addition to all the books I learn about from my fellow book-bloggers, I'm constantly learning about the books that are hot in Britain right now from my Times of London subscription. Almost everything that catches my eye in the paper's book section is available in this country, too, and if that weren't already bad enough, the book editors kindly sent me an email or two every week just to make sure that I don't miss all the books they couldn't squeeze into the paper itself. Then there are The Great Courses (available for free on Kanopy), classes like the 19-hour one on "Mysteries and Thrillers" that have led me to countless classics and series (there's that word again) from the past. And, I don't want to forget all the British and European television series I watch on services like Acorn, BritBox, Prime, Tubi, and Walter Presents that end up leading me in whole other directions after I learn they are based on a book or series of books I had not heard of beforehand. 

In other words, life is pretty good for readers right now. We are all very lucky to live in such an interconnected world. Make the most of it.

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Can "Bad" People Write Important Books?

As evidenced by the above photo, I'm a big fan of Philip Roth's novels and nonfiction - and I have been since the late 1960s. The books shown in the picture are part of my Library of America collection, and they represent the vast majority of what Roth published during his career, but I also have some of his novels and nonfiction books in their original editions. 

Now, I have almost nothing in common with a man like Philip Roth, but that is a big part of the attraction. Roth was Jewish, he was born in New Jersey, he was a rather infamous womanizer; I am none of those things. So I turned to a writer like Philip Roth to explain that world to me, and even though I doubt that I ever came close to really understanding it, Roth got me as close to that point as any writer ever could. Philip Roth expanded my universe, and I am grateful to him for that. His personal life and habits, intriguing as they were, were his business, and I didn't think much about them.

But Philip Roth is gone now, and what promises to be his definitive biography has recently been published, and I really want to read it - and I want a copy of my own to shelve and reference. Until Monday, I had not ordered a copy, just kept putting it off because I already have so many books stacked up to be read. Then, I spotted an article in The Times of London that W.W. Norton & Company was yanking the book because Blake Bailey, its author, has been accused in New Orleans of sexual misconduct that may have occurred decades ago during his tenure there as a middle school teacher. If the charges are true, Blake Bailey deserves whatever legal punishment his actions merit. No doubt about that.

Bailey, however, was handpicked by Roth to write this biography, and that means that he was given the kind of access to Roth that future biographers can only dream about. From what I've read, the biography exposes extremely unflattering aspects of Roth's personal behavior, so it promises to be frank and, I hope, honest. Bailey was even at Roth's deathbed, from what I gather. As I've said, I want to read this book, and I want to own it.

I realize that I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but since I review everything I read, if this book arrives today, as Amazon promises it will, I will read it, I will display it on my shelves, and I will review it. Frankly, I consider "cancel culture" to be nothing more than thinly veiled censorship, and I abhor it. Blake Bailey may very well be a despicable human being; I don't know. But if he is, that does not lessen the quality of this book - and even though it will probably be published by someone else eventually, I want it now. And if I could afford to do it, I would probably buy a couple of dozen copies to give to likeminded people because this kind of thing makes me very nervous. 

As a friend of mine says (and he probably stole it from somewhere), "Woke me when it's over."

Library Due-Date Crunch Time

I find myself fighting the clock this week thanks to the several library books with short time-fuses that I'm still reading. I really don't want to miss out on reading any of them now that I finally got my hands on them...but they all came in about the same time and none are renewable without me returning to the end of the line again.

I've had this one on hold since November, starting out as number 210 on the waiting list. Tana French is not an author I've read before, but I finally decided that her immense popularity demands a peek. So, the book finally arrived, and I read the first page and was immediately hooked before I put it aside to finish a couple of others first. And I'm still on page 2. One week to go.

Transcendent Kingdom is actually due back at the library today, but I'm still over 120 pages away from the end so that's not likely to happen. I picked it up, finally, last night thinking that if I had to give up on one, this would probably be the one to get culled. About a dozen pages later, I knew that was not going to happen. I am so immersed in her story right now that I can't imagine not finishing the book. Yaa Gyasi is a special kind of writer. This will be the first book with a waiting list I've ever purposely not returned on its due date...maybe tomorrow.

The George Saunders book is due in four days, but I'm only 40% of the way through this creative fiction class, so this one may end up being returned late, too, despite its still-growing waiting list. Even at this point in the book, I recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain to anyone curious about how good short stories are constructed - especially ones written by some of the Russian masters of the genre. I'm retaining much more of what Saunders has to say about the structure of the stories than I would have thought possible - and that's entirely to the credit of Saunders's prose style. Saunders is one of my favorite writers for a reason.

If I'm not careful, I'm going to be in the same boat with another set of library books in just a couple of weeks. But, hopefully, I've now learned that my "eyes" or bigger than my "brain," and I will better control my urge to put every interesting book I run across on my library hold list. Yeah, right, like that's going to happen.

When TV and Film Lead Back to Books, You Are Having a Good Day

I gave up on most television channels years ago with the exception of a few exceptional series, the rapidly dwindling list of sports I still follow, and what passes for television news these days. My attention, instead, went to whatever appealed to me on Netflix, Prime Video, and more recently, the PBS/Masterpiece Theater app. In the last year, I've noticed that the offerings on Prime often interest me more than what Netflix has on offer, and I'm very much enjoying the fact that the PBS app also offers series and movies from all over the world via its affiliation with "Walter Presents." As a result, I've become quite proficient now in reading subtitles as they go past, but they can be pretty quick sometimes. Surprisingly, since I still understand and read French at a basic level, I have more difficulty reading French titles because it makes me realize that the translations are far from literal - that they have been "Americanized" for the intended audience. 

So why am I rambling on about this? Well, I've found that some of the series I've watched end up leading me back to the books from which they were adapted. And, in fact, I have two of those books stacked up right now with all the other library books I've picked up in recent weeks. 

I'm looking forward soon to comparing these books to their movie/TV versions:

This one is a Masterpiece Theater production that caught my attention because it marks the return of actress Glenda Jackson to movies for the first time in 27 years - and her performance is remarkable. The premise is that the best friend of Jackson's character has disappeared and no one seems to take it seriously. The kicker is that the two women are elderly and the Jackson-character suffers from advanced dementia, so even she is not certain what she is hallucinating and what is real. But because victims of dementia so often have vivid memories of the distant past, things start to make sense in the disappearance of the Jackson-character's own sister more than sixty years earlier. Elizabeth is Missing was British author Emma Healey's debut novel, and it looks like she struck gold with it.

I watched the Apple Tree Yard in late December only because it grew on me. After the first episode, I would not have bet that I would continue on, but I did and it turned into quite a courtroom drama with a twist at the end that actually surprised me. It's another one I found on the PBS app via Prime. I don't want to give anymore away about this one because it would be too easy to spoil it. Just know that I can't wait to see if the book is even better than the film adaptation. Books almost always are, in my experience. This one, too, is British, although Apple Tree Yard is far from Louise Doughty's first novel. 

I'm finding myself watching quite a few documentaries on Netflix, too. I just finished one there called Pretend It's a City that is actually seven thirty-minute interviews of Fran Lebowitz, a 70-year-old New York comedian and writer I'm embarrassed to say I never heard of before watching this. Fran's delivery and smart, dry wit remind me of the comedians I loved so much a few decades ago when nothing was out of bounds in comedy. I didn't always agree with what Fran had to say, but she made me laugh - or more importantly, think - even about the things upon which we don't think alike. This can easily be binge-watched over a couple of evenings, and I really recommend it.

I may not be reading as many books as I read in the past, but I'm learning so much more about the world now because we are blessed with so many choices and possibilities. Some feed my addiction to crime fiction and drama; others teach me things I never even suspected I didn't know. What a beautiful time to be alive this is.

A New Wrinkle Comes Along Just in Time

 In an attempt to shake the mood I've been in for the last three or four days, I decided to take a look at how my reading is likely to go for the remainder of this cursed year. All I've really felt much like doing for a few days is to bury myself inside a book, only coming out of hiding long enough to take care of those things that can't be avoided. And the more I'm forced to go out in public (especially to the grocery store), the less I believe that people are not just inherently too stupid for their own good. OK...rant over. I promise.

So, here's what the rest of December looks like for me:

I'm something like six decades beyond the target audience of this children's classic, but my curiosity has finally gotten the best of me. It's one of those books I've been hearing about for what seems like forever, and I still see it referenced several times a year despite how little I read of YA or Middle-Grade books. I jumped into it last night as soon as I found out it was immediately available from my library. So far at least, it's everything good I've heard about it - and it has already been instrumental in changing my mood for the better.

Although I've been reading John Steinbeck for most of my life, I've never taken an in-depth look at his life despite owning a door-stop-sized Steinbeck bio that's been around the house for at least thirty years. The highly praised Mad at the World caught my eye a few weeks ago, though, and I decided to give that one a look. I'm now about 80% of the way through it, and I've learned so much about Steinbeck's personal life that I'll never see him the same. If you are a biography reader, I recommend this one.

I'm about half-way through Strongheart and plan to finish it before the end of the month. The tone of this third book in the series is much more somber and ominous than that of the first two books despite all the terrible things that happened to the white women and the tribes they have married into in those first two. Part of that, of course, is because we all know how the story ends for those tribes and what happens to them next. The writing is still strong, and Jim Fergus continues to tell a great yarn despite what the ultimate ending of the trilogy has to be.

I'm reading Dark Passage from this Library of America collection of five David Goodis novels from the 1940s and 1950s. Goodis isn't as well known today as some of his contemporary crime novelists, but he was definitely one of the better writers of dark crime fiction from that era. Dark Passage is one of his better known novels, probably because of its movie version, and I'm suitably impressed already even though I'm less than one-third of the way through it. I'm looking forward to reading the other four novels in 2021 and 2022.

I'm in the process of pulling together my January books right now, and hoping to get off to a nice fresh start to the coming year. Surely (please, please, please) 2021 has to be better than the one we've all just endured. At the very least, readers will still have books - lots of them - to lose themselves within when the going gets tough.