Reader’s Notebook, 1/7/26

My final four books of 2025, which ended up being my most prolific reading year on record. Appropriately, and I’m not making this up, I read 67 books last year. Honest to God! SIX SEVEN!!!!

Cross, Sanctuary, The Devil – Ken Bruen
Three more entries in Bruen’s brilliant Jack Taylor series, read over roughly a week. Somehow they are getting even darker, with a terrific twist in Taylor’s life thrown into this set. I have now read eight of the 18 official Taylor books, all over the past six months, happily buying up used copies from Thrift Books. I imagine I’ll do some damage to the rest of the series this coming year.

Big Chief – Jon Hickey
I have a couple Best Of 2025 Books lists saved, and added several of them to my personal reading list and library holds. I forget which list this one appeared on, but it was a worthy entry.

Its main character is Mitch, a young attorney who returned to the Anishinaabe reservation in Wisconsin he grew up when he hit a bump in his career. Eventually he landed as chief of staff to a childhood friend who pulled an upset win in the election for tribal president. The book picks up two years into that stint, with the president in the midst of a tough reelection battle. They face charges of corruption, a group of extremely angry reservation residents, and an insurgent opponent who seems poised to oust them from office.

In the final days before the election things truly go off the rails. The protests become violent, Tribal police battling their own citizens. The president begins taking erratic, often illegal actions. And a long-time white benefactor to both the tribe and Mitch dies under mysterious circumstances.

Along the way Mitch is forced to face a lot of uncomfortable truths about his upbringing, how he managed to get out of the rez when so many of his childhood friends were stuck, how he is tied to corruption both present and past, and deal with leftover trauma from his mother’s death years earlier. It’s a lot for a young dude. He doesn’t always handle it well. That messiness really made this book strike home with me. We like to think that we will triumphantly defeat all the challenges life throws at us. Often, though, we stumble along the way, making wrong decisions or, more likely, putting off making those choices because their options paralyze us.

And like so many modern pieces of pop culture that are centered on Native Americans, Mitch has to wade through a ton of questions about who he is, what community he feels most at home in, and how he deal with all the emotions that bubble up from that internal conflict.