Tag: books (Page 1 of 25)

Once again I am behind on these, so let’s get caught up with my last four reads.

The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski
What a book! Future NBA scoops guru Woj spent the 2004–04 season embedded with the basketball team at St. Anthony High School of Jersey City. The program was famously coached by Bob Hurley for 45 years. For much of that time Hurley also worked tirelessly to keep the school open, spending countless hours fundraising and donating the money he made from speaking engagements and clinics to the school. He, and others, kept it afloat until 2017.

That 2003–04 squad was one of his 26 state title teams, finishing the season undefeated and ranked #2 in the country. Unlike his four national championship teams, this one didn’t have a single D1 senior recruit on the roster.

The book is about more than basketball, though. Woj gets to know the kids on the team, the circumstances they came from, the daily challenges they face, and so on. He tracks the Sisters who run the school as they also fight to keep the facility from being closed and kids from dropping out.

Hurley had a lot in common with Bobby Knight, someone he was friendly with. He was fiery. He held players to a high standard. He expected as much from them in class as on the court. You can see where his sons got their (over) intensity. Unlike Knight, though, Hurley seemed like someone you could have a genuine conversation with that wouldn’t involve him spending most of the time proving that he was smarter than you and everything you believed was wrong.

Like any sports book, it was fun to see how much things have changed in the 20 years since this came out, and how players who seemed like can’t miss prospects at the time faded away.

Lazarus Man – Richard Price
I’ve read a couple of Price’s books in the past, and watched movies and TV shows he’s written for. He never disappoints.

Here he writes of the aftermath of a building collapse in New York, and how several people are affected by it, including a man pulled from the rubble alive three days after the collapse. As these folks navigate the days after the collapse, they give us a view of what everyday life is like for people in Harlem in the late 2000s. These glimpses into their lives pull the story along, but there’s never any great conflict or common ending that their stories are leading us towards. There is a rather notable reveal/twist late in the book, but it is hinted at throughout and doesn’t really shock the reader or flip the story in a dramatic way.

Price is such a good writer, especially of dialogue, that this thinness in plot is fine. Not every novel needs to have a great, deeper meaning or statement on life. That lack does keep this from standing next to his earlier, better works, though.

The Gray Man – Mark Greaney
A decent, mindless, assassin kills a bunch of bad guys novel. There’s a whole series of these. I’m not sure I’m going to work through them all – Lord knows I have plenty of other spy series I could jump back into – but Greaney’s 2024 entry landed on a couple Best Of lists so I may selectively pick some that got good reviews and/or focus on topics that interest me.

Notes On A Foreign Country: An American Abroad In A Post-American World – Suzy Hansen
I forget where I heard about this book, but I also read an article Hansen published in a magazine within recent weeks, so something got her into my feed.

I knew that this was all about her observations as an American living overseas over the past decade, but I did not realize it was almost pure analysis. I was hoping for a book that was as much travelogue as extended piece for Foreign Affairs.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. Hansen spends the entire book explaining how pretty much everything about her world view was challenged and changed by the decade she spent living in Turkey. She dove into how little history Americans know and understand about other countries. How even our overseas reporters, who are supposed to learn about and explain other cultures to us, are often woefully ignorant about the lands they are reporting from. She gets deeply into how Americans don’t understand the ramifications of our foreign policy and the direct effects it has on people in other countries. How what is “good for America” is often purely about economics for us and has no regard for anyone crushed along the way. And so on.

I tend to agree with much of her perspective, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Pretty woke, right? Where this is important for all Americans is in explaining the “why do (insert ethnic/religious/cultural/racial group identifier here) hate us?” questions we face all too often. It’s because we’ve routinely crushed, or helped to crush, popular, effective governments in other countries because their interests didn’t align with ours (or more specifically with our biggest corporations who have operations in these countries). It’s because we have a long history of supporting very bad people because we didn’t understand local interests or assumed because their opponents might lean to the left, that meant they were deeply indebted to the Soviets. We would never let another world power come into the US and tell us what we could and could not do inside our own borders. But we’ve been doing that to people all around the world for nearly 150 years now, since we first started building our own empire by taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.

Even if you disagree with her contentions, Hansen’s perspective is important, especially in an age when we are equally threatened by small, non-governmental actors as we are by China and Russia. Like so much of the bullshit we face these days, a little interest in and empathy towards others could go a long way towards making the world a safer place.

There’s Always This Year – Hanif Abdurraqib
I started the year with this wonderful book. It is a multi-layered examination of the places we call home and how we relate to them as we age, all set against a backdrop of basketball. For the most part, Abdurraqib’s tale follows the career of LeBron James, from high school phenom to his first run with the Cavaliers, to The Decision and move to Miami, and finally his return to Cleveland and winning the title the city sought for so long.

But only a fraction of the book is actually about LeBron. It’s as much about the neighborhood Adburraqib grew up in in Columbus, OH and what it was like to come of age in Ohio in parallel to LeBron. There’s also a nice diversion about former Kansas Jayhawk Kenny Gregory, who was a few years older than the author and lived a few doors down from him, and what it meant to the Columbus projects for a local kid to be a McDonald’s All American, winning both the dunk contest and game MVP award. KG is also used as a counter to LeBron, as the Can’t Miss Kid who, for various reasons, misses. At least compared to all the expectations on him before he went off to college.

There are also bits about music and culture and family and other stuff. Abdurraqib is more poet than social critic/commentator, so the book at times reads as such. There are even sections written in verse. The whole book was surely written over months, if not years. But it reads as though he spun it out over a single night, or maybe two, letting the thoughts flow from brain to pen/keyboard and following whatever diversions they took on the way to getting to his bigger points.

The Wide Wide Sea – Hampton Sides
Captain James Cook was one of the greatest seafarers of the age when men piled into ships and sailed off to parts unknown, hoping to “discover” new lands, peoples, and opportunities. This is an accounting of his final voyage, when his primary mission was to explore the western coast of North America for a potential connection to the theorized Northwest Passage. Along the way he became the first European to land on the Hawaiian Islands.

Cook was unlike most of the other most famous sea explorers whose names are litered across maps and history books. He wasn’t interested in spreading Christianity to “save” the heathens of the unexplored territories of the world. He generally treated the native peoples of the lands he arrived at with respect and intellectual interest, striving to learn about their cultures and societal structures. He took pains to avoid spreading Western diseases in lands where white men had yet to land, not always with success but at least with genuine intent to protect the locals.

But something was off about his final voyage. He seemed cranky and distant, and at times sloppy. There were a series of early setbacks to his journey that were unintentional but set a tone for the remainder of the mission. He was much more likely to punish his sailors with the lash than he ever had been in the past. Worst of all, the change in his mood and behavior led to a massive misunderstanding that ended up costing him his life on a Hawaiian beach in 1779.

This is a remarkable book. It came from a time (Cook left England in mid–1776) when there is a healthy historical record from people on the voyage to accurately recreate their travels. It is truly remarkable that large ships were sent to sea in this time (and had been for over 300 years!). Life on a ship seems like a truly awful experience. Sanitary conditions could be horrific. Boats were filled with rats and cockroaches. Food rotted quickly, supplies of fresh water were limited. The ships constantly leaked. Weather conditions were miserable and the sailors relied on 18th Century clothing to keep themselves dry and warm. Sailors would randomly fall into the sea because of unsettled conditions, often never to be rescued or seen again.

And then there was the matter of it being impossible to communicate with the rest of the world. Ships would set sail and travel for years at a time, family, friends, and benefactors not knowing if a crew was carrying out its mission or on the bottom of the sea until they crawled back into port years later. In severe storms or heavy fog, Cook and his companion ship would fire off their canon at regular intervals to avoid running into each other.

It just doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

A fascinating story well constructed by Sides.

Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life In Music – Ted Templeman as told to Greg Renoff
Kind of an odd choice, but Alex Van Halen referenced this book a lot in his memoir, and then I’ve come across a couple other random references to it since I read AVH’s book, so I thought it would be an interesting read. Which it was, with some big flaws.

First off, I had no idea that Templeman was in the band Harpers Bizarre, which had a few hits in the Sixties, including “59th Street Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” He spends the better part of the first 100 pages of this book detailing his childhood and his Harper’s Bizarre days. Not the reason I picked it up.

Eventually he gets into his production career, beginning with Van Morrison, moving through The Doobie Brothers, and peaking with Van Halen’s glory days.[1] That last bit was obviously the most interesting.

Yet, the book landed a little flat. In musical terms, it felt a little over-produced, as if the rough sections had all been smoothed away. I wasn’t necessarily reading it for gossip, but controversial moments are relayed in an almost passing manner. He keeps hinting that Eddie Van Halen had “issues” but never really spells out that he had become an addict. It’s a weird avoidance of something that is on the public record. Templeman also glossed over many musical terms without explaining them. And, most strangely to me, he insists on calling artists by their shortened names. Eddie Van Halen is always Ed, never Eddie. Alex is alway Al. Michael McDonald is always Mike. He never, ever strays from this. Which drove me nuts. It’s such a Hollywood thing, like “Bob DeNiro is a pal of mine,” or whatever.

There were plenty of good parts. It was very interesting to read his take on how Van Halen fell apart. He had produced Sammy Hagar as well, and famously wanted Sammy to replace David Lee Roth when he signed the band in the late Seventies. In Alex’s book he said he had read this one, and while he respected Templeman, he disagreed with many of his characterizations of VH’s career. It was fun to try to pick out the parts where their views diverged.

Can’t say I highly recommend this book, but it wasn’t a total waste of time, either.

I completed my final book of 2024 late Saturday/early Sunday as I was battling some insomnia. It was my 62nd book of the year, making 2024 one of my best reading years ever.[1] I read seven books in two different months, six books in three separate months, and never fewer than three books in a 30/31-day stretch. Pretty good work. Now I get to start all over again.

The Siege – Ben MacIntyre
I’ve read two of MacIntyre’s books before, and heard about this latest one via a couple different podcasts. It relates the 1980 takeover of the Iranian embassy in London by Arab terrorists. Our generation remembers the Iranians occupying the US embassy in Tehran well, but I did not remember this event, which lasted for six days that spring.

MacIntyre spoke to many of the surviving hostages, police and military, and government officials involved in the event, which allowed him to piece together a highly detailed, very British accounting of every moment of the crisis, from before the terrorists – who had the stated goal of autonomy for an Arab-majority province in Iran – entered the embassy to the quick but problematic assault by British special forces to free the hostages.

It is a fascinating tale not just for the shady motivations of the terrorists, more on that in a moment, but for how it was one of the first public uses of British SAS forces. The unit had existed since World War II – as one of MacIntyre’s other books outlines – but was barely known to the British public until they stormed the embassy. Quite different from America, where our special forces have always been celebrated as both the elite of the elite and as a warning to forces that want to do us harm.

Now to the terrorists. While most of the force were Arab Iranians who truly sought the autonomy back home they believed the Islamic government had promised them when they supported the 1979 revolution, the power behind them was much less narrowly focused. The organization, training, and money all came from Iraq, leading directly to Saddam Hussein and the super terrorist Abu Nidal. Saddam wanted to embarrass and destabilize the new Shiite government in Iran, hoping to increase his own power in the region. This disastrous event in London was one of the direct causes of the horrific Iran-Iraq war, which lasted for eight years. That, in turn, led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, as Iraq wanted to take possession of Kuwait’s oil reserves to stabilize its economy after the Iran war. Which led to US troops being stationed in Saudi Arabia before liberating Kuwait. The presence of which was one of Osama Bin Laden’s motivations for declaring a holy war against the US. And you know what happened from there.

Anyway, a highly interesting read about a seemingly unimportant blip in history – to most Americans – that ended up being massively impactful on all of our lives.

There Was Nothing You Could Do – Steven Hyden
I intentionally saved this for the end of the year. What better way to wrap up the 40th anniversary of the greatest year in pop music history than with a book about one of that year’s biggest albums?

In Hyden’s latest, he takes on Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA, the biggest, most popular, and perhaps most impactful album of The Boss’ career. However, this is not just an assessment/break down of the album itself. Hyden takes a long look at where Springsteen was when he recorded the album, how he was already struggling with the weight of success and popularity. How the E. Street Band was already beginning to fracture ever-so-slightly. How Springsteen took a deliberate step back on Nebraska. How, despite their huge differences in sound, how many of the songs on Born In The USA were recorded around the same time as Nebraska was. Biggest of all, Hyden examines what the USA cycle did to Bruce and how he changed in the years after, from pulling back further from the pop mainstream to separating from the E. Street Band to becoming more overtly political.

Bruce Springsteen is one of the most important and influential artists of the rock era. Because of that, whether you like him or not, his story is important. And the most important part of his story is the point where he both embraced popularity and decided that wasn’t for him.

Favorite Books of 2024

I’ve written about every book I read this year already, so no need for blurbs about my favorites. Here’s a list of the ones that I enjoyed the most. Not all of these were new releases.

The Peacock and The Sparrow – I.S. Berry
Calico – Lee Goldberg
Brooklyn Crime Novel – Jonathan Lethem
The Family Chao – Lan Samantha Chang
Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Wager – David Grann
Carrie Soto Is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) – Jeff Tweedy
Middle of the Night – Riley Sager
Nuclear War – Annie Jacobsen

A Spy Like Me – Kim Sherwood
The second installment in Sherwood’s planned 007 trilogy, it continues to tread ground that is very unlike anything ever written for the Bond franchise. James Bond himself remains absent (mostly), as the rest of the Double-Os attempt to unravel a network that finances terror attacks before it can strike again. They’re also searching for clues for Bond’s status and whereabouts. And seem to be getting killed off at a fairly concerning rate. Oh, and is there a double agent in their midst?

What sets Sherwood’s Bond work apart is how she plants them firmly in the modern age, beyond even where the Daniel Craig era pulled the movie franchise. I’m sure a lot of geezers get annoyed by all the wokeness – “How can there be gay spies?!?!” – but her characters fit our age, so those old fogies can piss off.

I still struggle with Sherwood’s writing style. It is also far different than the many other authors who have carried the series since Ian Fleming’s death. I keep arguing with myself on whether a Bond novel should have a certain core style, or if it is ok to break free of those restraints. Maybe the combination of her writing with a more edgy, modern flair and the very modern characters is too much for me? Maybe I’m an old fogey?!?!

I didn’t love this. But I’ll stick with Sherwood for one more book to see how her arc turns out. And maybe at the end it will all make sense to me.

A Christmas Story – Jean Shepherd
The 17th straight December I’ve sat down for a few hours to revist this classic. Still makes me laugh.

Brothers – Alex Van Halen
I got this after reading the New York Times article about it I linked to a few weeks back. I was intrigued by Alex’s seeming willingness to share more than the standard, aging-rocker bits about his life, career, and relationship with his late brother Eddie. This book was certainly frank, but I wouldn’t describe it as surprising.

Alex runs through the Van Halen brothers’ lives, from early childhood in Holland to moving to the US to discovering rock music and launching their band. He marches through Van Halen’s history up to when David Lee Roth left the band in 1985. Then he stops, jumping ahead to describe his life as a 70-year-old and his continued grief at the loss of his younger brother in 2020. There are lots of good tidbits from each section but, again, I think if you’ve read about the band or watched shows about them, you either know some of the stories or could guess at them.

I guess my point is the book is not gossipy at all. When he shares details that might shock people, they are often via quotes from already published works. So, again, a fan would be familiar with them. He talks about how he and Eddie fought constantly, but they also loved each other more than anyone else and always had each other’s backs. How he felt that his brother crumpled under the pressure of being labeled a “guitar genius.” How the entire band took things too far to the extremes at times. How DLR drove them all nuts nearly from the beginning. How disappointed he was when that initial incarnation of the band ended. There’s nothing super controversial in his words, though. He often defends DLR, saying his wackiness was the perfect counter to the VH brothers’ musical talent. That you need someone who loves the public eye and is ambitious if you want to be successful.

However, he barely mentions Michael Anthony. He does drop Sammy Hagar’s name a couple times, but only in the context of how the Red Rocker once opened for Van Halen and how, before they signed their first recording contract, their manager wanted to boot DLR for Hagar. There’s not a word about the Van Hagar years. Nor what came after that. Perhaps because his brother wasn’t as happy in these years, or Alex’s partying got out of hand and he eventually had to get sober to stay healthy and able to play.

As I said, much of the book is Alex’s reaction to quotes from others. He pulls lengthy passages from books by DLR, producer Ted Templeman, manager Noel Monk, and many interviews with Eddie and then shares his reaction to them. Sometimes he provides context, sometimes he argues, sometimes he supports. I found that manufactured dialog fun to read. Often when he disagreed with someone, Alex pointed out that he understood where the other person was coming from. I expected the book to be more combative, for some reason. Maybe Alex has mellowed as he aged. Or perhaps I’ve had the wrong view of him for 40-some years. I like this mature Alex, though. He’s old enough to know a lot of the things we fight about are kind of silly and there’s nothing productive by remaining upset about them years later.

Because of all those quotes/reactions, the book can come across as a little light. I still really enjoyed it. My biggest takeaway is how much Alex loved, and continues to love, his brother and how proud he is of what they created. And that Alex is probably a pretty good dude to hang out with.

Happy Thanksgiving to all! Hope your travels and gatherings are safe and enjoyable.

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe
Somewhere I ran across an author/poster I follow who mentioned that they had recently read this book. In their blurb, they said something about not loving Wolfe’s writing style but still enjoying the book.

I’ve never read any of Wolfe’s work before. At least for this piece, I loved his writing and the book.

I have seen the 1983 movie based on The Right Stuff many, many times. Or at least parts of it, back when it used to run on cable often. So I knew the basic story, the tale of the seven astronauts selected for the United States’ Mercury project designed to put a man in orbit. The movie is fun.

The book is more fun.

Wolfe writes in a breezy style that you are never quite sure if he’s totally into the mythology of the astronauts or making fun of it. That gets applied to everyone involved in the story, from the astronauts’ wives to politicians to NASA administrators to the media of the era. He often adopts the perspective of his subjects, and does so in a very 1950s, gee-whiz manner. This is a serious subject, but he never takes it too seriously. He’s not looking to explain the science behind putting a man into space, but rather exploring the personalities involved and the public reaction to them.

The Sun Down Motel – Simone St. James
Another one of the “scary” books I put on hold back in early October that also came through after the spooky season had ended. And, again, it worked out perfectly, as this book is split into two overlapping sections, one in November 1982, the other in November 2017. You know how I am about reading books in their proper moment in the calendar.

In the 1982 portion, Viv is on her way to a new life in New York City from Illinois before she gets stranded in a strange little town in rural New York. To earn some cash to complete her trip to the city, she begins working the overnight shift at a small motel. A motel where weird shit happens. She eventually learns of a series of strange deaths and disappearances, and begins investigating them. This leads to trouble.

In the more modern section, Viv’s niece Carly moves to that same small town to look into the disappearance and presumed death of her aunt 35 years early. She stays in the same apartment, gets the same job, and runs into some of the same creepy stuff her aunt ran into. And she begins finding connections between her aunt’s disappearance and the ones Aunt Viv was looking into.

This is one of those books where the resolution isn’t super surprising. How St. James get there is what makes the book fun. There is some truly creepy stuff and a highly satisfying and deserved end for one character. A good page turner as we drift into the dark months.

Let the Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist
I put several scary books on hold in late September and hoped one or two would come in before Halloween. This one actually came through after the holiday, but that was perfect as it takes place in the week before and after Halloween, 1981. In Sweden. So it’s a little weird.

Not sure I realized when I added this to my holds that it was a vampire book. I haven’t done much of the vampire thing. And, I have to say, I did not love this one. Maybe it was the Swedishness of it. Or it was a sometimes tedious story that seemed to stretch on far too long. But most likely it was some of the brutal violence that goes along with the genre. It was a little much at times. Plus vampire stories all seem kind of the same to me. I guess I should have read the synopsis closer before adding this to my list.

Nuclear War: A Scenario – Annie Jacobsen
This was flat-out the scariest book I read last month. That was totally random, as I had placed a hold on this in late August and it finally came in during the spookiest month of the year.

It is exactly what its title suggests: Jacobsen lays out, minute-by-minute and sometimes second-by-second, the course of events over a roughly 90-minute stretch after a nuclear missile is launched at the US. How the launch is detected, how the missile flies, what the procedures are within the US government, how a response is chosen and approved, the result of the first detonation, and how other countries get pulled into the event, turning a single-missile attack into global nuclear war that basically ends civilization as we know it.

The first half of the book reads like a novel. You can’t help but race through pages, thinking something will avert the inevitable end. As Jacobsen shifts into laying out what happens after the bombs start exploding, it’s a decidedly less thrilling read.

Our generation grew up with nuclear war hanging over our heads. For 30 years we’ve thought that fear had largely passed. With more countries gaining access to nuclear weapons and some of the countries who already possess them being led by less mentally stable people, that threat is far closer than we think. As this book points out, a single rogue missile is all it could take to send us down a path we can’t turn back from.

The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve thought about re-reading The Lord of the Rings for several years and finally pulled the trigger. Which was dumb. Given how focused I am on nostalgia, memories, and anniversaries, I really should have tackled it last year, the 40th anniversary of the first time I read it. In fact, that’s how I spent the fall of 1983, working through these four books as a couple friends did the same. So much for symmetry.

I honestly can’t tell you what triggered me to finally jump in. I was waiting on several books from the library and had a lull. We have all the LOTR books in our one remaining bookcase, so I’m sure I had seen them at some point and they made an impression. On the last Saturday in September I checked to see if they were available via ebook at the library and most were.[1] I checked out The Hobbit and The Two Towers and put holds on the other two. Thus I snuck one book in between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring but basically spent the last month pouring through these four classics.

This was at least my third time reading the series. There was the first time in seventh grade, a mid–90s re-read, and now. I’m not sure if I squeezed out another effort sometime between the first two.

So it had been 41 years since the first read, I’m guessing 27 or 28 since the second. Plus I saw the movies when they came out roughly 25 years ago. Naturally, as I worked through the books lots of details came back to me just before I got to those sections of the stories. I forgot how much influence classic Greek epics had on Tolkien’s writing, surely as much as traditional British writing.

As easy as it is to make fun of people who go all Star Wars on LOTR, they really are great stories. It was fun to pick up moments that have influenced more modern works. As I read The Two Towers I sure felt connecting points to the general arc of The Empire Strikes Back. When The Ring comes to its final fate, I immediately thought of the final moment of action in Die Hard. Plus plenty of general points that pop up in modern stories.

I’ve said many times how I am intrigued by the concept of sci-fi and fantasy, but really struggle to connect when I occasionally take a stab at those genres. I’ve always thought some of that was because of how well Tolkien crafted his worlds and stories, and that nothing else made sense to my mind. There is some general, fantasy silliness in his books, at least to me, the non-fantasy fan. But the stories do hold up well, other than some casual racism. I bet some uptight parents even think Tolkien was kind of woke for the moments when he had women assert that they had the right to fill the same roles as men. All that makes it worth devoting a month that could have been spent on other books working through stories I’ve read before.

My biggest criticism is there was too much detailed description of this mindless march or that one. Too much detailing of every tree and plant the Fellowship saw, or spinning out history that doesn’t have a great effect on the core story. So many names of kingdoms and blood lines. There was some juvenile laughter on my part about how often the Hobbits place their heads in each other’s laps to take a nap. The stories could be tightened up just a bit. But they are supposed to be epic quests against absolute evil attempting to take over the world; you have to allow some space for Tolkien to stretch shit out.

Now the question is will I watch the movies again? My To Watch list is probably longer than my To Read list. Right now it doesn’t look like Peter Jackson’s movies are on any streaming platforms we pay for. I would imagine we’ll either re-up with Max at some point, or they’ll land on Prime or wherever eventually and then I’ll load them into the queue.

Going to fire off three quick summaries of recent books before we head to the airport.

Middle of the Night – Riley Sager
The Only One Left – Riley Sager

I was not at all familiar with Sager’s work, but when I saw Middle of the Night pop up on multiple lists of must read new books over the summer, I jumped on it. Wise choice.

It is an excellent, spooky, freaky, fun mystery revolving around the disappearance and presumed death of a young boy in 1994 and his best friend’s efforts to cope with that loss as an adult, and then deal with weird coincidences that pop up 30 years after the disappearance. It pushes up against the supernatural, but eventually the causes for those seemingly unexplained incidents are relatively mundane. Except for one element…

Lots of twists and turns, especially in the final 20 or 30 pages, when Sager fakes the reader this way and that. Highly satisfying.

After that, I put a ton of his old books on hold and The Only One Left was the first to pop up. You can tell it’s from earlier in his career. It is less subtle and more in-your-face at times. That final stretch, where he offers several solutions for the mystery before the final reveal, is less elegant than in Middle of the Night. But it’s still a cool story, in this case about a 50-year-old murder mystery that has a shocking story that has been hidden in plain sight for those decades.

Cold Shot – Mark Henshaw
This is book two in Henshaw’s Kyra Stryker & Jonathan Burke series. After stopping a secret Chinese weapons program in the first book, here they are investigating a connection between the Iranians and Venezuelans that seems pointed at producing nuclear weapons for one or both of the rogue nations. Henshaw has been described as a modern Tom Clancy. That fits. He doesn’t go into pages-long descriptions of weapons or technology, but does find a way to still provide a lot of detail about such things without derailing his story for too long.

Solid plot, lots of action, the good guys win. What else do you need?

Trust Her – Flynn Berry
Three years ago I read Berry’s A Northern Spy, about an unaffiliated Northern Irish woman, Tessa, who gets pulled into the conflict between the IRA and British authorities because of her sister.

In this follow up, set a few years later, the siblings are settled in Dublin where they have carved out new lives with new identities. Until the IRA finds Tessa and threatens her family unless she attempts to turn the British agent she worked for when she was still in the North.

Much of the book progresses without much happening, just the slow building of pressure on Tessa. I wondered if Berry was making a statement more about the stresses people involved in the conflict lived with rather than writing a more straight-forward thriller. Then she threw a couple twists into the final fifth or so of the book that picked up the pace and gave it a more traditional feel.

I guess that ending was needed. After finishing I wondered if a book with a messier, open ending would have been more effective. I liked the idea of nothing ever truly being resolved during The Troubles. Each kidnapping and bombing and death led to another, then another. Each time the situation around you calmed down, there was sure to be some retaliatory act that would ratchet events back up again.

Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
I remember seeing this book a lot as a kid, but never read it until now, after finding it on a list of best espionage novels ever written. After finishing it, hard to believe I put it off so long.

Set during World War II, it is the twin tale of a German spy embedded in Britain and the agents tasked with tracking him down. The chase picks up steam in the weeks before D-Day, when the spy discovers the true location of the Allied landing and attempts to get photographic evidence back to his superiors in Germany. There’s a rather unlikely but entertaining climax to his efforts in which a regular citizen is responsible for his failure. The entire plot is a bit by-the-numbers, but it is always entertaining, and ultimately works.

As the book was written in 1978 and set in the 1940s, I wondered if it would feel a bit off in tone. With the exception of a couple brief passages, which I think were reflective of how people would have talked during the war, I was surprised that the book did not feel out-of-date or fashion at all.

World Within A Song – Jeff Tweedy

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) – Jeff Tweedy
I’ve been a casual fan of Wilco, with occasional moments of greater interest, for a little over 20 years. I am most fond of the music they made from 1999 to 2004; hot-and-cold with them at other times.

When we had friends over a few weeks ago, I talked books with one guest. He asked if I had ever read any of Jeff Tweedy’s books. When I said no, he said he bet I would enjoy them, no matter how much I listened to Wilco’s music. He had just read World Within A Song and suggested I start there.

So I did, and read it in two days. And immediately got Tweedy’s proper memoir and read it in two days. Dude can write more than a good song.

World Within A Song is a list of both songs that have influenced him, for better or worse, over his life and little snippets of observations about touring or life. It was not what I was expecting. He is all over the place in his song choices. He writes about music from artists like The Minutemen, The Clash, Bob Dylan, The Replacements, etc that he loves and influenced what he wrote. He also includes tracks from artists like Leo Sayer and Judy Garland that bring back memories of his parents. And traditional stuff like “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday,” songs we have all heard a million times in our lives that he kind of hates.

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is a straight autobiography, beginning with his childhood. He covers his discovery of music both as a listener and artist; his days in Uncle Tupelo and how he and Jay Farrar grew apart; the formation of Wilco, the addition and later firing of Jay Bennett from that band, and Wilco eventually leaving the major label world; his opioid addiction and recovery; how he met his wife, her cancer battles, and how they started a family; the deaths of his parents; and his fights with the recording industry. Pretty much everything. You always question how honest and accurate books like these truly are, but this seems like a warts-and-all accounting. I’m not sure if Farrar, Bennett’s family, or some of the other people Tweedy had conflicts with would agree with everything. But a book like this can only have one perspective.

What made me read these both in four days is that Tweedy is a terrific writer. Funny, eloquent, and open. He shares some pretty horrific, cruel stuff he did in his years as an addict without much filter. He doesn’t mince many words when he discusses his conflicts with Farrar and Bennett. You don’t necessarily admire him for every step he’s taken in his career, but you understand the bigger context they came in. He also gets deep into how he makes music and how that has changed over his career. Wilco has taken many hard left turns over their 30-years together. The songs covered in World Within A Song and events in Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) help those diversions make a lot more sense.

Well, August was quite a month when it came to reading. I finished seven books last month. And that was with a vacation, the Olympics, paying more attention to baseball (at least some of the time), and watching the US Open mixed in. I guess I used my free time wisely. Also I read some very enjoyable books that kept me engaged and turning the pages.

Here are the last four from that run.

Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
One of my sisters-in-law had this with her when she visited last Christmas and without asking her about it, I added it to my reading list. When I checked its status at the library there was a 30+ week wait for it. Yowsa. I placed my hold and waited until early August when my name hit the top of the list.

Worth the wait. It is a fun, entertaining, thoughtful, charming, at times poignant book.

A group of four residents at a British retirement community start a club where they dive into cold cases for fun, hoping to find clues the police missed and bring the proper people to justice. Hey, big surprise, the group stumbles into a real murder in the process! Then another. And another. Working on their own, and sometimes in concert with the police, they eventually solve all the mysteries. Naturally the cold case they started with ends up tied to the new ones they are looking into, with a surprising connection to their group.

The end got a little messy, as Osman unravels all the threads he’s spun, including several that intentionally led in the wrong direction. That is the tiniest quibble. And perhaps I was just reading too fast as I raced to get to the resolution. I’m looking forward to more adventures with the gang from Cooper’s Chase.

She Rides Shotgun – Jordan Harper
It’s been quite awhile since I read a super-dark book. Like cringey dark. I’m not sure if this officially qualifies – it’s not into Daniel Woodrell territory, for example – but it did make me a little uncomfortable.

This centers on the heart-warming story of a dad reuniting with his estranged 11-year-old daughter and them forging a new relationship.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Nate has been in prison and, just before being released because of a technical error in his conviction, kills a higher-up in one of the prison’s Nazi gangs. Then he kidnaps his daughter, Polly, from her school because he knows she is being targeted by the Nazis as part of their plan to destroy his life in retribution. After grabbing his daughter, Nate finds her mother and new husband murdered by the Nazis. They flee both the Nazis and the police, who think that Nate is responsible for the murders. Then Nate teaches Polly how to be a badass and she helps him rob Nazi stash houses and whatnot to earn a measure of revenge.

And it keeps getting darker from there.

I think I would have loved this story 10–15 years ago. Now, though? Not so much. Not just because of the wrongness of teaching your 11-year-old how to choke people out. There were some strange parts of the book where my question was less where was the story headed than what drugs was Harper using when he wrote those chapters.

Again, I might just be getting old. I’m going to give another of his novels a shot at some point, as he’s got a lot of notice for taking up the banner of noir lit.

The Pine Tar Game – Flip Bondy
Would you be shocked I raced through this book, about the Royals-Yankees rivalry at large and a certain 1983 baseball game in particular, in about 36 hours? I have vivid memories of the Pine Tar Game – I was at my grandparents’ home, watching with my grandfather. He took a nap after the game and when we woke, first thing he did, before lighting his traditional cigarette, was look at me, shake his head, and say, “That damn Billy Martin…” – but it was still fun to relive that day in great detail. It was also cool that one of the greatest rivalries of its era got a full accounting. Since it was a league championship series rivalry, it has largely faded into history outside of Kansas City.

Carrie Soto Is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Finally, another book my sister-in-law directly recommended to me and that I saved until the US Open. Fine timing! This is focused on the greatest (fictional) women’s tennis player of all time, and her return to the game after a younger player ties her record for most majors won. Along the way Carrie Soto reconnects with her father, who had been her coach but from whom she became somewhat estranged late in her career. She has to deal with the realities of being nearly 40 and attempting to compete in major tournaments. And she gains a love interest on his own comeback trail.

Every aspect of this story is predictable. Reid has such a great, breezy yet compelling style of writing that it doesn’t matter that every twist and turn is telegraphed from chapters away. You keep turning pages anyway.