The Cold Dish – Craig JohnsonThis is the time of year when I abandon my To Read list and seek out Best Summer Reads type lists online. One such list suggested this book, which was a nice spin on the detective procedural. Walt Longmire is a sheriff in a small town in Wyoming. He is in his 50s, widowed, and…

The Border – Don Winslow For an author, finishing a trilogy has to be difficult. Especially when you didn’t set out to write a three-book series to begin with. This is the final entry in Winslow’s excellent Power of the Dog series, in which he unfurls the epic story of the rise and fall of a Mexican drug empire and…

Say Nothing – Patrick Radden Keefe My brother-in-books Sir David and I often share recommendations with each other. I don’t know that he’s ever pushed a book as hard as he did this one. I think he got a little nervous he had oversold it, but this turned out to be a great recommendation. Keefe provides a thorough but quick…

Point B – Drew Magary God damnit, Magary has done it again! (I feel like he would like that opening line.) If you can’t immediately place the name, Magary is the all-around excellent writer responsible for things like his annual take down of the Williams Sonoma Christmas catalog, the best mailbag on the internet (once on Deadspin now on Vice),…

I worked my way through my stack of library books a few weeks ago, so it’s down to the Kindle and re-reading a few books I have around until the physical library opens again. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name – Vendela Vida With the transition to Kindle books, I’m finding recommendations in odd places. Someone on Twitter recommended…

Well, I did it. I finished my pile of books I checked out from the library last night. I have a couple books on my Kindle that I’ve purchased to get through the next week or so. After that I guess I’ll start checking out ebooks from the library, which I kind of hate to do after learning about how…

First off, in my last entry I mentioned that I had forgotten to include a book in my December updates. But I had also forgotten the book’s title, so I could not mention it at all. Fortunately the author of the book blurbed one of this entry’s books which jogged my memory. This is my official recognition that I read…

An Honorable Man – Paul Vidich I’m on a bit of a Cold War kick right now; I believe reading about Chernobyl kicked it off. This is the first of several Cold War espionage thrillers I’m working my way through. It takes place in Washington 1953, in the midst of the Korean War and as the McCarthy hearings are getting…

While reading one of these books, I had a memory of a similar book I had read recently. I looked into my Books Read list and could not find a match. I went back to reading, but the memory stuck with me. Soon I was checking again, and then looking through my Reader’s Notebook entries for the past few months,…