I have started 2024 on a huge reading run; I finished my seventh book of the year early this morning. It helps that I’ve been sick the past couple days and unable to sleep, so I’ve stayed up deep into the night knocking out the final book in this list. Said illness and lack of sleep will also push my sports notes entry to Tuesday this week. Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel I read, and loved, Mandel’s Station Eleven nearly nine years ago. Then I watched, and also loved, the seres based on it exactly two years…

Julia – Sandra Newman My first book of the year was a real uplifter! Officially sanctioned by the estate of George Orwell, it is labeled as a re-telling of his classic 1984. Newman flips the script, and instead of focusing on Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, she uses Smith’s lover, Julia, to explore Oceania. It’s been a decade or so since I last re-read 1984. As I processed Julia I wished I had done another review of the original just to better compare the books. Julia stands up on its own, but I think having a fresher memory of Orwell’s work…

Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man – Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer Each December, as I listen to a shitload of Bing Crosby music, I think, “I should learn more about his life.” I picked up a little of the general, collective pop-cultural memories of him as a kid. But I was six when he died and that was all basically background noise. This year I finally looked into his biographic options. Our library has two massive volumes of a not-yet-complete biography. I had no time for that. Instead I chose this, which came out in 1981, and, I would…

Please Report Your Bug Here – Josh Riedel This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too. This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company. One problem: an employee…

The Kennedy Men – Laurence Leamer After about a month of reading, split into sections, I knocked out my Big Book for the fall. A neighbor passed this to me over the summer. We were sitting on the porch having some drinks and somehow books or the Kennedys or something along those lines came up and she mentioned she had read this book and loved it. She offered it to me. I’m not one to turn down a book so I happily accepted. I was in the midst of a run of reserved library books coming in, so I let…

Tales from the Torrid Zone – Alexander Frater I mentioned in my last entry that I was taking on a rather long book that seemed like it might be a chore to get through. With that in mind, I decided that since it is divided into three parts, I would take a break after each section and squeeze in another book. This was my choice for break number one. Frater was the son of a Presbyterian minister who was based in the Pacific. He was born in the then New Hebrides islands in 1937, which eventually became the country of…

I just started a book that is probably going to take me a few weeks to get through. Seems like a good moment to clear out the queue so I don’t forget about these two. We Cast a Shadow – Maurice Carlos Ruffin Writers have been using the “how far would you go to protect your child” trope for ages. Many of us can relate to it in a strongly emotional way, so it often works. Here Maurice Carlos Ruffin takes that idea and places it in a near-future world where things are, to put it mildly, not good for…

I’m not sure why but I’ve struggled to put together blurbs for my most recent books. I’ll bash away for a paragraph or two then realize I’m not really sharing anything interesting other than a basic summation of the plot and give up. After three false starts I’m officially throwing in the towel and offering the briefest of notes about these books and hope that by my next post I’ve shaken this mini-writer’s block. Fates and Furies – Lauren Groff The story of a marriage told in two halves, from two perspectives. The first half is about the husband’s upbringing,…

Rememberings – Sinéad O’Connor After O’Connor’s death, there were many references to her autobiography, most of which came with the comment that it was a fantastic read. Those recommendations were right on. This is one of the best musician autobiographies I’ve ever read. It’s frank, funny, and frightening although also incomplete. O’Connor admits that a long stretch of her life after that tumultuous period in 1990–91 is lost to her. Which is a shame, because she is often shockingly honest about other parts of her life, and it would have been fascinating to read how she dealt with the years…

I’ve been on a decent reading run. A few blurbs about my most recent completions. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Quentin Tarantino This has been sitting in my cabinet for something like two years. I’m glad I finally got to it. This is not a straight novelization of the movie, but rather an expansion on its base. Lots of weird tangents about the history of Hollywood. Lots of backstory about the characters in the movie. And very little overlap with the actual story (as far as I can recall). In fact, the biggest scene in the movie is…