Tag: books (Page 6 of 25)

After finishing nine books in July I didn’t finish my first August book until the 15th. And then I finished two more books in just over a week. I think I’m doing just fine.

After the Fall – Ben Rhodes
The latest book by former Obama staffer Rhodes, this one is about the current state of the world, how we got here, and where we could be headed. It’s not an uplifting book, nor one that will give you reason to be hopeful that things are going to get better.

Rhodes uses the examples of Hungary, Russia, China, and then the US to show how right wing, nationalistic, authoritarianism has begun to replace traditional liberal democracy across the world. He argues that this wave is largely the result of four major events and how the US reacted to each one: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the 9/11/01 attacks, the 2007 economic meltdown, and the election of Obama in November 2008.

The fall of the Wall left the US as the sole remaining superpower. We acted as though because we had “won” the Cold War, everyone would get on the same page as us and the world would turn into one big, happy family all with the same ideals, systems of government, and goals. That created resentment most notably in Russia, and led to the rise of Putin. The Sept 11 attacks began our epic of Forever Wars that cost the US any moral high ground when other countries made advances on independent nations. The 2007 financial crisis spooked the entire world, and gave credibility to those who thought the American economic model was flawed and hopelessly unfair. Finally, the election of Obama galvanized the far right in the US, moving them from the fringe to control of the Republican Party, upsetting the decades-old balance of power in America, and leading us both to the election of our disgraced former president and the emergence of white, christian nationalism as the primary ideology of the American right.

Yuck.

I’m sure any conservatives that are able to read this with even half an open mind will dismiss Rhodes’ arguments quickly. They will probably call him an American-hating liberal and move on.

However, even if you disagree with his conclusions I think there’s a very important point within his arguments: all political decisions, regardless of who makes them, come with long-term consequences that often get ignored because of short-term political benefits. It is difficult for elected officials to think beyond the next election when forming policy, let alone 10–15–20 years down the road. Presidents Bush and Clinton weren’t thinking about how Boris Yeltsin’s corruption would unleash a system of oligarchs, create a wildly unfair new economy, and give a large swath of the Russian population the impression that the US was gloating about our Cold War win rather than guiding them into the world of liberal democracies. Both presidents were both focused on taking credit for the end of the Evil Empire and translating the Peace Dividend into a redistribution of the federal budget away from defense.

Books like this often come with a closing chapter on how we can divert the train before it crashes. Rhodes has little sunny optimism to balance his assessment of the world. Unfortunately, I think that’s the proper final judgement of where we are at. When the party that has rigged the American electoral system to give them a measure of power out-of-proportion with the number of votes they receive, and that party has embraced despots like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, it’s hard to believe that we are either going to help these countries get through their own cycles of authoritarian leadership, let alone avoid one of our own.

Razorblade Tears – SA Cosby
My brother-in-books Sir David suggested Cosby’s work to me. In this novel, two men from very different backgrounds join forces to investigate the deaths of their sons, who were a married couple.

Ike Randolph is an ex-con who, after spending some time in prison, has carved out a new life as a legitimate business owner. Buddy Lee is a slightly less-accomplished criminal, but still lived that life and remains on the fringes of society as his alcoholism prevents him from ever getting on the straight and narrow path. Ike is Black, Buddy white. Neither accepted their son’s sexual orientation while they were alive, and struggle to come to grips with the ramifications of that after their deaths.

Their journey to find the killers of their sons – the police have no leads and have let the case go cold – also turns into a journey of discovery, as Ike and Buddy learn about each other, about parts of society they knew nothing about, and begin to open their eyes to different worlds.

This book is very violent, getting close to Charlie Huston territory. The villains are perfectly hatable. You pretty much know where the story is headed and how it will end. It is a satisfying journey that shouldn’t take too long, making for a solid summer read.

Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography – Laurie Woolever
This, in many ways, serves as a companion piece to the Road Runner film, as many of the same people are interviewed. It evokes pretty much the same mix of emotions as the movie.

July was one of my better reading months in recent memory. Nine books finished, and all were legit books. No graphic novels, manuals, photography collections, etc. mixed in. Here are some brief synopses.

Phil – Alan Shipnuck
The book that shook up the golf world when an excerpt was released earlier this year detailing Phil Mickleson’s thoughts about the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour, a tour he is now getting paid somewhere in the range of $200 million to play shitty golf on.

Mickelson is a complex dude – like most people in the public eye – and Shipnuck does a nice job laying out as many aspects of Phil’s character as possible. I’ve always thought Phil was a phony douche, a smart guy who thinks he’s a lot smarter than just smart. Much of that is confirmed in this book, but it is good to see he balances that with some genuine acts of kindness and sharing of his wealth. As one unnamed golfer described him in the book, “Yes, he’s a phony. But he’s a sincere phony.” Which is a super funny yet ideal label to slap onto Mickelson.

City on Fire – Don Winslow
The opening book of Winslow’s next crime series. It begins as a long era of peace between the Italian and Irish crime families of Providence, Rhode Island is shattered by a careless act of drunken stupidity. Once the peace is destroyed, there is no fixing it. And it seems to be moving to the west coast for the next volume.

Winslow takes a very different tack from his Mexican drug cartel novels. Those are dense, thick works that take awhile to get through. This book was written in a much breezier manner, more in the language that the wise guys at the center of the story would use. Which means I knocked it out in about 36 hours.

Six Bad Things – Charlie Huston
You may recall about a year ago I found an old email from a fellow lover of books who suggested Huston’s work to me, and I then read his first novel, Caught Stealing, an insanely violent yet thoroughly enjoyable book.

This serves as the sequel to Caught Stealing, with Henry Thompson living in anonymity on Mexico after escaping the many criminal forces in New York that attempted to kill him. He is discovered and a new series of slaughter is on as he attempts to secure his money and protect his family.

Not as compelling as Caught Stealing but a solid book for warm summer days.

How Lucky – Will Leitch
I’ve read tons of Leitch’s online/magazine work over the years, going way back to when he started Deadspin in the early 2000s. But this is the first time I’ve read a work of his fiction.

Here he writes about Daniel, a man with spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that slowly kills its victims. Daniel does social media relations for a small regional airline from his home in Athens, GA. He survives thanks to the help of some caretakers and his best friend. He cruises around town in a mechanized wheelchair, and communicates by using his one functioning hand to type into an iPad or computer. Every day is a battle to keep his body from shutting down.

One morning he sees a UGA student get abducted in front of his home. But because of his disability, the police don’t take him seriously. He manages to strike up a relationship with the kidnapper online, and their interaction eventually becomes violent.

The story is a little creepy but never terribly suspenseful. I found it to be more about Daniel and his disease than any of the plot elements. Which isn’t a bad thing when you’re telling the story of someone as remarkable as Daniel.

We Had to Remove This Post – Hanna Bervoets
A very slim novel based on Bervoets’ research about the stress that people who serve as content moderators for online forums and social media platforms face. When you watch violent, racist, or conspiracy laden content for 12 hours each day, you are bound to feel some effects. Here it turns people into employees who drink and use drugs on their break, spend every evening getting smashed at a local bar, and see their relationships torn apart.

I didn’t feel there was much weight to the book, or that any arguments that Bervoets was trying to make were very compelling. The main characters all had plenty of trauma before they went to work for her mythical social media company. Did what they looked at each day make those traumas worse? Or just prevent them from setting them aside and moving on? Or were they drawn to such work because of their existing issues? There’s no doubt these are terrible jobs with horrific effects on the people who do them. I didn’t walk away from the book thinking the job was responsible for

Depth Charge – Jason Heaton
I really wanted to like this book. Heaton is the co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, The Grey Nato. His cohost and several guests have talked up this since he released it earlier this year. Sadly, while a decent effort at a first novel, it needed another round of polishing and editing to make it work better.

The story, about an underwater archaeologist who discovers an effort to recover a nuclear weapon lost when a ship was sunk off Sri Lanka during World War II, has promise.

But Heaton’s language is a bit stiff. At times he overwrites simple conversations. I found the big moment of conflict had a rather obvious and much easier solution. Sure that would have denied Heaton his climactic battle but I also sat there thinking “This wouldn’t have been necessary if the guy had just done…”

The Committed – Viet Thanh Nguyen
I read, and loved, Nguyen’s The Sympathizer in 2015. His sequel did not quite meet the original’s standard.

The Committed picks up a few years after The Sympathizer, with the main character living in Paris in the early 1980s, and attempting to start a new life in the Vietnamese ex-pat community. Once again he must play the different factions of the community off of each other to maintain his safety. He falls in with criminals, corrupt French politicians, and must hide his work for the Communists from his best friend, an ardent anti-Communist.

The story is rich and complex, but as it is less moored to real events, it lost some of the magic that made The Sympathizer such an enjoyable read.

The Plot – Jean Hanff Korelitz
A buzz book from last year, this novel wades into the world of meta fiction. It does a pretty good job.

Jacob is a once-promising writer who learns that a former student has died without ever publishing a brilliant story he had worked on while they were at a writing workshop together. The student’s story featured a unique plot that he believed could not miss. Jacob takes the bones of that story, writes his own novel based upon it, and becomes the hottest writer in the world. Soon, though, someone is harassing him for stealing the plot.

Korelitz lays out the story in two tracks, one focused on Jacob and his life, the other sharing pages of Jacob’s novel. The two tracks, of course, come together, each with big twists. Both are are supposed to be big shockers. I would say the double fictional one is, but that lessens the impact from the single fictional one (If that makes any sense).

The Plot is a fun read, perfect for summer, but falls just short of matching the hype it arrived with.

The Lords of Easy Money – Christopher Leonard
I don’t know shit about economics. I should put that out front. Despite that ignorance, I have some theories, thoughts, and concerns about our economy, capitalism in general, and how our government allots its resources in keeping the economy healthy. I don’t know if they hold up to scrutiny from anyone who actually knows a little about economics, but thoughts I have.

I heard Christopher Leonard discuss his latest book on No Laying Up’s The Trap Draw podcast. Leonard is from Kansas City, one of people he builds this book around is from Kansas City, and his general topic was the state of our economy and his fears the Federal Reserve has greatly overstepped its role over the past decade. Throw those all together and I was very interested to read this.

I was expecting a fairly dry book that was difficult to get through. There were plenty of times when the econ jargon got laid down so thick that it was hard to keep up. But Leonard does a fantastic job breaking down complex concepts into more easily understood examples. It’s my stupid brain’s fault I can’t keep them all straight.

His central argument in that the Fed, since the 2008 housing market collapse, has transitioned from a body that was supposed to quietly guide the economy with an eye on the long term, to a much more active agency more concerned with the short term at the expense of widening the prosperity gap by constantly securing the interests of the richest people and corporations in the country. The Fed has created trillions of dollars out of thin air to shore up nearly every part of the financial system over the past 14 years. It has made it nearly impossible for large banks, massive investment firms, and hedge funds to be punished for making bad financial decisions. They know no matter how riskily they behave, if their bets fail, the Fed will be there with billions of dollars to bail them out.

But if you start talking about universal healthcare, forgiving college debt, establishing a living wage, or even simply increasing the minimum wage – all programs that would cost much less and more directly affect the lives of many more Americans – cries of “SOCIALISM!!!” erupt and the plans get torpedoed before they ever come to vote.

Sorry, I’m inserting my opinions into Leonard’s.

Bottom line, our economy is probably fucked. The Fed has done a lot to try to un-fuck it, but in the process have only helped the richest people/entities and created an unsustainable new system that will eventually fuck everyone.

I should read a book about climate change next to improve my mood.

Midnight in Siberia – David Greene
Interesting timing on reading this. Greene is a former NPR reporter who was the network’s Moscow bureau chief in the early 2010s. Late in his tenure, he took the Trans-Siberian Railway 6000 miles across Russia. In 2014, he returned to take the same journey and write about it.

It is a fascinating read because of where Russia was in 2014 and where it is now. In 2014 the country seemed to be growing impatient with Vladimir Putin’s leadership, and he was countering that by making his first encroachments into Ukraine. Of course today he is fighting a full-scale war in Ukraine and has crushed all his internal opposition.

In 2014 Greene was cautiously optimistic that Russians wanted something closer to western democracy and Putin’s powers would continue to wane. He missed on that, big time.

The book reads like a series of NPR vignettes rather than a deep look into the psyches of Russians or the history of the country. Because of that I found it a bit lacking in context and depth, Greene’s conclusions are often hasty so he can move on to the next subject.

A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
I’ve read several of Bryson’s books, but somehow never read this one, the mid–90s accounting of his attempt to walk the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. An old college buddy with some serious issues joins him, and their partnership is not the smoothest. Bryson’s stories of his actual travels can be a little snooty at times; I was disappointed at how often he made fun of the people he encountered. But the little historical sections each chapter begins with were typically well-researched and written.

The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
Summerwater – Sarah Moss
Two small books about summer. Both are about the routines and boredom that come with summer.

In Jansson’s book, first published in 1972, there are two main characters: a young girl and her grandmother, living on an island in the Gulf of Finland where their family summers. The girl’s mother has recently died and she is in a fragile emotional state because of this. Her father, in his own battles with grief, isolates himself in his fishing at sea, leaving the girl alone with her grandmother. The book is a series of vignettes about some of the most mundane aspects of their lives and there’s no real momentum to them that pushes the story forward. But if you ever had a boring summer somewhere that was isolated, you will connect with some of these small stories.

Moss’ book, on the other hand, is much easier to connect with. She places it in a Scottish vacation area that is filled with small cabins. Each chapter gets into the head of one of the various people spending a dreary, rainy day in one of the cabins. Kids angry they have been forced to travel with their parents, an elderly couple who are set in their routines and don’t like them upset, a soon-to-be-married couple who spend most of the day having sex but thinking very different things while doing it, a woman who takes long runs every morning that are her only escape from motherhood/marriage, and so on. Each of them is somehow disappointed with their lives, and sitting in an isolated cabin where the rain doesn’t end just focuses those frustrations rather than eases them.

All these people see each other, but never really interact. And one cabin is filled with people who are a little different than the rest, and become the focus of everyone else’s anger. Moss brings all that together in the final, shocking chapter. It seemed a little over-the-top, but given how absolutely bonkers the world is right now, maybe her climax makes perfect sense.

Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution – Elie Mystal
“Our Constitution is not good.”

Thus begins a book that should infuriate anyone who reads it. Conservatives brave enough to take it on will be enraged by Mystal’s destruction of our most sacred document. Liberals will be maddened by how our entire republic was built upon a system designed to exclude and exploit anyone who wasn’t a wealthy, white, male landowner, and how each time we’ve tried to restructure the Constitution so that it truly speaks for all Americans, those efforts have constantly been subverted, ignored, or reversed by conservatives.

I’ve long thought it ludicrous at how many Americans deify the Founding Fathers, forgetting they weren’t one or two people but rather a large, ungainly mob who argued bitterly about how to design our national government. They forget the Founders were motivated more by self-interest and maintaining their places in society than truly establishing a free and egalitarian union. Kings were bad, yes, but that didn’t mean the common rabble should have a say in how they were governed. And, most of all, people forget that these were fucking human beings, not god-like creatures. They made mistakes. They avoided some pretty big issues in order to get a final document approved. They could never have anticipated how society would change over the next (nearly) 250 years. But a small, yet highly vocal and influential, segment of our political commentariat would have you believe those men were faultless and their judgements can never be questioned.

With that being my point of view, yes, I enjoyed this book, even if I’m not a Black Guy.

Load the Wagon – The Athletic
Not sure if you heard the news, but Kansas won the NCAA men’s basketball national championship in April. In fact, they did so on the strength of the biggest comeback in championship game history. Pretty cool!

This is a collection of The Athletic’s pieces about the Jayhawks from the entire season, going back to last September’s season preview. Most of the pieces are CJ Moore’s, but a couple of the other Athletic college hoops writers dropped in for their own pieces in late March/early April. Good stuff, even if I had read every piece at least once when they were initially published.

The White Girl – Tony Birch
A gorgeous novel about something I knew very little about: how the Aboriginal people of Australia were treated in the 20th Century.

At the center of Birch’s story is an Aboriginal grandmother, Odette, and her mixed-race granddaughter, Sissy, in 1950s rural Australia. Odette’s daughter disappeared shortly after Sissy was born and aside from the occasional letter, has made no contact with her mother or daughter since. Sissy’s lighter skin makes her a target for various government agencies who look to “protect” children like her by removing them from their home environments. A particularly nasty local sheriff with a God complex becomes especially interested in their affairs.

Also a threat is a local boy who sees Sissy as a target for his sexual desires since she lacks basic rights under the laws of the time.

Between the pressures felt from the sheriff and the sexual predator, and a major health issue for Odette, the duo have to sneak away from their home village and into the city hoping for a safer life. Along the way they meet an Aboriginal man who understands how to navigate the system along with several sympathetic white, government officials who assist them to land on their feet.

Birch paints an unflinching portrait of his homeland’s treatment of its native people. The ending is a little too clean and Spielberg-ian, at least for me, but that doesn’t negate the overall effect this book should have on any reader.

:07 Seconds or Less – Jack McCallum
The “season inside” schtick is one of the most satisfying sports book tropes available to writers. A reporter embeds with an athlete, team, or even entire sport for a year and relates the inside dope on their experiences after-the-fact. Unless the subject is super boring, the result is usually a compelling read.

I’ve had this book on my list since it came out back in 2006. I think I didn’t get to it because our old library didn’t have a copy. I had kept it tucked deep into my Amazon wish list that whole time but was never in the mood to buy it. Then I read this piece a few weeks back, which refreshed my memory of its existence. I looked and – behold! – the Indy library carries it.

Jack McCallum was for years Sports Illustrated’s primary NBA writer. During the 2005–06 season, he embedded with the Phoenix Suns, who were challenging the NBA orthodoxy of the moment by playing super fast and shooting tons of 3’s. The style resulted in back-to-back conference finals appearances in ’05 and ’06.

Although McCallum spent most of the season with the Suns, the book focuses on the 40-ish days they were alive in the Western Conference playoffs, ultimately losing the Dallas in six games. He does make little runs back into key moments of the regular season to provide background on players or developments that became important in the playoffs.

McCallum earned near-complete access to the Suns, both within the locker room and the coaches’ rooms, and was blessed by a coaching staff that were completely comfortable sharing with him. That makes for a pretty great book, as little of his words are speculation based on things he saw from, say, press row informed by later discussions. He was there when the coaches were struggling to decide how to defend Kobe Bryant or how to handle the moods of Shawn Marion or the minutes of a hobbled Steve Nash.

These insider sports books can have a limited shelf life, as players cycle through their careers and styles change. But as the current NBA owes a great debt to the choices Mike D’Antoni and his staff made over 15 years ago, this book feels like a super useful guide into how the 3-pointer happy league of today came to be.

Ocean State – Stewart O’Nan
Once again O’Nan has written a novel that is both beautiful and frightening. He has such a gift for creating characters that are both simply presented yet rich in detail and easy to relate to. Every time I read one of his books, I’m left in awe at the ease with which he accomplishes this.

That’s the beautiful part. The frightening part is this novel is, mostly, centered on teenage girls, the horrible things they can do to each other, and how those behaviors can have effects that linger into adulthood. Which is deeply unsettling to read as the father of three teenage girls. In this case it isn’t just tormenting and bullying, but goes much, much further than that. Any parent who reads this should have some uncomfortable moments as they consider their kids getting into a situation like the ones O’Nan puts his characters into.

He also has a gift for getting to the point quickly and keeping his stories relatively short. If you really wanted to, you could finish this in a day, but it isn’t some light, breezy read. It will leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads it.

Good grief, I’ve gotten bad about these again. Didn’t I say I was going to start posting after I finished each book to keep from getting so far behind? Or did I just think it? Regardless, I clearly failed to follow up. I guess that will be my goal for the summer, when I expect my reading pace to quicken. Some blurbs on my most recent crop of books.

The Nineties – Chuck Klosterman
I really liked this, which surprised me a bit. I’ve been hot and cold on Klosterman for years, but here he was locked into his style that I enjoy the most.

Obviously the book is about the 1990s. And while Klosterman is most famous for tackling pop culture, he takes a much wider view of that decade here. In fact the best chapters are the ones about politics. I watched the 1992 presidential campaign as close as any of my life, but he highlighted all kinds of aspects of that race I had totally forgotten about. For example, I forgot that Ross Perot was forcibly against the war to liberate Kuwait, called out the US military often, and was demonstrably in favor of equal rights for gay people. A Texas billionaire in 1992 might have been the most progressive person in the race on those issues!

Another of my favorite of Klosterman’s points was how our generation, which came of age during the 90s, has a unique perspective on society’s relationship with the phone. We remember what it was like to have to sit at home and wait on a call to come through on a landline. If we were expecting a really important call, we had to hope someone else in the house wasn’t tying up the line. And we were not able to screen calls, but instead had to answer any call that came into our home, braving telemarketers and batty old aunts in hopes someone we really wanted to speak with was on the line. Kids today have no idea what that was like with their caller ID and texting and direct messaging!

Devil House – John Darnielle
Darnielle is the lead singer of the Mountain Goats, but has been writing for years. I’ve heard his work is good but this is the first time I’ve read any of it.

He takes an interesting angle here: a successful true crime writer moves into a home that was the site of a bizarre and unsolved murder in the 1980s. As the author reconstructs the crime, he is confronted by the mother of a murder victim he wrote about in an earlier book. The encounter forces him to reevaluate his process and the work that he cranks out.

There were some very strange parts to the book, including a long section that took place sometime in old England – talking castles and shit – and printed in a nearly unreadable old English font. I’m not a big true crime reader, but this did make me wonder about the decisions authors in that genre make and how they affect the people they write about.

The New Rules of War – Sean McFate
I heard McFate on a podcast talking about the Russian war against Ukraine and enjoyed his perspective. So I checked out his most recent book. In it he argues that basically everything the US does in terms of preparing for war is wrong. We spend too much money on the wrong things, rely too much on our technological advantages, train and deploy our troops for the wrong kind of battles, don’t understand how the concept of war has changed, and, in sum, have set ourselves up for a military disaster in the near future.

His arguments are provocative. While I agree with many of them – do we really need to spend more on defense than all our biggest potential adversaries combined? – I think some others are a little nutty. And I can’t see any political will to make the changes he suggests, since those would drastically reduce the amount of spending we commit to major weapons systems. Something we, as a nation, are genetically predisposed to do.

It is also interesting that the Marines are attempting to do some of what McFate suggests, and have been getting major pushback from a lot of people for it. Who ever thought the Marines would be the most forward-thinking branch of our military?

Rethinking Fandom – Craig Calcaterra
I’ve been reading Calcaterra’s baseball writing for years. Even though I’ve barely watched any baseball this year, I still subscribe to his Cup of Coffee newsletter, which is essential morning reading. It helps that his politics are similar to mine and once he gets through the daily summaries of games, he often dives into things going on in the world that have nothing to do with baseball.

In this book he looks at all the ways modern sports screw the fan. Between exorbitant ticket/parking/concessions prices, massive public funding efforts to build stadiums and arenas, dishonesty from ownership in labor battles, tanking teams, restrictive television rules, franchises controlled by conglomerates that have wider business interests, how college sports are exploitative of athletes, and so on, sports have turned into an affair where winning and giving the fans an entertaining product is not always at the top of the organization’s goals.

He offers some strategies for surviving all this, most of which can be summed up as taking a step back from sports. You can still watch but you don’t have to spend 24/7 absorbing information about your favorite teams/sports. You can even be a fair-weather fan and only follow teams that are winning and entertaining to watch, since sports are supposed to be a fun diversion from the drudgery of real life.

I found that I’ve already implemented many of his suggestions. Well, KU basketball excepted. I still know what’s going on in most sports, check ESPN.com a few times a day, and have plenty of sports news included in my Twitter feed. But I watch a lot fewer games than I used to, rarely watch any pregame or summary shows, and have zero time for sports radio or the talking head shows on TV. I watch most sports pretty casually, finding a storyline I like in a given game and letting it carry me through the next couple hours before moving on. I track closely enough to be able to slide into conversations about what’s going on in the NBA playoffs or who the Colts should chase at quarterback, but I’m not as weighed down by sports information as I once was.

Calcaterra is an Ohio State alum and was once a massive Buckeyes football fan, his falls revolving around watching and reading about OSU football. But now rarely watches them and knows next-to-nothing about that is going on with the team. Despite the changes I’ve made in how I watch sports, I’m not quite ready to go all-in and get lukewarm about the Jayhawks. Let’s not get crazy.

I’ve been on a good reading stretch lately. Here are some blurbs.

The Mercenary – Paul Vidich
Vidich gets a lot of critical acclaim for his espionage novels. I wasn’t crazy about his first book I read, The Good Assassin. It was so noir-y that I felt no warmth towards or connection with any of the characters. Despite that, I decided to give this one a shot.

Taking place late in the Soviet era, just before Mikhail Gorbachev took over and began opening the country up, it focuses on the attempts by the CIA to exfiltrate a KGB contact, something they had never successfully done. To facilitate this, they bring in a retired agent who had defected from the Soviet Union, Alex Garin. Garin’s return to the USSR is rife with issues beyond his not-so-simple task of hustling a high-level KGB officer across the border, creating an ultra-tense setting for his mission.

This hews a little closer to standard spy fare. But there were still elements of the story I did not like. I think my experiments with Vidich’s oeuvre are complete.

The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music – Dave Grohl
I’ve had several people tell me I should read this. One friend even gave me a link to his copy of the audiobook. But I don’t do audiobooks so I bought the Kindle edition to read over spring break after the news that Taylor Hawkins had passed.

I’m not a huge Foo Fighters fan – I like them but don’t love them – but this was a fun book that I raced through. Grohl brushes over a lot of big moments and leaves out a few minor stories I was particularly interested in. I would, for example, have loved a few paragraphs on the brief period when he drummed for Pearl Jam when then PJ drummer Jack Irons was unable to.

The book doesn’t change anything I thought about Grohl before I read it. He still seems like a very decent and (mostly) unaffected dude. Through immense effort, some luck, and some tragedy he went from being an underage drummer in an obscure punk band to one of the biggest names in rock. And unlike a lot of famous folks, it doesn’t seem like he shit on too many people along the way.

The Backyard Adventurer – Beau Miles
My favorite YouTube adventurer wrote a book! This provides a lot more backstory on how Miles got to be how he is, how he comes up with his various projects, and then background beyond the content of his videos. It was interesting and entertaining, but unfortunately he writes exactly how he speaks, and I think that style translates better to audio than text. Still glad I was able to support his habits in some small way.

The Trees – Percival Everett
This is one of the more amazing books I’ve read recently. It is outrageously funny. It is infuriating. It feels awfully close to the truth of how our country continues to marginalize people of color.

A series of bizarre murders take place in rural Mississippi. Two Black Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents are sent in to take over for the local, white police. Soon a Black, female FBI agent joins them.

What starts out as a funny-yet-incisive story eventually gets pushed hard, hard, hard into the ridiculous. But that was Everett’s point, I think, to show the ridiculousness of our history race relations in this country.

There was one little sub-point that I loved. When a large FBI task force is put together, an ancient agent is brought in because he was the only active agent who had ever witnessed a lynching. After running through the agent’s history, and litany of problematic beliefs and statements, Everett writes that Clint Eastwood was working on a film about this agent’s life.

I HOWLED at that section.

How Civil Wars Start And How to Stop Them – Barbara F. Walter
Obviously a light-hearted, uplifting read.

Walter dives into the political science behind how most modern civil wars have begun. Sadly, by many measures, the United States is dangerously close to reaching the thresholds that countries like Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia hit when they descended into civil wars. The good news is our various constitutional guard rails have held steady. For now.

Damascus Station – David McCloskey
I believe this is my third espionage novel written by a former CIA employee in recent months. And it was, by far, the best of that bunch.

Set in, wait for it, Damascus, Syria, it is the story of an American CIA officer who recruits a member of the Syrian intelligence service and gets pulled into the truly bizarre world of the Syrian government. Oh, he’s an attractive man, she’s an attractive woman, and they become far more than agent and handler.

I think what set this book above the others like it I’ve read recently is that it seemed about 18% more believable. The whole romance angle gets done a lot in spy stories, but that really worked in this one. And perhaps because it took place in Syria, a country that we know little about, I bought into McCloskey’s description of its history, its current state, and its byzantine governmental hierarchy a little more. Oh, and the story was very good.

I still can’t quite say what it was that made this book stand out. But it did, and it one of my favorite spy reads of the past couple years.

Billy Summers – Stephen King
It’s amazing how King just keeps going. He’s 74 and continues to crank out novels. After a lull a decade or so back, his works have generally been pretty good recently. This one was a bit of a disappointment, though.

Billy Summers is a hitman who takes on one, last, very unusual assignment before he retires. The job involves spending anywhere from weeks to months setting himself up in a location waiting for conditions to align so he can make this hit. As he waits he is supposed to pose as an author working on a book. With nothing better to do, he decides to go ahead and pretend to be a writer and put the parts of his life that lead him to becoming a hitman down on (digital) paper. When the time arrives for the hit, there are complications, which give Summers two new missions.

What sets King’s best works apart are some strange magic that only he seems able to conjure. Sadly that magic is missing here. It feels like the bones of a good story that he just couldn’t get all the adornments adjusted correctly around. There are plenty of nice moments, even the obligatory references to another classic King work, but the book never reaches the heights of my favorites of his work.

The Roanoke Girls – Amy Engel
I believe this is the second time I’ve read a book written by someone that I know. I know Amy from way back, and was aware that she wrote a YA series and then moved into more adult works. A couple friends told me that this book was a really good read, but it was also very dark and not what I would likely expect from the author. I was reminded of it recently, with another heads-up that it is kind of twisted, and decided to track it down.

That warning was super true.

The story revolves around a family in a small Kansas town, and the multi-generational secret that dominates their existence. As I was warned, I picked up on the hints right away and knew what was coming. That didn’t make the slow revelation any less shocking.

Back when I used to think about writing some fiction, I always struggled with how to write about darker subjects. I wasn’t sure I would feel comfortable letting friends and family read something that was kind of fucked up, lest they think I was kind of fucked up. I think it’s great that Engel got over any qualms she had about chasing an interesting story at the risk of having people wonder where the hell she got that idea from. Oh, and it’s a really good story, too.

Anthem – Noah Hawley
Hawley can spin a story. Here he takes a little bit of everything going on in the world today and mixes it together: Covid, our former president, climate change, toxic discourse on social media, the Insurrection, and even Joe Rogan. He whips that up into the biggest possible mess. There is a total breakdown of society and what amounts to a second American Civil War. Then he throws in a very Stephen King angle: sending a bunch of kids on a quest in the midst of this. He even names one of his characters after one of King’s most famous characters. Hmmm…

It’s a hell of a story and keeps the reader turning the pages. Whether all of it makes sense or not is another discussion. But I was entertained.

Bloody January – Alan Parks
Damn, I read this two weeks too late!

This tale takes place in Glasgow in January 1973, as a series of murders take place and detective Harry McCoy takes lead on the investigation. McCoy isn’t the cleanest of cops, and his private life gets all intertwined with the search for truth. The story is bloody and dark.

How the Word Is Passed – Clint Smith
This is a difficult book to write about, for a couple reasons.

First, it is about the lasting effects of slavery on American society, and how we, as a nation, handle that history. That’s never easy to discuss.

Second, Smith has written one of the most beautiful non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I was constantly amazed at how gorgeous his language was, and the irony of that beauty being used to relate the most heinous part of our country’s history.

Smith travels to several different geographic locations to examine how the legacy of slavery is handled in each of them. Among stops in his travels are Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello; the Angola prison in Louisiana; Galveston, TX, where the holiday Juneteenth was first celebrated; New York City; and the island off the coast of Senegal that was a loading point for slave ships.

Smith reported this book before Covid hit, right in the midst of the last administration, when white supremacy was being encouraged from the highest office in the land. Some of the conversations he had are astounding. I can’t imagine being a Black man and having an open discussion with people who are celebrating the lives of Confederate soldiers. Hell, I can’t imagine having those conversations as a white man!

There were many points while reading that I would stop and stare out the window, thinking about what I had just read, forming thoughts about those passages. I should have written some of those down.

I do recall a couple of those thoughts.

First, there was the suggestion Smith made for why so many white people struggle to honestly look back at our country’s history of slavery. It is hard, he writes, to be told the history you grew up with was false. To realize you have to reevaluate your life, and the lives of your family members that came before you. You may have no connection with your great-great-great grandfather who was a slave owner, but you still don’t want to hear that he enslaved other humans and generations of your family probably thought that was fine. It’s just hard to get people to accept updated histories of any kind, whether they are directly affected or not.

Second was how the concept of freedom differs based on who you are and where you are from. For white Americans, freedom is largely about our relationship with the government. What can and can’t we do without being interfered with? Where can we travel? What can we say and believe? And so on. For all the heated rhetoric of modern politics, where some people suggest that being asked to pay taxes or wear a mask is tantamount to tyranny, white people are generally arguing about nuance.

Black people, on the other hand, view the concept very differently. To them freedom literally means the difference between being owned as property and living as free humans. Sure, slavery ended over 150 years ago, but because of how Black people have been marginalized since Emancipation, that truth remains strong within their community.

Unfortunately Smith does not offer us a clear path forward. He suggests that we will never get past slavery as long as broad swaths of the country – in all geographic regions – refuse to honestly address the impact slavery has had on our society.