Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir Officially a 2021 book, I finished this over New Year’s weekend. It was my 53rd book of 2021, just getting me over book-a-week pace for those 12 months. This treads similar territory to Weir’s excellent The Martian, again focused on a man who is stuck in space alone. This time, though, the stakes are…

Only about six weeks behind on these, no big deal. If you got a gift card for Christmas maybe you’ll find something in here to use it on. The Last Tourist – Olen Steinhauer My latest entry from a recent list of best espionage novels. I knew this came from a series, but it got tremendous reviews so I figured…

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr When you win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as Doerr did for his wonderful All The Light That We Cannot See, it can be a bitch to follow it up. So why not build a story around five main characters who occupy 700 years of time? If nothing else, the sheer scope of the…

Good grief am I behind on these. That makes total sense, though, because my reading pace has slowed to a level not seen in years. I’ve finished just one book in the past four weeks. I went nearly three weeks without starting my next reading project. Normally I break out in hives if I don’t immediately start a new book.…

After a six-week-ish lull, my pace of knocking out books has picked back up. I’ll likely finish another book later today, but wanted to go ahead and get this out. Missionaries – Phil Klay Klay’s second work about modern warfare is his first true novel; Redeployment was a series of short stories based loosely on his service as a Marine…

My goodness, I am so far behind in sharing my recent completed reads. I imagine a few of these will be crappier than normal since I’ve put them off so long. A Spy In The Struggle – Aya de León I’ve been working through a list of good, recent espionage novels that this and the next book both were on.…

I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (Except When I Hate It) – Brian Boone Between both switching to the smaller, satellite Indy library near our house from the larger Carmel library and Covid, I don’t just go wonder the library stacks very often, surprising myself with books that speak to me as I pass them. That is how I found this…

The Alice Network – Kate Quinn A friend gave me this book awhile back, but I left it in my bookshelf for months before finally cracking it open. When I did, S told me she had read it on one of our vacations and loved it. We don’t read a lot of the same books, so I was both excited…

We have a house full of guests this week. My brother-in-law and his family from Boston are staying with us. So far that has meant lots of pool and play time as we’ve dodged the daily thunderstorms. It’s also C’s first real week of summer after wrapping summer school up last week. In a few hours I’m going to go…

My reading pace slacked off significantly over the past month. I only finished three books in May, and none of them should have taken more than a couple of days. Because of that, the first two books in this entry don’t get very good recaps as it has been too long since I finished them to write anything terribly coherent…