A busy start to a new year of reading. Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man – Emmanuel Acho These are a series of essays by Acho, a former NFL player and currently a talking head on Fox Sports, to help white folks understand people of color a little better. It is light and breezy, at times almost too light and…

In my final piece of 2020 business, here are the last three books I read for the year. These put my total at 59 books for the calendar year. I know this sounds dumb, but I was disappointed with that number. I’ve read that many books in a normal year. Surely in a pandemic year I should have knocked out…

Pretty good run of books. Lucky Supreme – Jeff Johnson The trick to writing a good crime novel, when approximately eight billion of them have been written, is to find a new angle and/or place the story in an unusual situation. Johnson did that quite well with this book. Darby Holland owns a tattoo parlor in Portland. He’s kind of…

The Wolf Wants In – Laura McHugh I saw this book described as being for fans of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and/or season three of True Detective. I loved Sharp Objects; I’ve never watched True Detective but have always heard good things. That was enough to get me to pick this up. It also help that someone I used to…

Nothing much going on today. Might as well share my most recent reads. A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson My master reading list isn’t complete; I didn’t really start digitizing it until the mid-to-late 2000s, so a lot of books I read in the first decade of this century aren’t accounted for.[1] So I know I’ve read…

I rediscovered my reading mojo over the past few weeks. It helped that I found a book I had been trying to locate for a year or more, and then two other great reads on top of that. Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever – Geoff EdgersFirst is the book I’ve been trying…

My reading pace has fallen way off over the past month. I tried to start a book I was very much looking forward to reading but couldn’t focus and gave up. That lack of focus is most of the problem. Where I’m usually itchy and nervous if I’m not reading in my free time, I currently lack the motivation or…

Three highly lauded books have kept me busy the past couple weeks. Disappearing Earth – Julia Phillips The last part of a book is so important to how readers feel about the entire story. This is an example of a book that was elevated by a nearly perfect ending. It begins with the disappearance of two young sisters from Petropavlosk,…

I’ve accumulated five books that require discussion. I’ll try to make this quick, but you know me, so strap in. *The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever* – Mark Frost I knew nothing about this book or the event it covered until I heard a discussion of it on a podcast. The focus is the 1956 match…

Death in Her Hands – Otessa MoshfeghI read Moshfegh’s Eileen a few years back. After I started this one I had to go back and read my summary of it to recall that it was an odd little book. This one was odd, too. It is the story of a Vesta Gul, a widowed, 80-something woman who lives in an…