The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, a damn fine novel set in the Jewish and Black (mostly) neighborhood of Pottstown, PA, around a century ago. Pretty good size cast of characters, but James McBride makes it pretty easy to keep straight who is who and who has done what.
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail - Jason De León An anthropologist chronicles the journeys of people who cross the border in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. Well worth reading.
Legion, a follow up novel that Willam Peter Blatty wrote as a sort of sequel to The Exorcist, though this is a bit more of a police procedural that has horror elements rather than a straight up horror novel. Not bad, and the main character, Kinderman (a homicide detective who had appearances in The Exorcist that mostly served to slow the pace down) is a bit less irritating in this book than in the first.
A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt. It's a play that inspired a film, which I saw many years ago. It's a tale of St. Thomas More and his adventures under Henry VIII. It's not a long play. Should be an interesting read.
Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice - Lorraine K Bannai Biography of Fred Korematsu, who challenged Executive Order 9066 and lost in one of the one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. Forty years later, the District Court vacated his conviction when his attorneys showed that the Government had withheld evidence contradicting the military necessity for the Executive Order.
The Three-Cornered War by Megan Kate Nelson. This history book is subtitled: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. This book is up my alley. Nelson focuses on individuals on the three sides. Should be fun.
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.] I haven't been active in this thread in 2025. Reading has been an odd experience for me this year. The weekend following New Year's, we learned our daughter had been raped repeatedly in her home and we ended up in the hospital and meeting with police and prosecutors and advocates, and trying to help our daughter through it all. And us too; my wife and I leanes on each other through some dark days. I started a lot of books that I abandoned when a female character had something terrible happen to them. And sometimes not that terrible, but any amount of violence and I was done. Couldn't do it. Even hazing or bias or meanness. I set aside a bunch of books. It isn't like I loved those sorts of plot points before but I could recognize them as part of a larger story and that it would all work out. I couldn't get there. Months later and we have made it through the worst of it. Our daughter is a bad ass. It was damn rough; it isn't all gone of course but we are closer to normal. And so is my reading, so I will pop in here again to share my takes on my books. I have kept up visiting to see what you're reading, which was a welcome respite.
Oh, Man. That’s brutal. That happened to my niece about three years ago. She and my brother are about as good as can be expected now, but it’s an ongoing struggle. The bad-assness of my niece has been crucial to their healing, that’s for sure (along with my brother and her younger sister being there for her when being a bad-ass was a bit too hard for whatever reason).
Oh, man, I am so sorry to hear that. As horrible as these situations are, she is fortunate to have you and your wife for support. Please take care of her, take care of your spouse and, please, do not forget to also take care of yourself. Best thoughts as you all recover. And she will recover. It will be difficult but it can and does get better. I am encouraged to read that the worst is over for her.
I have tears in my eyes as I read this. I know there's nothing I can say that can mean anything but just know that I am just so terribly sorry to hear this.
North Woods by Daniel Mason. This novel is a tale of two lovers who leave a Puritan colony in Massachusetts and the adventures that ensue and the people that they meet. Seems like a literary work. This book was voted one of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by the New York Times Book Review. The back cover describes the book as magisterial, which Ray Hudson would appreciate. Looks like an interesting read.
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac “In Berkeley I was living with Alvah Goldbrook [Allen Ginsberg] in his little rose-covered cottage in the backyard of a bigger house on Milvia Street.” The little cottage is no longer there. My father's house is a few blocks away. I knew Ginsberg had lived there but, though I have read this novel at least twice before, I did not notice until this read that Kerouac lived there too.
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, a damn fine book by Clay Risen that chronicles the second red scare of the 20th century (post WWII through the late 50s). Made me think that our current president is basically a more buffoonish version of Joseph McCarthy who I know see as an archetypal American figure that Sinclair Lewis chronicled in his novels, esp. Babbitt. I need to reread Lewis for the first time since the 70s in order to confirm this thesis. Also posted in the P&CE book recommendation thread for obvious reasons (i.e., it's pretty good).
The Likeness - Tana French Undercover Dublin garda detective investigates a murder. Good plot, but suspension of disbelief required.
Haven't read any of Tara French's novels but I did watch the Dublin Murders series based on a couple of her early novels. It was okay, but not great.
As the cover says (and the still image from the movie shows) this novel was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. There are significant differences and I'm not sure I'm glad that I saw the movie before reading the book--I don't think it really matters. Really weird, unsettling, but also weirdly enjoyable to read. A friend lent it to me, and I'm tempted to buy my own copy for future re-reading.
King's latter day crime-writing has consistently been quite entertaining. The eponymous protagonist is a Marine Corps veteran sniper turned contract killer who agrees to One Final Job, that job going about as well as Final Jobs usually go in fiction writing (in any medium).
The Puma’s Claw – Simon Clark 1957 first ascent of Pumasillo, an (almost) 6000 meter mountain in Peru. Interesting to me because I have seen this mountain (i) from Machu Picchu, (ii) from the plane flight from Lima to Cusco, and (iii) from the route on a trekking trip to visit Inca sites at Choquequirao, Ñusta Hispana, and Vitcos.
The Book of Genesis: A Biography, one of the better books in the Princeton University Press "Lives of the Great Religious Books" that I've ready by Ronald Hendel. The chapter on the interaction between the Hebrews and the Greeks was pretty interesting, that the role that interpretations of Genesis played in the Abolitionist movements in the 19th Century, especially in the thinking (and debating) of Abraham Lincoln (who used a Biblically based argument that the Bible does in fact include slavery, but the slaves in the Bible are people that we would consider white, therefore if we're going to have slavery, white people should be included: it's in the Bible. His opponent Douglass pretty much quit using the Bible to defend slavery after Lincoln handed him his ass in that debate