tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-386566332026-06-22T05:19:09.294-05:00A nineteen-year-old book blog offering book reviews and news about authors, publishers, bookstores, and libraries. Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.comBlogger3814125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-90066063503861055602026-06-20T12:10:23.690-05:002026-06-21T10:26:02.778-05:00

 The four books I finished up in the last couple of weeks were kind of hit and miss:Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - this one proved to be more difficult, and way less impressive, than I anticipated, as you can tell by the review I’ve already posted,Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - a re-read that I think was even more fun than the first time I read this classic,Animal

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-30873761818940292312026-06-17T14:26:49.647-05:002026-06-18T12:19:40.102-05:00

 Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-63389086150249345732026-06-15T11:20:02.423-05:002026-06-15T19:33:17.096-05:00

 Back when I was eleven years old, the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine was my first real exposure to time travel stories. I knew I wanted more, but time travel movies don’t come along every day, so I reluctantly turned to the movie’s source material, the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. That’s how a whole new fiction subgenre was introduced to me, and I’ve been a sucker for

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-11823440060598986402026-06-11T14:46:00.791-05:002026-06-11T14:46:00.792-05:00

 Lucy Mangan’s Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is Mangan's follow-up to 2018’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which covers the author’s childhood reading influences and experiences. Bookish picks up with Mangan’s teenage reading years and concludes in what the author calls her middle-age ones (she is 52). “If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-35101479687691689282026-06-09T06:30:00.000-05:002026-06-09T06:30:00.115-05:00

 Michael J. Fox was only 23 years old in 1985 when he pulled off one of the craziest Hollywood stunts of all time. For about three months, beginning on January 15, 1985, Fox worked simultaneously on two major projects: completing the third season of Family Ties during the day while shooting his scenes in the first Back to the Future movie at night. He managed this by working five days a week

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-45665288654992622482026-06-07T15:15:49.582-05:002026-06-07T15:18:41.554-05:00

 During the past two weeks (since I’ve done one of these “what I’m reading” posts), I’ve finished up four very different books:The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout’s latest literary novel,Future Boy - Michael J. Fox’s memoir about working simultaneously on the third season of Family Ties and the first Back to the Future movie,Bookish - Lucy Mangan’s account of her

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-30905939006205170952026-06-05T14:49:25.328-05:002026-06-05T14:49:25.328-05:00

 The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-73907712059057934372026-06-04T13:17:59.220-05:002026-06-04T13:17:59.220-05:00

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-28216387386964187662026-06-01T16:06:49.256-05:002026-06-01T16:06:49.257-05:00

I’m really not all that much into audiobooks these days, but I do still enjoy them anytime I’m driving alone for more than just a few minutes at a time. The extra focus that audiobooks demand keeps me more aware and alert than I otherwise would be by just listening to music while I drive. So I put Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar to good use last month. I chose an Albom book mainly because he is one

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-28102226472135886012026-05-30T13:02:46.750-05:002026-05-30T13:02:46.751-05:00

 “No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"But that’s

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-3992301846978344472026-05-29T00:21:16.639-05:002026-05-29T00:21:16.640-05:00

College Station, home to Texas A&M University, is only about 75 miles from my front door, so I enjoy driving up there every few months to see what might turn up in the city’s bookstores. Even though I ended up doing more selling (I hope) than buying this time around, I did come home with five additions to my home library. I’ve decided to begin selling off my collection of Civil War books,

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-29717752851568848972026-05-26T13:53:45.463-05:002026-05-26T13:53:45.463-05:00

 While I did finish two books last week, Godfall by Van Jensen and The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, it seems like I’ve been doing way more " book grazing” than I usually do. When I grow temporarily weary of a book, instead of just picking up another book I have already invested a lot of reading time into, I find myself reading the first chapters of  random books or maybe a short

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-58966107064545760862026-05-23T13:45:33.486-05:002026-05-23T13:45:33.486-05:00

 Where it comes to the things I like most about crime fiction, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, Sullivan writes the kind of methodical, steady paced police procedural that has become harder and harder to find in recent years because today's publishers seem to prefer publishing crime thrillers in which every other chapter ends with a

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-24799353290836542092026-05-18T14:18:41.620-05:002026-05-18T14:18:41.621-05:00

 I turned a lot of pages last week but ended up only actually finishing one book, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist. I really like the way that Sullivan develops his characters, especially Cross who suffers from Asperger Syndrome, and I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the DS Cross series soon. I’m over halfway through Godfall now, and I’m still trying to answer one of the

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-85239211349787801232026-05-16T20:43:00.289-05:002026-05-16T23:24:20.829-05:00

 Return to Sender is the twenty-first book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I’ve read every single one of them. I’ve also watched the entire Longmire television series, so you can definitely consider me a fan of Craig Johnson’s work, someone quite familiar with Walt and his surrounding cast of characters. But as much as I still look forward to the next Walt Longmire mystery,

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-39737585862623304182026-05-13T14:56:36.976-05:002026-06-04T20:23:42.219-05:00

 It’s strange to me how some books can stick in your mind so firmly that even after more than fifty years you still remember the very first time you became aware of their existence. Time and Again is one of those books for me. My wife and I were living in Houston in mid-1972 and had driven about 110 miles back to the two little towns we had been raised in so that we could visit our

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-80989793949469454932026-05-10T20:34:18.634-05:002026-05-11T13:48:27.194-05:00

 Reading four or five books at the same time often means finishing two or three of them within a day or two of each other, and that’s what happened to me last week. I finished Time and Again, Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and Return to Sender, book number 21 in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series all within a few days. And while I continue to read

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-40743398925005597302026-05-09T11:48:25.451-05:002026-05-10T08:43:16.742-05:00

 Buckeye is a multi-generational family saga following the evolution of  two small town Ohio families from the 1920s to the 1980s. The book’s central character is Cal Jenkins, a young man who is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Still dejected because he is physically ineligible for World War II military service, Cal marries Becky, a hometown girl who sometimes is

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-30097574103611537782026-05-04T14:50:04.426-05:002026-05-04T14:50:04.427-05:00

 I first read Elmer Kelton’s Stand Proud sometime back in the eighties,  and that was plenty long enough ago for this re-read to feel like I was reading it for the very first time. I remembered almost no details concerning the book’s plot, and had only a general memory of how much I enjoyed the story the first time around. It turns out that Stand Proud explores a theme that

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-55834421347662301612026-05-01T14:49:29.018-05:002026-05-01T14:49:29.018-05:00

 An American Outlaw is the first book in John Stonehouse’s popular series featuring US Marshal John Whicher. There are now eight books in the series, including one novella, with the latest novel Wolves of the Evening, having just been published in March 2026. This is my first exposure to the series so I don’t know how typical An American Outlaw is to the other seven books, but I’ve been

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-17880944442626328962026-04-30T13:26:35.400-05:002026-04-30T13:26:35.401-05:00

 I finished two of the five books I was reading last week (reviews to come eventually - I hope), and I made decent progress on two of the others. I finished my re-read of Elmer Kelton’s Texas novel, Stand Proud, along with listening to the rest of An American Outlaw, the John Stonehouse audiobook I started during my recent day trip to Beaumont. The Kelton book, I’m relieved to report held up

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-60944749365765469752026-04-27T19:24:53.428-05:002026-04-27T19:58:40.821-05:00

 Although this is just my second experience with a Haruki Murakami novel, I’ve learned that he is immensely popular in his home country of Japan. In its first week alone, one million copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage were printed - and by the end of its first month in publication, all but 15,000 of those books had been sold. And from what I’ve read, this is

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-43456471592131901472026-04-23T12:20:48.486-05:002026-04-23T12:20:48.487-05:00

 Although I have five books going this week, they are not the ones I expected I would be reading after just purchasing over a dozen new ones a a few days ago. Of course, my long term reading of Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain continues, but the other four that I’m reading were not in my immediate plans before…suddenly they were. I did abandon one last week that I had high hopes for, Rule of the

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-22586726370009566612026-04-21T13:20:00.000-05:002026-04-21T13:20:01.484-05:00

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a difficult book to review without inadvertently straying into spoiler territory almost immediately. It comes in at fewer than 130 pages in total, putting it firmly in novella territory, and elimination of spoilers from the conversation leaves little but generalities to talk about. The problem is not with the generalities themselves; they are all

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38656633.post-9229970449416911222026-04-19T12:32:00.001-05:002026-04-19T12:32:59.217-05:00

 I can’t vouch for the methodology behind the survey that generated this chart, but it pretty much reflects the numbers I’ve been seeing over the last few years from numerous other sources. The takeaway headline is easy to spot: The top 4% of readers by themselves read almost half the books read in this country in any given year. But the saddest takeaway, by far, is that 40% of U.S.

Sam http://www.blogger.com/profile/17448913705757509608noreply@blogger.com6