Tag: reading

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On the night stand…

Michael Connelly cranks out one to two mysteries per year and they are some of the best detective/police procedurals being written today. I’ve read everything he’s written and it is almost always a fun ride following along behind Connelly’s protagonists. His longest standing and most popular character is LA Police detective Heironymous (Harry) Bosch. If you take Amazon Prime then you will note that several seasons of Harry Bosch serials are available for your viewing, and they are done very well…

I usually wait about a year after the book is published so I can get a good deal buying one used off of Amazon and snatched this one up a few weeks ago… the problem I have is that because Connelly’s books are usually such page turners they do not last long on the nightstand so while I read them I fret about what to read next. In my house I have a queue of books waiting, but it’s the choice I wrestle with… Sometimes a book that I’ve acquired will be read right away, but others may languish for months or years before they are gotten to. The Connelly books never wait very long… like excellent customers, they move to the front of the line…

Having zoomed through the Harry Bosch story pictured above in short order, I am now involved with Caleb Carr’s The Angel of Darkness, which is a sequel to The Alienist. Both books take place in the late 1800’s and involve Lazlo Kreizler psychologist & criminal profiler who hunts serial killers. I read The Alienist several years ago, really enjoyed it and while reading it grabbed a used copy of the The Angel of Darkness; however for whatever reason, the second book languished on a shelf for years. Perhaps I was saving it because I knew that there were no more Lazlo Kreizler books in the works.

Nevertheless, two things occurred that led me to pick up and start reading The Angel of Darkness. First, I discovered that Caleb Carr was indeed planning to publish a new Kreizler story! And secondly, I started watching the TNT TV series based on The Alienist.

New network for the Tarheels not supported by Mediacom.

I was aware that there was a TV treatment of The Alienist; however, I did not have access to a streaming version of it and I find watching a fixed scheduled TV series anathema nowadays; however, the television landscape has changed much for the better in my home as of last week.

First a bit of background. As you are all aware, Cable TV subscriptions are terribly expensive and the ONLY reason I subscribe to Cable TV is to watch my beloved UNC Tar Heels basketball team during the season. Well, much to my despair, I learned that the new ACC Network that would carry UNC games in the future would not be supported by my Cable supplier Mediacom and when I queried them about this, they were a combination of oblivious and unapologetic!


So, I dumped cable, purchased an Apple TV and a subscription to Hulu+ and now have access to the Tar Heels again. The transition away from cable went incredibly smooth and is saving money too! I am wondering why it took me so long to do this!

I also have access to a bunch of other stuff on Hulu, including a streaming version of The Alienist and after watching an episode or two, I decided it was time to dust off The Angel of Darkness and read it… so there you have it…

PS… Caleb Carr is an excellent writer and I look forward to The Alienist at Armageddon!
It might move to the front of the line…

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On the nightstand…

Last night I finally finished the 700+ page Don Winslow opus, The Border. It was (supposedly) the final installment of a trilogy about the Mexican and Central American illegal drug trade and the development of the infamous cartels. I did not enjoy this last installment at all but pushed myself through it. Full of paper thin stereo-typical characters, a plot spread way too wide, a la Game of Thrones, and contrived over the top political virtue signaling, it was, in my assessment an utter failure. This was an incredibly disappointing summer read as his last book, The Force, was an outstanding accounting of police corruption in New York City driven by an unforgettable anti-hero.

So, I am due for a cleansing science fiction read and out of my queue I pulled Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won a Hugo award years ago for its depiction of a post apocalyptic world and a theme of the cyclical nature of human civilization. I think I was vaguely aware of this book, but recently found it on one of those web lists of books that absolutely must be read, so I grabbed it off Amazon… I’ll let you know how it goes…

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Time well spent… or my continuous stream of consciousness about a life of reading…

When I first announced I was going to retire the most common reaction I received beyond congratulations was a dubiously phrased, “What are you going to do?” Initially, I was caught off guard believing that my interlocutor thought my plan to retire was somewhat suspect. So, in response I would list off the many activities that I engage in, including photography and guitar playing/learning to prove I was worthy of retirement…

Then after I while I became fatigued with trying to prove that I was prepared to retire, and instead stated that, “I would do whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to…” which, so far, has been pretty much the case within the resources I want to allocate to the “whatever I want to do” aspect of my time spent.

It’s actually a little more complicated than that… Though it initially it seemed that time is available to do anything/anytime, there are still chores around the house like cleaning and yard upkeep, as well as time at the gym to avoid backsliding health wise… Nevertheless, I do have dedicated activities that I hold sacrosanct and one of them is reading…

I’ve been a devoted reader almost all my life… perhaps when I was a nascent reader it was a little rocky, but by the time I was 10 years old. Ian Fleming and Edgar Rice Burroughs enchanted me into a world of fiction where all things are possible… I am still there in that fantastic world of spies, detectives, space ships and time travelers… I found the vintage paperback covers to some of my gateway books into a life of escape reading…

So, I’ve lead the life of a voracious reader… to prove the point, I was not a lit. major in college, but I managed to take a lit. class almost every semester, including classes devoted to Shakespeare, Greek Tragedy, the Literary Significance of the Bible, and Late 19th Century American Literature…

The fact is, my dedication to literature is a bit of a problem… there is no room in my home for anymore books yet I keep buying them…. I really should read more books on my Kindle, but I feel suffocated and constrained when I read books electronically… I like to flip ahead sometimes and that is difficulty with an electronic reader…

I have to make way sometimes by disposing books… some I give away to friends, others get deposited at the local library’s Book Nook… most if the books I toss off are not what I call keepers… I still hang onto the books that are “classics” or ones that really affected me.

Some of the giveaways make a difference. Yesterday, Coach Chip, a young man who coached my son Parker in club basketball when he was in early grade school and who subsequently gave him private lessons in our driveway shared on FB that his “travel” team just one second place in a tournament. I know how hard Coach Chip works and congratulated him. His response was:  “All because of the book you gave me!” Well, I think there’s more to it than that but it was fun to hear from Chip. Below you can Coach Chip and the book I gave him… It was a first edition of Dean Smith’s Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense.

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On the bedstand…

I’ll be with this tome for a while, weighing in at just over 700 pages. Because I read the previous two books in the trilogy, I was pretty charged up when I first noticed this book was to be published and pre-ordered it on Amazon… Despite my early order, it has been sitting around for several months waiting for me… I have to steel myself for a Don Winslow book as they are typically very dark…

The Border is the concluding book in a trilogy focusing on the illegal drug trade that filters up into the U.S. primarily from Mexico, but also involves Central America. It’s a really deep dive into Mexican politics, corruption and the every day people trying to carve out a life who are often victimized. The other two books were, The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. If you ever saw the wonderful film Sicario, then that would give you some idea of the subject matter.

This book in particular, as noted by the title, is particularly topical given the daily turmoil on the southern border of the U.S. According to the reviews I’ve read Winslow offers his own dark insights as to what is really happening, going deeper and on beyond was the mainstream media offers.

I’ll be leaving next week for a road trip to North Carolina with my guitars, and this book will be along for the ride.

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On the bed stand…

After slogging through to completion a history of the U.S. involvement in World War I, which was actually a rather dry accounting, I was in the mood for a summer page turner… Fortunately, I had one on hand, courtesy of a birthday gift from my son Parker…

This is the second book I’ve read by Blake Crouch… He happens to be a graduate of the University of North Carolina, so I feel a modest connection to him. The first book, Dark Matter, was a sci-fi adventure involving quantum mechanics and multiple universes and it was entertaining enough for me to consider reading his new one. Recursion is about the nexus of time and memory and thus far is a great/fun and interesting read. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart of stories about time travel and the paradoxes it entails, with the possible exception of Star Trek episodes where time travel was too frequently used to solve improbable plots…

Up to this point in my reading, I would recommend this book…