Some books that are worth your time
Start your year off with a good read!
This year I did my best to crack a book each day. Usually I read at night after tucking into bed—I find that is a good way to forget about my day and relax. I got through 27 books this year; ten were novels and the rest were on politics, history, or a contemporary matter.
Of the bunch, here are the titles that I both liked the best and that I am guessing you, dear readers, are most likely to enjoy.
Nonfiction
John Strausbaugh has written another book that made me laugh out loud while teaching me something. As a kid I got the impression that the Soviet Union had an incredible space program, one staffed with top scientists who were working at the bleeding edge of aviation and rocketry. Yuri Gagarin, I remember hearing, was the first Russian in space and a national hero. Serious stuff! Well… the truth of the matter is the U.S.S.R.’s space program was slapdash, underfunded, and shot through with bad ideas pushed by Nikita Krushchev and other leaders who care mostly about yanking the chain of American presidents. Untold cosmonauts and test animals died when launches went bad. And Gagarin? He was a wild boozer and womanizer.
I’m not one for self-help books, but this one is quite good. We all have habits big and small. Some are good (e.g., taking a walk each day), some are a drag on our happiness (e.g, eating fast food multiple times per week). James Clear urges us to take greater control of our lives by adopting more good habits and ditching the bad ones. He doesn’t tell you which habits are which—he leaves it to you to look at your life and answer that question. Then he provides techniques for making them happen.
It took me a while, but I finally picked up incoming Vice-President JD Vance’s memoir of growing up in Kentucky and southern Ohio. It was a crazy life that no kid —but far too many actually do— endure. Like him or loathe him, Vance lays out the ugly, self-destructive culture that entraps many Americans and that can’t be fixed by government social programs.
Journalist Michael Finkle spins the astonishing tail of a mousy man and his odd girlfriend who pulled off an astonishing number of thefts of rare artifacts across Europe. They did not do it for the sake of selling off the goods for big dollars. Each of them stole for their own crazy reasons.
Fiction
A sister drowns, leaving her sister to take care of a teenage daughter and fathom the death. Was it suicide? Or is she only the latest of the women who ended up dead in the river? Paula Hawkins, best known for The Girl on the Train, spins a complex tale with a lot of characters that left me wondering nearly until the end.
Ruth Rendell was a great English mystery writer. I quite enjoyed this one, which kept me up past lights-up. A teenage girl dies after a chunk of concrete thrown from a bridge hits her car. Another girl is beaten to death. The aging Inspector Wexford, who has his own daughter who keeps him worried, follows what few clues there are in hopes of finding the murderer (or are there two of them?) and preventing further mayhem.
This is a short novel written in simple words but one that you must read slowly, maybe 15 to 30 pages at a sitting. (Preferably alone and at night.) An old clock repairman lays dying. His mind turns to his past, trying to remember and make sense of things. Family members drift in and out of his room—treating him as if he is both there and no longer there. You the reader soon find yourself joined to the narrator in the mysterious exploration of existence.
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Thanks for reading!