11 August 2021

Reading List: October - December 2020

 David Block, Pastime Lost. Lincoln: Nebraska, 2019.

Block continues exploring baseball’s origins, following his Baseball Before We Knew It history of proto-ball in the Americas with a closer look at the English games(s) also known by that name.

Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys. NY: Doubleday, 2019.

Nickel Boys were wards of a fictional Florida correctional facility modeled on the Dozier School for Boys, where discoveries on the grounds after closing uncovered decades of abuse. Whitehead may not be trying to write horror, but this is a terrifying as anything from Stephen King. It should feature prominently in high-school reading lists.


Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1968.

Sharik is injured and freezing in a Moscow doorway when Professor Preobrazhensky finds him, takes him home, and operates. This exacerbates Preobrazhensky’s problems with his house committee, but all ends as well as can be hoped for in 1920’s Soviet Russia.


Madeline Miller, Circe. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Odysseus's return to Ithaka from Troy was quite the odyssey, yet most of the ten years it took was spent on islands with nymphs - Calypso kept him for seven years, hoping he would choose to stay forever. Before that, though, he had landed on Circe’s isle, where the defiant daughter of Helios was exiled as a witch. Circe also loved the traveler, but her story required letting him leave.


Janet Evanovich, Look Alive Twenty-Five. NY: Putnam, 2018.

In this installment, intrepid bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is caught up in a kidnapping case.


Anya Seton, Hearth and Eagle. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

The title was abridged and serialized in Woman’s Home Companion, and the abridgment reissued as a paperback Pocket Book. Pulp pages, foxed into the text and glue cracking with each turn, tell the stormy tale of a read-haired Marblehead girl and her family home by the sea.


Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. NY: Viking, 1962.

Inspiration for the Jack Nicolson film, Kesey’s novel portrays a state mental ward overseen by a former Army nurse who understands discipline but not people. As a indictment of brutal systemic failure, it ranks with Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, and while the movie is an excellent, enjoyable, and affective adaptation, Kesey’s choice of voice and room for detail make the book well worth reading on its own or to supplement viewing.


Richard Hershberger, Strike Four. Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

The delightful history of baseball rules joins Peter Morris’s Game of Inches in studying how the game developed not through the personalities that played for or owned the teams, but how and why playing conditions evolved.

Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965.


Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs. NY: Soho, 2003.

Ms Dobbs is a private investigator in London. She served as a nurse the the Great War, and in her series debut uncovers and resolves a string of deaths at a rehabilitation home for injured veterans. Rich in both historical and psychological detail, and more literary than most series mysteries, it should satisfy both mystery readers and readers who enjoy mysteries.


Charlaine Harris, Shakespeare’s Landlord. NY: Berkley Crime, 1996.

Another first-in-series mystery as I race to pad stats before the year ends. This set, named for the small Arkansas town of Shakespeare (an hour and a half from Little Rock) in which they occur, features Lily Bard, the local cleaning lady with a noirish voice, secrets to protect, and no reason to spill those of her clients.

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