Reading List January - March 2022

 Lonnie Wheeler, The Bona Fide Legend of Cool Papa Bell. NY: Abrams, 2021.

I think Lonnie did him justice. It’s impossible to know, of course. The reason it’s taken so long for James Nichols to get a biography, just like a Hall of Fame plaque, is that there simply isn’t much left to work with. Wheeler’s book succeeds by embracing this, accepting that we can’t know in a normal historical fact sense when records were never kept and instead building an impressionist collage of a life. His baseball career is there, in documented events, oral histories, even Papa’s own notebooks tracing his stolen bases or Josh Gibson’s home runs. The man is there, in notes and incidents showing a character. And the entire history of Negro Leagues is there, in the more than twenty five years Bell played, right on up to integration and the end. It would be an excellent text for a twentieth-century US history class.


Eric Longenhagen & Kiley McDaniel, Future Value. Chicago: Triumph, 2020.

Baseball players get old, and young players are cheap for big-league teams, so finding new talent is important.  This is a book about finding professional baseball talent. It looks at the MLB induction routes: the draft, international amateurs, and international professionals. It considers the front office structure and various roles in scouting and player development, the use of big data and how that relates to scouts, and how to get one of these few jobs, with their long hours and low pay.  It offers a clear-eyed look at the competitive side of making money from a game.


Neil deMause & Joanna Cagan, Field of Schemes (revised & expanded). Lincoln NE: Bison, 2008.

This is a handbook on getting rich. The secret? Start rich, duh. Once you own that professional sports club, people -- that is, the elected representatives of the people -- will give you more money. And then more money in another few years. And then some more money...


Charles Dickens, Hard Times. NY: Fawcett, 1966.

The Gradgrind family of Coketown is led by Thomas, a schoolmaster who wants only Facts. They take in an abandoned girl, who helps Mother, while the older daughter marries and Tom Jr. joins her husband’s bank. It’s like a fairy tale. Except the snow of Coketown isn’t white, it’s black, and this drear place tolerates no joy. Scandals, and death, ensue.


Shauna Robinson, Must Love Books. Naperville IL: Sourcebooks, 2022.

I expected a simple rom-com featuring a young assistant between publishing houses, trying to tempt an author to follow. And I got that. But Nora, the young assistant, mentions a new hobby in chapter three: watching the ceiling fan spin. From this point forward, I knew that Robinson’s debut would not be the last I read from her. Her second novel is out November 2022.


Jasmine Guillory, The Proposal. NY: Jove, 2018.

In which Nikole is rescued from an unwanted public spectacle and gradually learns both what love is and that she has it.


Rosie Dana, Intimacy Experiment. NY: Jove, 2021.

That was fun: a (“hot”) rabbi hires a former adult entertainer to teach a course on modern intimacy. They, obviously, fall in love, with the expected consequences. Follow their seven-week curricula, and you too might fall in love.


Kalynn Bayron, Cinderella Is Dead. NY: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Sophia is of age: it’s her turn to attend the ball. She may be chosen. But she doesn’t want to be chose; the men of her town live as licensed by Prince Charming, the vampire who has ruled under different names for two hundred years. No, Sophia doesn’t accept the situation. She changes it.


Talia Hibert, Take a Hint, Dani Brown. NY: HarperCollins, 2020.

The Brown sisters’ adventures continue, as the academic among them begins to study romance.


Lana Harper, Payback’s a Witch. NY: Jove, 2021.

Emmy is the eldest child of the Harlows, one of four magic families to found Thistle Grove three hundred years ago. She left when the scion of another founding clan broke her heart, but now she’s back to judge the contest determining which scion will rule the town next. The title sums it up, but her journey to revenge is filled with romance and self-discovery.


Jasmine Guillory, Party of Two. NY: Jove, 2020.

Olivia has just moved to LA to start a law firm with her best friend, hasn’t even moved into her house yet, so she’s in the hotel bar. And that hot guy looks like fun, but she doesn’t have time to date. She still doesn’t have time when she later learns he’s a Senator, but what the hell, right? He seems to like her, and he still looks like fun.


Sonali Dev, Incense and Sensibility. NY: HarperCollins, 2021.

In this Austen adaptation, the lead characters are a yoga instructor, a gubernatorial candidate, and an international nonprofit organizer, which makes it a bit more interesting than three spoiled young nineteenth century Brits.


Martha Wells, All Systems Red. NY: TOR, 2017.

The Security Bot - a constructed frame supporting cloned organic material - assigned to Preservation’s survey team has hacked its control governor. That leave it free to ignore instructions and kill its client crew, but Murderbot would rather just watch entertainment feeds. Until someone else tries to kill Murderbot’s clients.


Evie Dunmore, A Rogue of One’s Own. NY: Jove, 2020.

He’s a new-made Lord; she’s a suffragette. Even though they were childhood playmates, their positions are at odds as co-owners of London Print. Can they overcome animosity and work toward mutual profit?


Tilia Hibbert, Act Your Age, Eve Brown. NY: HarperCollins, 2021.

The third Brown sister has always been a bit of a screw-up -- she may have undiagnosed autistic tendencies -- so running away from her latest failure surprises no one. Finding a reason to stop running, though, does surprise her.


Evie Dunmore, Portrait of a Scotsman. NY: Jove, 2021.

Hattie, artistic daughter of a banker, is the latest of Dunmore’s British suffragettes to make a match. Her choice is a rival banker, a mysterious Blackstone, who buys failing mines and ruins peers. He is not a suitable choice.


Elizabeth Bass, Letter to Three Witches. NY: Kensington, 2022.

Gwen’s family has magic, but can’t use it because an ancestor caused the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. But the magic can’t be contained, and once it breaks out, chaos ensues.


Teri Wilson, Accidental Beauty Queen. NY: Gallery, 2018.

Charlotte takes after her bookish father; identical twin Ginny, their beauty queen mother. When Ginny gets sick the night before a pageant, Charlotte agrees to stand in for her, even though she knows it’s wrong. The experience changes her view of ‘scholarship contests’, and her future.


Evie Dunmore, Bringing Down the Duke. NY: Jove, 2019.

First in the Extraordinary Women series about British suffragettes in the 1870s, seen above (and read in the order available from my library), this follows Annabelle, a cleric’s daughter studying at Oxford on scholarship, who challenges a Tory party strategist to choose scandal and the right side of history.


Lizzie Damilola Blackburn; Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? London: Viking, 2022.

Yinka is thirty-one. Her Mum and Aunties pray that she will find a husband, but first Yinka needs to find herself.


Rachel Hawkins as Erin Sterling, Ex Hex. NY: Harper Collins, 2021.

Vivienne fell for Welsh exchange student Rhys when they were nineteen. Now he’s back in Georgia, nine years after breaking her heart, and they can finally admit that what they had was magic.



Rosie Danan, The Roommate. NY: Jove, 2020.

Clara moves from NY to LA to room with her high school crush Everett, but he picks her up from the airport announcing that he’s going on tour opening for a blues band and has sublet his other room to a porn star (but doesn’t mention that last bit). Which turns out to be the best thing Everett’s ever done for Clara.


Jane Leavy, The Big Fella. NY: HarperCollins, 2018.

‘They say he is dead but it is very hard to believe because he was so alive,’ Frank Graham said of Babe Ruth. This is not The Babe Ruth Story, the battered paperback hagiography which was the first baseball book I remember reading; this is an outstanding biography, told by relating Ruth’s life to the events of a cross-country barnstorming tour after his record-setting 1927 season.


Charles Leerhsen, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

“A genius in spikes,” read the plaque, “The Greatest Tiger of Them All.” The Tiger Stadium wall is gone, plaque with it, and all we have now are the records. And the stories, most of which, turns out, are wrong. Fabricated, by an overenthusiastic little fellow who could wait until the subject died and publish over his objections. Leerhsen has verifiable sources. He tries to recreate a life, rather than create a character to fit preconceptions, and does it well.

Craig Morgan Teicher, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. Rochester, NY: BOA, 2021.

Ultimately, it was too much. Teicher gives us a life, in all its messy, glorious insecurity, in the guise of formal verse. I needed two months to get from poem one to poem two; getting to Death, the concluding piece, might take more time than I have, as each cuts away a slice of protective myth about contemporary society (or self) that must then scab over and heal before moving along to the next. Much like life itself.


China Mieville, The City and the City. NY: DelRey, 2009.

This is an international procedural, a murder mystery set in two cities, two countries, sharing physical space. Or is it an allegory, reminding us that what we so assiduously unsee exists, whether acknowledged or not?


Mia Sosa, The Worst Best Man. NY: :HarperCollins, 2020.

Three years ago, Lina’s fiancé sent his brother Max to tell Lina that he wouldn’t be attending their wedding that afternoon. Today both brothers walked into her job interview. She really wants this job, though, so she agrees to work with Max. He wasn’t the one who jilted her, after all. And she really wants this job. Or is it Max she wants?


Jasmine Guillory, The Wedding Party. NY: Jove, 2019.

Alexa’s wedding would go perfectly if Theo and Maddie didn’t need to be locked in a closet until admitting their attraction.


Sara Morgenthaler, Tourist Attraction. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020.

Zoey, a Chicago waitress, has saved her entire life for an Alaskan vacation, and all her plans go wrong. How did the best part  turn out to be local burger and dog dive where the owner has a strict no tourists policy?