Category Archives: Literature

This year I kept having the sense that I was way behind my normal reading pace, but somehow I still ended up reading 25 books. I wouldn’t say it was a great year. There was nothing particularly outstanding. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed The Lonesome Dove series, The Tress and Purgatorio. The Spanish Game, a spy novel set in the early 2000s Madrid, made me think I should go off somewhere to write a story about my first years in the city.

The big disappointments were the Stephane Crane biography which I found unreadable and Zorba the Greek which was just so bad and outdated. Anyways, here is the entire list in reverse chronological order:

• Empire of Ice and Stone: the Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk by Buddy Levy (currently reading).
• Historic Tales of Gasparilla Island by David Futch.
• Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove, #4) by Larry McCurtry
• Dead Man’s Walk (Lonesome Dove, #3) by Larry McCurtry
• Slammed (Slammed, #1) by Colleen Hoover
• The Trees by Percival Everett
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
• A Heart So White by Javier Marias
• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gumah
• Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa by Susan Gilson Miller
• The Spanish Game (Alec Milius #2) by Charles Cumming
• The First 90 Days: Cri#cal Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels by Michael D. Watkins
• The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
• Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom
• The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond by Chris Blackwell
• The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (a re-read)
• In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani
• Purgatorio by Jon Sistiaga
• Streets of Laredo (Lonesome Dove, #2) by Larry McCurtry
• Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
• Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1) by Larry McCurtry
• Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich by Harald Jähner
• Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster

In 2021, I read just over 30 books. That seems like a pretty good year for me ! Had it not been for TV bingeing, I could have read much more.

When 2020 came to an end, I was about half way through Obama’s memoir A Promise Land which is essentially his apology tour for not having taken greater advantage of his time in office. Nonetheless, the book is highly recommendable, no matter your political affiliation.

And as this year comes to an end, I am currently trying to make my way through the incredibly frustrating biography of Stephen Crane by famed novelist Paul Auster. I really would love to love this book. Sometimes I find myself enjoying it, but most of the time, I am just angry with Auster for making it feel interminable.

So here is my 2021 list in reverse chronological order:

• Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster (currently reading)
• Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
• The River by Peter Heller
• Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr
• The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
• Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music by Gerald Horne
• The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
• First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami
• Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney
• Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuar
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross
• The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah
• Orientalism by Edward W. Said
• Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
• If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
• The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
• The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
• Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
• Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist by Heather Augustyn
• The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17^th Century North America and the Caribbean by Gerald Horne
• Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• Writers and Lovers by Lily King
• Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
• American Dirt by Jeannie Cummins
• This is Happiness by Niall Williams
• The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan
• A Promise Land by Barrack Obama

Hands down my three favorite books on the list were The Great Believers, Homeland Elegies, and Blood and Faith. The Great Believers takes us back to 1980s Chicago, the AIDS epidemic, how little we understood about the virus, and the stigmatizing effects on the gay community. Along with Pale Rider and The Last Town on Earth from this year’s list, The Great Believers helped put the current pandemic into perspective.

Over the past few years, I have read so many novels about first generation Americans and the psychological toll they pay straddling their parents’ culture and that of American society. This year these included Homeland Elegies, The Beauty of Your Face, and Transcendent Kingdom. By far, Homeland Elegies is the best I have read in a long, long time. A real magnum opus. In defense of Transcendent Kingdom, at first it read like just another one of the lot, but it turned out to be a richer and deeper novel about addiction, depression and faith.

After having spent a few days in Granada with my family, I couldn’t stop thinking about how after 1492, Spain couldn’t just replace an entire city population with another from one day to the next. That led to Blood and Faith, Carr’s history of how for a over a century after the end of the Reconquest, Spain systematically and brutally ethnically cleansed Spain of its Morisco population. Everyone interested in Spain and even contemporary politics should be knowledgeable about this history.

There were many other books on the list that merit further mention. I highly recommend: American Dirt, The Girl with the Louding Voice, If I had your Face, and The River. It was also somewhat of a Korean themed year between If I had your Face, Island of the Sea Women, and Squid Game. Then the two S.A. Cosby crime stories (Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland), very much like George Pelecanos, were highly enjoyable and excellent fillers between more emotionally charged books.

Finally, a few big disappointments. The Don Drummond biography was poorly told, but at least it inspired me to revisit Ska which I have been playing non-stop ever since. And Haruki Murakami breaks my heart. When I first read through his main body of work, he quickly became one of my all time favorite novelists. Over the years, I have gone back and re-read most of his novels and whenever a new book comes out, I always walk away wondering what I loved the first time around. Like a boxer or politician he should have stopped when he was still great.  

I normally do not watch many TV series, and I have pretty much given up film all together. A couple times a year, I may watch a series or two, or when I need an easy smile, I’ll watch an old Seinfeld episode.

But in 2021 – and I don’t have a good reason why – I watched much more than in recent years. This ended up competing with my reading time. As you’ve probably heard me say a million times, I’ve had a bit of a Ted Lasso obsession (season 2 not so much). I also really enjoyed The Good Place which like Ted Lasso was about how we need other people in our lives to make us stronger and better human beings. Honorable mention to Borgen. I spent a few weeks pretending like I could speak Danish.

The Last Dance (which fascinated me and when I have time, I hope to write about as a contrast to Ted Lasso), The People v OJ Simpson and The Kings all made me reflect on the past, as I lived through those historical periods, often much more distracted by the trials and tribulations of my own day-to-day to consider their importance. I definitely enjoyed all three. I particularly liked learning more about Sugar Ray Leonard who lived down the street from me.  

Finally, Squid Game was fun for the sole reason that it was Korean, and most of what we get to watch on Netflix et al is American with a couple of European exceptions. The acting was great, but otherwise it was just The Hunger Games for adults.

Here’s my list:

• Ted Lasso
• The Serpent
• Sophie: a Murder in West Cork
• Queen’s Gambit
• The Good Place
• The Kominsky Method
• Borgen
• The Last Dance
• Squid Game
• The People vs. OJ Simpson
• The Kings
• Who Killed Malcolm X

Nothing we write about 2020 can start without the caveat that it has been a strange year. In a normal year, I average about two books per/month and generally reach around 24 books for the year. This year I struggled to hit 19.

The year started off pretty routine. I completed my last book of 2019 – Samantha Power’s memoir (coincidentally I am ending this year with Obama’s memoir) — and then did what I normally do, I turned to a George Pelecanos staple to pick up the pace. One day on my bus commute back from work (when no one thought twice about taking public transportation), I was listening to a podcast with an old interview of Mario Puzo where he talks about how his magnum opus was The Fortunate Pilgrim, not any of his mafia stories. So I read that, and then a variety of other books (including re-reading Dance Dance Dance) until finally Covid hit and the lockdown began.

During lockdown, I read the very appropriate The Plague, but also spent many nights reading about the virus. I didn’t touch Netflix, Disney Plus or Amazon Prime until the Fall. Instead I tried my hand at the Ken Follet Kingsbridge novels. At the end of the summer, I finally caved to the easy thrills of The Mandalorian, Cobra Kai, and then Seinfeld re-runs for lots of late 90s nostalgia.

So to make a long story short, there were lots of distractions from my normal reading pace, yet I was still able to get in some very good books. Here’s what I read this year:

• How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices by Annie Duke (currently reading)
• The Promise Land by Barack Obama (currently reading)
• A Column of Fire by Ken Follet
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• World Without End by Ken Follet
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet
• Deacon King Kong by James McBride
• Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas
• Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami (a re-read)
• Shame the Devil by George Pelecanos
• True Grit by Charles Portis
• The Plague by Albert Camus
• The Sweet Forever by George Pelecanos
• Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
• The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzzo
• Warrior of the Light by Paolo Coelho
• In the Woods by Tana French
• King Suckerman by George Pelecanos

The Kingsbridge series pretty much dominated my year. Of the three, A World Without End was my favorite as it takes place during the Black Death (which felt very timely). Kim Ghattas history of the cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran to dominate the Muslim world by competing to push the extremist ideologies across the region was incredibly informative, as was Jeff Chang’s history of Hip-Hop culture. Dance Dance Dance like almost all of the Murakami novels I have re-read seemed much more flat and repetitive the second time around (which always breaks my heart because he has been one of my all time favorites). I loved The Fortunate Pilgrim which is an Italian immigrant family struggling to make it in Hell’s Kitchen during the Depression. I could imagine the characters as my grandmother and her brothers who suffered through the same time period and circumstances just a dozen blocks away. Butler’s excellent Parable of the Sower about an unraveled and dystopian American society felt all too possible. And of course, for a DC boy like me, anything by George Pelecanos is always enjoyable. All in all, though, I will go with A World Without End as my favorite read of the 2020, with Parable of the Sower coming in second.

This year I felt like I was way behind in my reading. Maybe this was because of some longer books like The Brothers Karamazov or Embracing Defeat about how the US occupied Japan following WWII. Also some of my reading capacity was cannibalized by the My Brilliant Friend and Casa de Papel TV series. So I was quite surprised when I did the actual count: 29 books which is more than my usual average of 24 book per year.

Here is what I read (in reverse chronological order):

• The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
• The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• What You Have Heard is True by Carolyn Forché
• The Man Who Say Everything by Deborah Levy
• I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Less by Andrew Sean Greer
• Down by the River where the Dead Men Go by George Pelecanos
• Nick’s Trip by George Pelecanos
• Genesis by Eduardo Galeano
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
• A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mizra
• Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie
• A Firing Offense by George Pelecanos
• The Night Tiger by Yangzse Choo
• River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy
• Kitchen Confidential by Antony Bourdain
• A Dance to the Music of Time: 1^St Movement by Anthony Powell
• The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
• The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie
• Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy
• We Cast Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• Educated by Tara Westover
• If Beale Street Cold Talk by James Baldwin
• The Street by Ann Petry
• North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The year had some definite winners and one major disappointment. I was so excited to finally read The Brothers Karamazov yet found it very dated and slow moving. It only became interesting during the last fourth of the story. By far my favorite books this year were the two Buddy Levy histories of the Americas: Conquistador and River of Darkness. I also loved Carolyn Forchés memoir about El Salvador, What You Have Heard is True, and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Honorable mentions go to Educated, the incredibly moving You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, and Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans. I am always so impressed how each Lalami novel has a different voice and timber.

Finally as in other years, I always seek refuge in George Pelecano’s novels. This year I read four, including The Big Blowdown which may be along with The Turnaround my favorite to date. I don’t know what I will do when I have finished all of his work.