Best Books Read in 2024

 Read 83 books this year. Not bad. I was hoping for 100, but that didn't happen. Over 30,000 pages- not a very good way to track it because so much depends on the size of the book and the size of the type. But it probably averages out. This does not count the books I edited. That adds another 6 or 7 to the total. I probably should count those since I read them multiple times, eh?

Sunrise from December 14 for fun.

Here are the ten books I have selected as the best reads of 2024, in alphabetical order. I cheated and included one whole series because 5 of the books got my "excellent" notation.

Title	Author	Genre
Brief Review
Butch Karp series	Robert Tannenbaum	thrillers
I discovered the Butch Karp books this year, although they are about 20 years old. You will either like these or not. They are semi-believable and semi-outrageous, but it's a mix that I find wonderful. The series progresses from Butch meeting Marlene while they are young and both work for the DA through to their retirement years. They books are set in New York City with a few trips to other locations.     We watch their children grow up. Marlene discovers that she prefers confronting evil in a personal, armed manner, while Butch respects the courtroom. Their adventures take them through horrendous confrontations with criminals. An almost mythical man who lives in the world of the underground street people becomes part of the story, and also a Vietnamese criminal who becomes their daughter's protector. Of course there is a nemesis who continually confronts them.     My favorites in the series are: Resolved, Absolute Rage, Justice Denied, Reckless Endangerment, Act of Revenge. But it's best to read the books in order. You can find my reviews at Butch Karp series
Clear Thinking in a Messy World	Ken Samples and Mark Perez	non-fiction
This is an easy-to-read overview of how to use logic to clarify not only your own thinking, but to help you sort out the mixed signals you get from the "world:" social media, friends, family, organizations, advertising, etc.     The book is written from a Christian perspective, but the authors are very careful not to show bias. For every example they give that would support a Christian worldview, they give an example from a materialistic view. This is one of the many books published by Reasons to Believe.     Highly recommended. One of the top reads of the year.
Contagion	Robin Cook	medical thriller
Robin Cook's writing is inconsistent. He's either right on or really bad. This one is right on. I did stay up all night reading.     A woman in hospital dies from a strange infection. Of course, the medical team is trying to track down the source. Then another person also dies from the same virus.     Sounds like your typical medical investigation right? Nope. Soon, they have a couple more deaths from something very rare, but not the same as the first deaths. This pattern continues. There is no reasonable way these people could have contacted such rare infections. What is going on?
Iron House	John Hart	thriller
Michael and Julian are brothers who grew up in a horrific orphanage. Michael becomes the strong and aggressive one, while Julian is fearful and artistic.     The book follows the unfolding of their lives. Julian is adopted by a Senator's family and continues to need constant protection, but Michael becomes an enforcer for the mob. Their lives once again intersect after Michael tries to leave organized crime.
The Lincoln Highway	Amor Towles	literary fiction
This book is definitely one of the best three of the year. I expected it to end badly since it is literary fiction, but the ending is quite satisfactory.     Emmett has just been released from a detention home and returns to his own house to find his father dead and younger brother Billy in need of care. He had been sent away because he had accidentally killed a man. Soon a couple of neer-do-wells that Emmett knows from the reform school show up.     It is never said so in so many words, but Billy may have Aspergers. He is precocious and unusually focused. He is fascinated by a book he is reading throughout the novel. The book Billy reads is a book I wish I had written. I absolutely love it: Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers.. It contains adventurers whose names begins with each letter of the alphabet. These are everything from classical to contemporary, and there is a world map on the endpapers showing where they were from. The letter Y is left blank. It stands for YOU, and the reader is invited to write his or her own adventure. Billy is unsure where to start his story.     Anyway, they set off from Nebraska to drive the Lincoln Highway to California, but Emmett's "buddies" turn that into a trip that causes them to double back to New York and is fraught with adventure after adventure. There is never a dull moment.
Lost on a Mountain in Maine	Donn Felton	true adventure
I discovered this short book at least a month before learning that Angel Studios has turned it into a movie.     In the 1950s, several young boys with a couple of adults set out to hike up Mount Katahdin in Maine. Twelve-year-old Donn gets separated from the group in the fog. He has only rudimentary woods skills. Soon, his wet jeans have rubbed his legs raw and his feet are too swollen to keep his shoes on. He tries to hold on to his clothes while continuing to attempt to move downhill, but before a couple of days have passed, he has nothing except his underwear. Against amazing odds, he finds an occupied cabin after a week of attempting to follow a waterway downstream and is rescued.     I had never heard of this story, but apparently he gave talks throughout the east about his experiences. I really want to see the movie.
The Ryer Avenue Story	Dorothy Uhnak	literary fiction
This is one of those epic novels that spans four decades as it spins out the story of consequences arising from a childhood tragedy.     Six friends raised in a tough neighborhood of the Bronx manage to kill a bully who continually torments them. The father of one of the children takes the blame and is sent to prison.     As the book progresses, we learn how the children grow to adulthood and how they deal with knowing the truth.
The Silent Patient	Alex Michaelides	psychological thriller
A psychiatric patient refuses to speak, but one therapist believes he can get through to her. I don't want to give any more of the story away.
T is for Trespass	Sue Grafton	mystery
This is one of the Kinsey Millhone books. Kinsey is a rather sassy and independent private detective. I like them all, but this one is outstanding.     The elderly, cranky neighbor of Kinsey and Henry, Gus, takes a fall and is badly injured. When he is able to return home, he needs the care of a home nurse since his only relative, a neice, lives in across the country in New York. Kinsey does a background check and hires Rosie to care for Gus. However, Gus fails to improve and Rosie moves in to help full-time.     Kinsey becomes suspicious, but Rosie continues to get good recommendations wherever Kinsey checks. The situation goes from bad to worse.
Whip Hand	Dick Francis	mystery
I had kind of forgotten how good a writer Dick Francis is.     Like almost all of his books, this one is set in the world of English horse-racing and the jockey world. It is part of the Sid Hally series (there are four books by Dick Francis and two more by his son). Sid is a jockey who has lost a hand from a bad fall where the horse landed on him. He tries to find a new place for himself in the world, and ends up investigating the unexplained deaths of highly promising race horses who did well as two-year-olds but suddenly died or were incapacitated the next year. Regular testing has turned up nothing.     This book is the one of only two to ever win both the Gold Dagger and the Edgar Award. The other is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarre.

See Best Books- second half of 2023

Best Books Read in the Second Half of 2023

 I was hoping to make it to 200 books for the year, but not quite. After I began to get my energy back, I was spending more time doing other things. Still, I made it to 171. 92 reads were what I call purposeful- they weren't simply an escape. These might be fiction, but I read them for a specific reason- maybe to analyze the plot. 79 were just for escape, for the sheer enjoyment of the story. Heavily into mystery and thriller, but that's usually true of me.

And, I'm sharing this great pic from the hike again. Peace and Victory to you in 2024 from the universe.


Here are the ten books I have selected as the best reads of the second half of 2023, in alphabetical order.

Title	Author	Genre
Brief Review
The China Governess	Margery Allingham	mystery
Several of the Albert Campion books are making this list. Allingham is a classic mystery writer, considered one of the Grand Dames of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. I've really enjoyed her books since the plots are always unique, not formulaic at all.     One of Allingham's standard sources of tension is the difference between the way the world was perceived by an older generation and the way young people want to live. In the stories set near or duing World War II, the older generation wants the class system and the Victorian formality to contine with ramifications of every action rippling down through decades, while the unsettled world of the young made them want to live life in the moment because the whole country might be blown up the next day.     In this story, the young adults are the babies born to that generation who seized the present. In fact, the bones of this plot are based on the fact that many babies born in the early days of the bombings in Britain had no papers, or the wrong papers. Some of them were lucky to be alive and to have been cared for by any decent family. And yet, that stodgy British protection of family decency still lingers and haunts.     Basically, a young man who wants to marry his underage love is shocked that her father will not give permission until he can prove who he is genetically, not just the adopted son of the prestigious family who has raised him. However, that family has more skeletons in the closet than just the young man's credentials.
Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass	Gary Paulson	country life
Paulson weaves the seasons of the year on a farm in the first half of the twentieth century into pure prose poetry. If you remember farm life, or even if you wish you did, this is a great read.
Death of a Peer	Ngaio Marsh	mystery
Marsh just excelled in filling a house with a large collection of wildly varying characters, and she's done it again. A girl who was friends in New Zealand with a family whose head was the younger son of a British peer tells the story. The family is always short on money and keeps asking the older son to bail them out.     The family moves back to England, and the girl comes to visit. When the elder son comes to their large apartment to tell them he will not lend or give them any more money, he is murdered in the elevator.     Hanky panky everywhere, and a set of twins who have been playing twin pranks since they were toddlers confuse the issues even more.
False Witness	Dorothy Uhnak	mystery
Uhnak was a popular writer from about 1960-1980. Her books are primarily police procedurals, based on her own experience as a policewoman. I've now read several others by her, and some of them are dated, but this one is flat-out riveting. There are two main suspects for a violent attack on a woman who lives, and gives a good description of the assailant, but the liklihood of guilt bounces between the two men, over and over.
I Am the Cheese	Robert Cormia	psycological novel
This may be the best book of these six months, but I can't really compare fiction to history or whatever. However, I was looking for novels that use the trope of the protagonist having amnesia. This is supposedly a young adult book, but it's pretty dark. A young boy is determined to ride his bike to a distant city to find his father.
The Innocent Man	John Grisham	true crime
You know I love true crime, and Grisham takes one of his detours from fiction to tell the story of a man in Oklahoma who was charged and convicted of a murder in 1982. There is literally NO actual evidence against him, but because of the brutality of the crime, he is sent to death row where he spent 17 years until DNA testing became a valid form of evidence.
13 1/2	Nevada Barr	thriller
This was the first Nevada Barr book I've read that wasn't part of the Anna Pigeon National Parks series. I guess she has moved on to writing much grittier thrillers. This is certainly in that category. A young woman who has pulled herself up from a childhood of poverty and mistreatment distrusts men.     In a parallel story, two brothers survive the emotional trauma of one killing their parents and the other caring for him after he is released from prison.     Then their lives intersect.
Tiger in the Smoke	Margery Allingham	mystery
I've been working on reading all of Allingham's mysteries featuring Albert Campion. This is usually considered her best work, and for once I agree with this assessment.     Meg, a young cousin of Albert, a WWII war widow, is engaged to marry a man who is very much in love with her, and she with him. Then, suddenly, she begins receiving notes that report sightings of first husband. His body had not been found, but he had been listed as missing in action. She is dismayed. Her fiance does not know quite how to react, but discovers that he is intensly jealous.     Then grainy photographs are sent with the notes. They look very much like her husband. The police decide to trap this man and discover if he is an impersonator. But this is all in the very beginning of the book. What is going on?     Adding to the mystery is a two-day London fog that covers everything with a gray and yellow pall. The descriptions are perfect. A band of disabled veterans who live on the streets and care for each other provide a grotesque but realistic element of suspense.
Traitor's Purse	Margery Allingham	mystery
Set in war time, this book involves espionage and national crimes. Other than that, I don't want to say too much because even telling the very beginning gives away some of the suspense.     It is a very unusual trope for a mystery. In fact, I had not encountered a book quite like this before. I tried to look it up, and may have found a few other titles with a similar technique employed.     One thing I can say is that if you are a lover of books with passages in caves under mountains, you will like this book.
Two Little Girls in Blue	Mary Higgins Clark	psychological thriller
Clark is usually "right on" with her creepy trillers, and this is no exception. The main characters are young twin girls, one of whom is kidnapped and presumed dead. But the remaining twin continues to "talk" to her sister.

I spent most of the day packing for my trip. Tomorrow, I hit the road!

See Best Books of the First Half of 2023

Newbery Medal Winner 40 - Island of the Blue Dolphins

I'm sort of backing back into this potential series of blog posts. You might recall that I thought I'd start reading my way through the Newbery Medal winners (outstanding children's book). But the first one was so horrible, I quickly got stalled. Now, I'm jumping ahead to the 40th winner because I was asked about it.



This weekend, someone asked me if I'd read The Island of the Blue Dolphins because her pre-teen son loved it and read it over and over. She thought this was fantastic, since the protagonist is a girl, but that did not bother him. No, I hadn't read it. Well, at least I'd heard of it, but that was all. A writer of good (hopefully) children's books needs to be a reader of good children's books.

In my defense, I'll mention that the book was written in 1961. I was in 8th grade. And I'm sure my school library didn't get it until a few years after that. By then, I was not reading children's books.

I found it free online at Internet Archive., then search for Island of the Blue Dolphins. You will need a free account.

This book has been listed by some sources as one of the most popular novels of the 20th Century. (Seriously? How did I completely miss this?). Anyway, it's a great story.

Current criticisms include that it's a Caucasian writer attempting to tell the story of a Native American and that many parts of the cultural narrative are not accurate. Well, OK. But it's a fictional story, based on the merest kernal of truth. Perhaps the author, Scott O'Dell, could have done more research. But millions of people must be glad he wrote it. It's a classic coming-of-age tale. There is also apparently a genre called Robinsonade, after the Robinson Crusoe story (people suddenly separated from civilization), into which this book fits.

The kernal of truth is that there was a real woman who was rescued from the island of San Nicolas (off the California coast) in 1853. She had lived there alone for 18 years and had tamed a wild dog to be her companion. She had been left behind when the remnant of her people were taken to California in 1835 by ship. Variations on the story have it that she jumped overboard and swam back to the island when she learned that her child/younger brother was not on the ship. After she was rescued, there was no one left who understood her language, and she died just 7 weeks later of dysentery. The real woman was probably in her 20s when she was stranded.

O'Dell takes this skeleton and gives us Karana, a girl of 12, who jumps overboard and swims back to the island because her younger brother is not on the ship. The brother is soon killed by the wild dogs and Karana is left alone to survive.

Supposedly, some of the native skills and customs are totally imagined by O'Dell, but the struggle to come to terms with her plight and to find enough self-reliance to survive is a theme that resonates with young people of any culture. The book is told from Karana's point of view, and does not attempt to explore the depths of emotions she must have felt. Karana mostly sticks to the "facts." and lets the reader add the details. She does occasionally mention being lonesome, or says how much joy she found in the company of the dog she manages to tame.

Personally, I liked this straightforward narrative. It rang true to me that a person who has been raised where every meal, tool, item of clothing, etc is only to be had by finding or making it yourself would have a matter-of-fact attitude toward dealing with the world. The greatest struggle Karana mentions is to overcome the tribal tabu against females making weapons, yet she had to defend herself from the dogs, and she needed to catch food beyond the abalones she could collect from the rocks. I don't know if this cultural norm was real or made-up, but I can believe that would have been an extremely difficult psychological situation.

The story was made into a movie in 1964. I watched the trailer on YouTube, but it was awful. Maybe it wasn't awful in 1964, but compared with the book, it was jarringly fake. Some movies age well. This one does not.

In other news: The vendor event wrapped up. I haven't done the final paperwork, but I did well. That is good.

See Newbery 1 - The Story of Mankind See Newbery Medal Through the Years

Still on a Reading Binge

Somewhere in past posts from earlier this year, I mentioned that one of the things I missed most while being on the road hiking was being able to read as many books as I wanted to.

I made a serious effort to "solve" that problem in the three months I spent at home, mostly resting. In fact, I read 77 books before I headed back to the trail. That's not quite one a day, but not bad. I just can't stop.

And, I'm now up to 90 books read in 2023, and I've discovered two good, new-to-me mystery series. Both are British.

One is the Charles Lenox mysteries by Charles Finch. These are set in Victorian England, and the first in the series is The Beautiful Blue Death.

Today, I traveled down a bunny trail of a bunny trail and discovered another. The first bunny trail was that Rex Stout wrote several books that aren't Nero Wolfe books. He had a series of three mysteries with a detective named Tecumseh Fox. I already knew this, and I own two of them (I'll have to get the third). Interestingly enough, one of the plots is a near duplicate, with even the same character names, as a Nero Wolfe short story. The Fox book, Bad for Business was an expanded version of the short story, "The Bitter End," which was eventually printed in a posthumus volume of Nero Wolf stories called Death Times Three.

So I read all three Techumseh Fox books, and I read the third one, The Broken Vase, for the first time. Now we come to the next bunny trail. One of the murder "weapons" in this book is nitrobenzene, so I looked it up. It's a chemical that is used in small amounts in the manufacture of candy, acetaminophine, and in larger amounts to make aniline dye. But in pure form, a few drops on your skin can kill. So when I looked that up, there was a list of other mysteries that used nitrobenzene to kill.

One of these is from another British author, Anthony Berkeley. The book is The Poisoned Chocolates Case. I'm reading that one now, and it turns out there are four in this series starring Roger Sheringham. These were written in the 1920s-1930s and are from that golden age of mysteries. This book in particular is supposed to be a true classic of the age. But I had never heard of it.

I'm going to copy a paragraph from it. This is unequivocally good writing.

Facts were very dear to Sir Charles. More, they were meat and drink to him. His income of roughly thirty thousand pounds a year was derived entirely from the masterful way in which he was able to handle facts. There was no one at the bar who could so convincingly distort an honest but awkward fact into carrying an entirely different interpretation from that which any ordinary person (counsel for the prosecution, for instance) would have put upon it. He could take that fact, look it boldly in the face, twist it round, read a message from the back of its neck, turn it inside out and detect auguries in its entrails, dance triumphantly on its corpse, pulverise it completely, re-mould it if necessary into an utterly different shape, and finally, if the fact still had the temerity to retain any vestige of its primary aspect, bellow at it in the most terrifying manner. If that failed he was quite prepared to weep at it in open court.

You can be sure that this bunny trail will lead to reading the other books in that series. Reading well-written books in your own genre is a great way to help improve your own writing.

And, since we are on the topic of books, I copied a wonderful quote from Archie Goodwin (Nero Wolfe's legs and eyes, if you don't remember).

If you don’t walk much you wouldn’t know, but the angle you get on people and things when you’re walking is absolutely different from the one you get when you’re in a car or in anything else that does the moving for you. - Archie Goodwin.

Most of these books can be read for free at archive.org

In other news: I got busy on quite a few of my ongoing projects today, but am in a bit of a panic in that I can not find something that is quite important. It's not where I thought I left it when I headed back to the trail. I've looked in the obvious places. Tomorrow I'll expand the search.

See Tidbits from Nero Wolfe

Best Books Read in 2021

  This post is going to do double duty. I didn't buy much in 2022 that didn't have to do with the hiking, but I did finally find a comforter for my bed that I like that's in my budget. I got this for $15 on a clearance. I know it's not an amazing purchase, but it makes me very happy. And it's not totally worn out, which my old one was.

Because I was getting ready for my North Country Trail hike in 2021, I did not read as much as usual. I was extra busy. In fact, I've come to realize that one reason I'm so tired is because I've been pushing myself super hard for two years, not just the 13 months of the hike.


But that's not the point of this post. The thing is... because I was hiking in January 2022, I never posted the best books of 2021. Going back and trying to reconstruct that list from the pile of books that needed to be put away wasn't totally satisfactory. But, as nearly as I can figure, I only read 46 books in 2021. Apparently, I needed more escape than usual, so there are fewer serious books in this list.
Anyway, here are the nine I have selected as the best reads of 2021, in alphabetical order.

Title	Author	Genre
Brief Review
Angels and Demons	Dan Brown	thriller
This book is a sort of prequel to The DaVinci Code. There are a ton of problems with these books theologically, but there is no question that Brown is an outstanding writer. This is basically a scavenger hunt through Rome to find an ancient series of clues in order to save the Vatican from destruction. Think of the movie National Treasure set in Rome and even better.
Before We Were Yours	Lisa Wingate	historical fiction
This has been a pretty popular book, so probably a lot of you have read it, but it's deserving of its acclaim. This story is loosely based on a real woman who ran a large orphanage in the south in the 1930s. But it turned out that she was stealing children from poor families in order to sell them. This is the fictional story of one family torn apart in this way.
Carnival for the Dead	David Hewson	mystery
Interestingly, this doesn't get very good ratings on Amazon. It is most often described as tedious. Well, I liked it a lot. A forensic pathologist goes to Venice to find her aunt who has gone missing. There are lots of twists and turns.
Deception Point	Dan Brown	thriller
This is a very formulaic thriller, but Brown is a great writer. I probably should boycott his books because of his personal theology, but I got it from a free pile, so he got no money from me... A secret under the Arctic ice leads to international intrigue. Probably unbelievable, but sometimes stories are just for the thrill of the ride.
Gone	Johnathan Kellerman	thriller
This Alex Delaware thriller has more twists and turns than Lombard Street. Almost no one is who they appear to be, but can Alex sort it out?
High Profile	Robert B Parker	mystery
This is a Jesse Stone mystery- made so popular through the TV series starring Tom Selleck. I think this is one of the best in the series with two bodies, no one who seems to care, and Stone still trying to work through his own problems. I just checked other reviews and people either loved it or hated it, so... if you like Jesse, you may or may not like it!
Prayers for Rain	Dennis Lehane	thriller
This psychological thriller may leave you unable to sleep. Violent and disturbing. But I like it.
Seabiscuit	Laura Hillenbrand	history
The story of one of the most amazing race horses in history. Although the movie was good, the book is much better. I do like books about great horses, but I think this would be a good read for anyone.
Shadows on the Koyukuk	Sidney Huntington	memoir
This is the memoir of a man whose earliest memory is sitting beside his dead Athapaskan mother. He chronicles his life from days of early Alaskan native life through the modern age, when he became a great spokesman and promoter of education. Some of the reading of this one got a bit tedious for me, but the true story is so amazing I kept reading.
When Stars Rain Down	Angela Jackson-Brown	other fiction
Jackson-Brown was one of the facilitators of the Writer's Workshop I "attended" via Zoom during the COVID years. This is a fictional story of growing up black in the South in the era when people of color were allowed to have positions of trust in the homes of white people, but only as servants. The son of the owner and daughter of the housekeeper grew up together and treat each other as equals, but the world is not yet ready for that. In fact, portions of their world are still decidedly ugly.

In other news: I'm just barely starting to feel guilty for not working more. I guess that means I'm recouperating. I did some writing (probably finished my new 10-minute play), put some stuff away and did some paperwork. And I made yogurt.

See Best Books Read in 2020

Moonlighting in the Daylight

  I'm still in Petoskey. My friends have 2 Air BnB units, and they had to juggle the schedule, and their regular cleaning person is on vacation. So I stayed for a little extra cash to clean one of the units.

I've been making a good dent in my promise to myself to spend as much time as I want reading books for as long as I want to since I'm taking a break from hiking. It's probably the thing I've missed most while hiking. That said, I've managed to read maybe 10-15 in the past year, but that's way off my usual mark of 100ish.

But here I am at a house with shelves full of books I haven't yet read. I managed one children's book (research), one book about George Washington (my favorite historical period), one history of the 1936 U.S. rowing team that took the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics (it was riveting!), and 3 thrillers just for fun. I read parts of the book about Mother Theresa. I really wanted to like it because I wanted to know more about her, but it was pretty dry reading.

I'm really and truly going home tomorrow.

See Rope Lights See the joke about me cleaning kitchens

Newbery Medal Winner 1- The Story of Mankind

 
You may recall that almost exactly two years ago I contemplated trying to read all the Newbery Medal books. The Newbery Medal annually honors the author of "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. The award was begun in 1922.



Well, I did not put this idea off to some future date. However, it did get stalled. Here's why. The very first winner was a book named The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon. I easily found the text for free at a number of sites.


Here is one of the illustrations. The text version I was reading did not include these.



This book is a complete snoozer, and on top of that, it's long. And...it's incredibly one-sided in its worldview. I just kept getting really angry with how it assumes that everyone has now agreed on one thread of growth for western civilization, and one standard social norm, and one set of values that is OBVIOUSLY the correct one.

I'll be honest with you. I haven't been able to finish the book. I've gotten to chapter 35 out of 66. And, of course, it has nothing after 1921. (1922 awards were for books written in 1921.) I'm quoting the final paragraphs to give you a flavor for the book.

Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. First one part, then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions were increased. The sails were discarded for steam. Better living quarters were established, but more people were forced to go down into the stoke-hole, and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they did not like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rigging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden square-rigger had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. But the captain and the mates remained the same. They were appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years before. They were taught the same system of navigation which had served the mariners of the fifteenth century. In their cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. In short, they were (through no fault of their own) completely incompetent.

The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those Imperial and Colonial liners began to try and outrun each other, accidents were bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the wreckage if you venture to pass through that part of the ocean.

And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership—who will have the courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seamanship.

They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. They will have to fight their way to the top against every possible form of opposition. When they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious crew may cause their death. But some day, a man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port, and he shall be the hero of the ages.

After this initial winner, I can't imagine than any other winner could be worse. Or as long. I'll continue my quest, and share.

If you want to take on The Story of Mankind, you can find it at Project Gutenberg. The Story of Mankind

You may recall, I'd only ever read 16 of these books, both winners and runners-up. Now I'm up to 16 1/2. Whoopie.

It's all other news: I mailed all the preordered books, and submitted my entries for this year's Michigan Outdoor Writers Association. That basically took all day. Tomorrow I have a few more things to do and then pack. Stay tuned.

See Newbery Medal Through the Years

Meet Modestine

 
My big ticket piece of hiking equipment this year is a new backpack. I am in serious mourning for Shamu, but he weighs 9 pounds empty, and I just need to take off some of the weight at this point. This one is named Modestine. I'll tell you why in a minute. It's a Gossamer Gear Mariposa 60 liter pack, and it weighs only 2 pounds empty.


I haven't had time to play around with the pockets and things, but here she is with the big basics: tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and chair frame inside. You can also see the top bar of the minimal internal frame.



First, let me tell you why I chose this pack. I HATE most of the modern ultra-light packs. Most are nothing but a nylon pillowcase with a drawstring slung onto some straps with a hip belt. No. Just no. I want pockets to keep my gear organized. I want a basic frame. So, I contacted Jennifer Pharr Davis (record holder for fastest Appalachian Trail time, and a great person, too). She and her husband, Brew, now have an outfitter operation in North Carolina. She commiserated about having to give up a favorite pack. I told her what I wanted, and she recommended this one.

It also has an option to order the pack and the hip belt in separate sizes, which was a big plus to me. I am very long-waisted, and I did the measurements and got a medium pack with a small hip belt. It fits perfectly!

Now for the name. Did you know that Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote what is considered to be one of the very first "hiker stories?" Maybe you did, but I did not. How could I have been unaware of this? Seriously? Anyway, it's called Travels with a Donkey in the Cevannes. When he was in his 20s, he bought a little donkey and took a 10-day hike through the Cevannes Mountains in southern France. The book has become a classic, and his route can now be hiked with much less difficulty than he had in finding the correct roads.

So, I had to buy the book! Most of it is charming, although near the end it gets into a lot of local politics. I can't really fault the book. One takes whatever entertainment one finds when traveling on foot, and that's what he encountered from the locals. That said, the squabbles of the Catholics and Protestants in France in the 1870s isn't high on my interest list. I'm sure you are shocked. You thought I was interested in everything.

Here is one of the illustrations.


The donkey's name is Modestine. She is small (not much bigger than a large dog) and gray. My new pack is small and gray. I think her nickname will be Teeny, but for formal occasions, she goes by Modestine.

Stay tuned for more as I learn how to pack things. She fits perfectly. I just hope all my gear works in the spaces where I want to put it.

In other news: I worked on my list of so many things I have to get done this month, and then I did errands, bell practice and writing group.

See Shamu is Packed

Time to Read - Author Friends

 
Although everything for the past week has been good, all the people-heavy activities caught up with me. I holed up and didn't do anything (including blog) yesterday. Today, I spent almost all my time on continuing preparations for the Writers' Rendezvous which is a week from Saturday.

Other than that, I've been reading. Here are the books I've read in the past month. All are by authors I now know, either in real life or on line. It feels good to spend so much time in books. I used to disappear into stacks of them for days at a time. People (and sometimes even I) thought it was pretty much a way of wasting time. I've now decided it was training for becoming an author.



Reading has become half research/ half pleasure, now that I'm an author. Sometimes I'm not happy about the constant sense of evaluating a book that I can't seem to escape now. But all of these books are good. Only one is not a Michigan author (Big Lake Fugitive). All are mysteries except Tuebor which is a memoir by a Michigan State Trooper.

Authors are Aaron Stander, Peter Marabell, Don Levin, Nick Russell, and Bob Muladore.

I'm awaiting final approval for the proof of The Bigg Boss, but it's doubtful I'll have the books by the 21st, when I wanted them. It's partly the fault of Createspace, because the approval process is taking much longer than it should. But it's partly my fault too. I didn't check the pdf the first time, and the file didn't convert properly, and 2/3 of it was missing. The second time, I forgot to embed the fonts, and there were changes I decided I couldn't live with. I'll probably take orders on the 21st and do free shipping for those that pay me on that day. Nevertheless, it's disappointing.

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Classics and Questions

 
I'm having a bit of a tired week. Can't seem to get myself moving after work at all. Some weeks are like that.

But it means I did not get out and find anything interesting to take pictures of. Instead here's a picture of some books I'm reading my way through.



These are the classic Boxcar Children series of children's books. So how come I never knew anything about them until a few months ago? The time frame is right. The series was begun in 1942. Some of the books were written after I would have been reading things for this age group, but the first four were in print when I was in grade school. The author is Gertrude Chandler Warner.

Since I read every children's mystery in the public and school libraries, most twice or more, I have to wonder why they didn't have these books. They're certainly totally wholesome- no questionable philosophies.

I know I would have liked them. They have light mystery and adventure and kids fending for themselves in a fairly realistic setting. Everything that appealed to me.

Now for questions from a different direction. Questions for me as an author. The four siblings are introduced in the series ranging in age from 15 down to 6. But the reading level seems to me to be barely third grade. It's about a step above Run, Spot, run. I'm not really saying this in a critical manner because they have stood the test of time. Kids seem to love them. Maybe the oldest brother, Henry, and sister, Jessie, provide a safety net for the adventures they find, since Violet (age 12) and Benny (age 6) probably couldn't be as independent as the foursome are together.

Next question. It feels a bit as if the author is talking down to kids in the story. Or maybe that's just the tone that was set in the 1942 book, and she needed to maintain it for the series. There's an awful lot of repetition of mundane dialog. I realize that appeals to small children, but it seems as if the target audience is older than that. So my question to myself is- what tone do my children's books have? And is it an appropriate one? The tone of the Dubois Files is certainly more mature than these. Kids reading them who are reporting back are liking the books. So, although different, I don't think I've missed the mark.

I don't need to feel that my interior illustrations are sub-par because they are amateur (me). The editions of the Boxcar Children that I'm reading have updated covers, but the original interior illustrations. Some of them aren't all that great.

Here's something I do have a slight issue with. It's not singling out this series, but is true of so many stories like this. The kids are able to take on so many adventures because their families have money. Of course, in the first Boxcar Children book, the siblings are homeless. But then they go to live with their grandfather who is rich. Nancy Drew's father was a lawyer and she never had a problem getting things she needed or getting help in a pinch. The Hardy Boys' father was a famous detective- although mostly absent- but as the series progressed the boys did more and more things that were out of reach of most of their readers. They went to foreign countries, went scuba diving, etc. I'm glad to tell you that except for some school field trips, or maybe summer camp or family vacations, the Dubois Files kids and their families are middle class at best and won't be needing passports or (probably) the FBI or expensive specialty gear.

Got one review of The Secret Cellar- five stars! Hooray! But it's going to take a lot more marketing work to get the general public to begin buying these, except from me personally. Have to break through that barrier.

Now I have three little computer tasks to do, but other than that, I'm going back to reading children's books for the rest of the day.

	See Initial philosophy of the Dubois Files
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Newbery Medal through the Years

 
You've probably heard of the Newbery Medal. I've realized since I was a kid that it was a prestigious award for children's books. Today, on World Book Day, I went hunting for a list of winners.


"The most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" United States, Presented by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association

Now I'm feeling quite sheepish. It has been awarded since 1922, with one winner per year, and several honored books- like runners-up.

How many total books? I quit counting at 300, and I was only up to 1991. But here's the deal. The number of these books I've heard of is ridiculously small. The list of those I've read is even shorter. Here it is:

On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1938, Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Long Winter, 1941, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little Town on the Prairie, 1942, Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Story of Mary Jemison, 1942, Lois Lenski
Johnny Tremain, 1944, Esther Forbes
Those Happy Golden Years, 1944, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Misty of Chincoteague, 1948, Marguerite Henry
King of the Wind, 1949, Marguerite Henry
Charlotte's Web, 1953, E.B. White
Men, Microscopes and Living Things, 1956, Katherine Shippen
Old Yeller, 1957, Fred Gipson
My Side of the Mountain, 1960, Jean Craighead George
A Wrinkle in Time, 1963, Madeline L'Engle
Sounder, 1970, William H. Armstrong
Frog and Toad Together, 1973, Arnold Lobel
A Ring of Endless Light, 1981, Madeline L'Engle
Because of Winn-Dixie, 2001, Kate DiCamillo

Reading through a list of adult literary classics can be really daunting. But how hard could it be to read a pile of great children's books? My guess is the hardest part might be to find some of them.

I may have a new personal library goal. Uh oh.

In other news: I worked, came home with a good energy level (couldn't stay awake yesterday) and have written chapters 18 and 19 in The ABZ Affair. May actually finish that book tonight. Then it will be on to editing, formatting, illustrations, etc.

	See Wikipedia list of Newbery Medal winners and honorees
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Still Life with Water Jug

 
A still life is an artistic arrangement of inanimate objects, right? I was pretty close to inanimate myself, today. I got out of bed only to get something to eat. No water yet- the pump guy hasn't even returned our call. Thus the water jug.



Work last night was challenging. We had no heat in our part of the building. It wasn't too terrible because once we get working we warm right up, but it added to the challenge. And until it's fixed the brake on the strapper spool wheel isn't engaging, so I had to apply the "foot brake" (my foot on the reel edge) for every bundle, which made for an interesting little dance routine throughout the shift!

I read a book that had a great premise for the plot. It was even a NYT best seller, and yet, I figured it out about a quarter of the way in. There was a ton of descriptive writing that was all well done, but the story could have been told in about 250 pages instead of 500 and still been good, maybe even better- I got impatient for it to move along several times. There were no big plot twists (or even little ones). It's billed as a "biomedical thriller," but there wasn't much med-tech in it at all, which I wanted. A good enough read, but oddly disappointing. This is what happens to your reading when you become a writer.

Bed again soon. More productive tomorrow, I suspect. This was clearly my day of rest. There is no other news.

	See The Saturday Clause
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Best Books Read in 2017

 
Caught a blue evening picture. That snow just keeps coming down! Now that I'm (really?) a writer, it sort of looks like some kind of writing prompt. Naw... just a pretty photo of the twin mulberries.



Apparently, I haven't been telling you what I've read for the past several years. I even temporarily gave up tracking my reading. What's up with that? And, I have to confess that the reading took a serious hit after I discovered a couple of games I really like.

I only read 26 books this year. Pathetic. (There may have been some I forgot about. I started tracking the reading mid-year and had to think back.) Also, the CD player in my car broke, so that ended listening to books while I drive. Actually, I started about five others that I'll never finish. I rarely used to give up on a book. Now, it just seems like there are so many good books waiting, why should I feel any kind of need to read ones I don't like. For the most part, I get free books from the exchange, take them out of the library, or accept piles from friends who want to offload them, so I haven't squandered any investment.

Worst of all, I only labeled seven of them as excellent. Here are those seven... for what it's worth, and your tastes may differ from mine. In the order read... I don't rank them cross-genre.

Title	Author	Genre
Brief Review
Hiking Without Dave	C.W. Spencer	hiking/ self-help
I met C.W. on a hike with Ester in Ohio. I thought I blogged about that, but I guess not. Anyway. We traded books. One never knows what quality of reading material will be received this way. This time, I hit the jackpot. C.W. weaves the story of his circuit hike of the Buckeye Trail (Ohio) with his personal journey through the grief of losing his brother to suicide. The book was so good I used it as one of my selections for my yearly book review newspaper column.
Ford County	John Grisham	Literary Fiction
This is out of the normal genre for Grisham- the legal thriller. It's a collection of short stories, featuring people and families from the South. Grisham's ability to observe people and tell stories is outstanding, as always.
English Country House Murders	Thomas Godfrey	Mystery
This was a cross between research and pleasure. Godfrey uses short stories and excerpts from over a century of mystery writers to exemplify the "English country house murder." He says that American writers can never get it right. Probably not, but my next Anastasia Raven book will be Dead Mule Swamp Mistletoe, and I'll be trying to at least write an American country house murder. Fun, and very educational for me.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes	Jason Fagone	History
This is the true story of Elizebeth (not a typo) and William Friedman who were the chief US codebreakers throughout World War II. The documentation of all this was recently declassified, and their story could be told. It's truly an amazing tale. Without these two people and a trusted staff that worked with them, things might have turned out differently.
Lydia of the Pines	Honore Morrow	Young Adult?
I blogged about this book at Shark Bytes and Tales. I sort of stumbled on this because I have read other works by the author. The book was written in 1917, just 100 years ago. The entire text was online, as part of one of those open book sites. I started reading it, and it was so compelling I couldn't "put it down." It's sort of a coming-of-age story for girls, and she does "get the guy" in the end, but it's not a romance at its core. It's about dealing with a life that isn't easy, and learning that people you love may not be perfect, and choosing to do what is right with your life.
Rule of Four	Ian Caldwell	Literary Mystery
This is sort of a highbrow Dan Brown kind of book. It's based on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a document which actually exists, and contains one ciphered message as to its authorship. The story involves several students and professors at Princeton University whose lives become entangled in discovering additional secrets hidden in the text. Especially after reading The Woman Who Smashed Codes (and it was pure chance I picked this up a couple weeks later) the plausibility of the story was impressive.
Murder on the Brewster Flats	Aaron Paul Lazar	Cozy Mystery
Aaron is one of my favorite cozy mystery writers. This book isn't even available yet, but I was one of his beta readers so I got a preview. Somehow Aaron manages to keep up pretty much non-stop action while retaining the nature of a cozy mystery. His books are always good, but this one was just fun from beginning to end. Hint: pirate treasure and secret tunnels. You can pre-order it at Amazon.

In other news: Worked 6 hours. Wrote Chapter 19- THE HIDEOUT, in The Secret Cellar. Knitted on the sock. Did some promotional stuff. Will be headed back to work in a couple of hours.

See Is It Compelling?