A native of Sweden, Fredrik Backman’s work, published in 25 languages, has made him a #1 NYT best-selling author. You don’t need to be an ice hockey fan to enjoy his writing, but it might help. I’ve read three of his books, and they are all set in Sweden, but again, you don’t need to know very much about Sweden to enjoy his work. I find the development of characters to be the most powerful aspect of Backman’s writing.
Every chapter is named “A Man Called Ove,” followed by a descriptive phrase, yet I believe the entire work is about misdirection. The best thing you can say about Ove is that he is a curmudgeon with a long list of dislikes about his life and the world where he lives. The book is about the women in Ove’s world who guide and encourage this disagreeable “bitter neighbor from hell.” Backman has created a heartwarming story about remarkable women who learn how to deal with an angry old man. In every chapter, we are misdirected into thinking we are reading a story about Ove, who has learned not to trust people in white shirts. A great read.
The Beartown Trilogy: Beartown, a book club selection, and Us Against You is the second in the series. I have yet to read the 3rd book. The setting is Beartown, a hockey empire that lives to defeat a rival community in both hockey and life.
Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert (1920 – 1986), a Tacoma native, sold more science fiction books than any author in history. I became a fan after reading Dune while a college student. I don’t recall how many of his books I have read, but the list includes Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, and The White Plague. All the books, except the latter, are in paperback, leading me to the point of this story. The student newspaper article below explains why Herbert was on the CWU campus at my invitation. At the time, he lived in the Puget Sound area and drove to Ellensburg with his wife. Before his presentation, I had a few minutes to talk with Mr. Herbert at the student union building, and I asked if he would autograph my copy of Dune. He was sitting across a desk from me, and I noticed he glanced at his wife when I handed him my ($1.25) paperback copy. He graciously signed the book. It was not until years later that I realized how short-signed I was in asking an author of his statue to sign a paperback and why he glanced at his wife. I think he understood why a college student could not afford hardback books for recreational reading.
Frank Herbert has sold more science fiction books than any author in history. The White Plague is not his best-selling work, but it is an interesting read because it is about something hard to imagine when published in 1984: a worldwide pandemic starting in Ireland. If you have never read Herbert, start with Dune, an epic work of science fiction. I became a fan when I was a student at CWU, where I met the author and had him sign my copy of Dune. The story of meeting Frank Herbert is a bit embarrassing, and you can read it here.
The Beartown Trilogy by Fredrik Backman: Beartown was a book club selection, and Us Against You is the second in the series. I have yet to read the 3rd book, The Winners. Backman also wrote A Man Called Ove, which I read several years ago.
Captain James Cook was given special immunity by the United States during the Revolutionary War but not by modern critics who are eager to point out his transgressions. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides is a fascinating and insightful account of Cook’s 3rd and final voyage of exploration to find the fabled Northwest Passage. A secondary purpose was to return Omai, a French Polynesian man, to his homeland. HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery sailed from England in July 1776, just months after the Declaration of Independence. Cook knew little about the American Revolution, but the Colonies realized he was on a voyage of discovery, so he was given immunity.
The author was aware of controversies surrounding the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which promoted and justified European exploration in the name of God and Country for many centuries. Sides carefully points out that James Cook was not a conqueror, privateer, or pirate but a British Royal Navy Officer who was an expert navigator and cartographer with a preternatural ability to find dry land. Cook was also aware that what he “found” by exploration had already been discovered by the local natives. He often ascribed native language names on his charts to areas in the many locations his ships traveled. Cook was mindful of the “eternal and everlasting curse” of VD that his crew brought to innocent women and did what he could to stop the scourage. Ultimately, Cook concluded a usable Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic did not exist. The Wide Wide Sea is a great read.
My Brilliant Freind by Elena Ferrante is more than a great read—it is an experience! Set in Naples, Italy, in the 1950s, it is the first book in what has become known as The Neapolitan Novels. It was originally written in Italian by a pseudonymous author who grew up in Naples and said that once books are written, they do not need authors. I recommend a character map to follow the intriguing storyline of the series. The book has been turned into an HBO series.
Larson compares pre-civil war South Carolina to Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations” as she retired from the world, stopped her clocks, and wore her wedding dress forever.
40: A Collection of Modern-Day Parables by John Cleveland is a book that should be read slowly. I read one or two parables and would then think about the message for the remainder of the day. Jesus taught in parables for a number of reasons (Matthew 13:10-14), including the fact that stories stay with us for generations, i.e., The Good Samaritan or The Prodigal Son. We have the advantage of over 2000 years of study, analysis, scholarship, and preaching to consider the parables taught by Jesus. Some of the parables Cleveland wrote deserve more thought and reflection, while others are more straightforward. By the time I reached number 40, I did not want the book to end. The last parable may have been his best.
Stephen King
Stephen King is a prolific and talented author of over 65 novels. He is known as the “King of Horror,” a genre that is not my favorite. However, I do admire King’s writing skills, humor, and his politics. My first reading of King was The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, which was enough for many years. When I got my first Kindle in 2009 from Amazon, I downloaded Ur, a King novella that was only available in digital format, which I enjoyed. More recently, I read Billy Summers and Fairy Tale, both of which were engaging. I also read On Writing, in which King tells us about what is involved in being a best-selling author. King also wrote under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman, for several years, announcing in 1985 that Kachman’s death was from “cancer of the pseudonym.”
Short Stories
I began writing short stories during the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020. It was a time of lockdown; the courthouses were closed, I couldn’t meet with clients in person, and litigation became almost impossible. My practice seemed to be centered on Zoom video conferences. I decided to become a part-time lawyer. Essentially, the pandemic was my pathway to eventual retirement. Writing short stories became my creative outlet.
Most of these stories were written in response to contests issued by Reedsy.com, a publishing company with an online platform connecting authors with publishing professionals to create books. It also offers writing tools and educational courses for writers. Self-publishing is a component of Reedsy’s services to writers. They sponsor a weekly contest for short-story writers and select a winner after all entries are evaluated by their editors. The rules are that the story must be written within one week, no longer than 3000 words, and follow a prompt selected from a list of five offered that week. The prompts and the contest rules may explain why some of my stories are on rather strange topics. I hope you find some of the stories enjoyable.
Reading a Donald Patrick Conroy novel is like watching an artist turn paint into forms and colors that grab your imagination. The first Conroy book I read, Lords of Discipline, drew me into the author’s world of military family life, violence, denial, discipline, loyalty, and sports. Conroy was the abused son of a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot who called himself The Great Santini, which became the title of his son’s 1976 novel. It also became a movie, as did many of Conroy’s novels. Conroy is recognized as a leading figure of late-20th Centry Southern literature. His writing caused family and other people to avoid and even sever ties with him, but Conroy persisted in speaking the truth on difficult topics such as military hazing, racism, and his own childhood pain. In an NYT interview, Conroy said, “The reason I write is to explain my life to myself . . . I’ve discovered that when I do, I’m explaining other people’s lives to them.”
The books shown above are only a sample of my reading of Pat Conroy. Other titles include My Losing Season and The Death of Santini.
I often read one of Conroy’s novels, cringing at one moment and then chuckling at the next paragraph. He wrote to express himself and make sense of his life. An example of his bitter-sweet writing is this compound sentence: “I never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.”
John Grisham
For many years, I avoided John Grisham and his fellow writers of legal thrillers. The same was true about TV episodes based on courtroom scenes and legal dramas. As a practicing trial lawyer who handles both criminal and civil litigation, I did not see or appreciate the reality of my life compared to the entertainment in books, TV, or movies. At some point, I read about John Grisham’s real life as a practicing lawyer before and during his early writing career, so I gave The Testament (published in 1999) a chance, followed by The Pelican Brief (published in 1992). My misgivings about legal novels dissolve as I read the story of a soon-to-be deceased wealthy man with a broken relationship with his missionary daughter and the lawyer tasked with finding the woman on the mission field in Brazil. I have read almost every novel he has written, including the Theodore Boone legal thriller series written for young readers. Grisham has written a series of books based on other characters who are lawyers, including Jake Brigance and Mitch McDeere. His latest series is about Camino Island, and the lead character is a bookstore owner in Santa Rosa on the fictional Florida island of Camino, not to be confused with Camano Island in Washington State. Grisham’s descriptions of courtroom procedures, rules of evidence, legal strategies, and client behavior are much like my courtroom experiences.
A Few Novels By John Grisham
Ken Follett
This author deserves a special place on any book list with a series. Kenneth Martin Follett is one of my favorite novelists, starting with Eye of the Needle, a spy thriller written in 1978and made into a movie of the same name. After publishing many thrillers and historical novels, he created at least two series: Century Trilogy (2010 to 2014) and the five-book series Kingsbridge (1989 to 2023). The British author has sold more than 160 million copies of his works. The first character you meet in the Kingsbridge series is Tom Builder, a 12th-century Master Stonemason with a brilliant mind for his craft and is commissioned to build a cathedral in a small English village called Kingsbridge. You meet his family, the nobility that oppresses Tom and his family, and the church clerics as they struggle to survive in a feudal system of injustice, disease, and death. Those characters and their children continue in the book series for several centuries.
Kingsbridge series:
Century Trilogy:
2023 Books
Beth Moore is an NYT best-selling author, speaker, and founder of Living Proof Ministries, devoted to women and knowing the transformative love of Jesus Christ through the study of the Bible. I recognized Beth Moore’s name but had never heard her speak or read her many books and lecture materials. Reading her 2023 memoir All My Knotted-Up Life was a profound and thoughtful introduction to a woman who has opened her life in ways most people could never accomplish. Moore says, “I wrote the book to untie knots kept clenched in sweaty fists all my life.” She broke a long relationship with the Southern Baptist Church, much of which had to do with the denomination’s support for Donald Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes. The knots in her life go back to childhood and secrets she kept for decades. The book portrays pain, survival, and the power of God’s healing in her life. The book and Beth Moore have become one of my favorites.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is a magical realism novel. The remarkably bright creature is Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living in a Puget Sound aquarium. It was another Skagit Valley Book Club selection that I would not have read on my own but nonetheless enjoyed. Tova Sullivan is an older woman working nights at the aquarium who has experienced tragedy and forms a bond with Marcellus as she goes about her cleaning work. Life becomes complicated, and Marcellus, a bit of a thief and hoarder, finds ways to communicate with humans before his anticipated death. Each character’s backstory is remarkable and makes the book unique.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann was the subject of a 60 Minutes episode because the 18th-century story of sailing into anarchy, murder, imperialism, starvation, and return to England has so much to explore. A British ship, the Wager, left England in 1740 on a secret mission during a war against Spain. The ship sailed around South America and ended up on an island off the coast of Patagonia, stranded for months, facing starvation in a barren wilderness. If the crew had died on that island, there would be no story worth of a documentary, but the crew does return to England, where a court martial was conducted on charges of mutiny, reason, and murder. The Wager is a true story with all the elements of a double thriller during the voyage and the ensuing Admiralty court martial when the crew is rescued and returned home.
Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks is historical fiction based on a real racehorse named Lexington, born in Kentucky in 1850 and became a record-breaking thoroughbred. An enslaved Black groom forms a bond with the foal that continues as the horse races into racetrack history. That history is largely forgotten until a painting of Lexington is found in New York City in 1954, reopening a powerful story about sport, racism, animal medicine, and art. Brooks winds together a complex plot of multiple timelines and characters that is often heartbreaking. If you read Horse, you will learn why Geraldine Brook is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith is a PBS Great American Read Top 100 pick, published in 1943, and has very little to do with a tree. It is all about the characters who grab your heart, even if 1912 Williamsburg does not. The protagonist is 11-year-old Francie Nolan, who you, as the reader, want to protect and guide as she struggles to help her brother Neeley in a family of first-generation immigrants plagued by poverty and alcohol. New York City was a difficult place for a little girl with so much to offer to the world and to us.
2024 Books
Thursday Murder Club is a series of well-written books by Richard Osman, a British author, producer, and television presenter. We listened to the entire series, though not all, in the first quarter of 2024 and present from left to right in the series order. You cannot trust any of the senior residents living at Coopers Chase Retirement Village, where these four pensioners meet on Thursdays in the Jigsaw Room to investigate unsolved local murders that the local police have let grow cold. Despite the serious nature of the crimes, you will find yourself laughing as Club members find critical clues and make the police look incompetent.
Nathan Hill’s Wellness: A Novel is another NYT Bestseller and NPR Best Book of the Year. It is about a modern couple in urban America who struggle with misunderstanding each other and cannot leave their own dysfunctional childhoods. The husband is also challenged by a MAGA-like father, in his dotage, who has discovered the dark side of internet conspiracies and acts upon them. The wife is involved in the unregulated side of the wellness industry and is financially rewarded, but it eats at her soul. It was an enjoyable read on Audible.
You need to read or listen carefully to the first chapter of James McBride’s well-crafted novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store because it becomes essential late in the story. The setting is a grocery store in a black and Jewish neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, called Chicken Hill. It is an award-winning, compelling story of community, family, love, and some violence worth reading.
Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning was written by Liz Cheney, a politician I disliked until the Congressional Select Committee investigation of the January 2021 insurrection. I disliked her father even more. I was wrong on both counts. The book and the story are compelling, and I stand in awe of the courage and integrity of Liz Cheney for her commitment to the U.S. Constitution and truth. She reinforces my pride in being a lawyer.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens finally reached the top of my reading list in 2024. It is a classic, and I’ll not spend much time telling you it should be on your list. This book is not the reason Dickens is one of the great English language authors of novels that have stood the test of time, but it is also a classic Dickens that offers characters you cannot get anywhere else.
Disclosure: We knew the author when she was a child living in Skagit County with her family. Her first book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, has been the subject of discussion locally, as anyone who has read it will understand. Her family attended our church in the early 1980s until they moved to Alaska. My wife, Debbie, is identified in the book as the RN who recalled Stephanie and was kind to her at a medical clinic. It was challenging to read her (unsigned hardback) book, knowing the family and not knowing the hardship Stephanie was experiencing in the years she lived in and around Skagit County. I believe her book is highly acclaimed because she conveys raw emotions about a difficult life where no good deed goes unpunished.
Amor Towles has become one of my favorite contemporary authors, so I was delighted when Table for Two was selected for the Skagit Valley Book Club. Towles has assembled a collection of short fiction stories and a novella. Table for Two is fine work but not comparable to A Gentleman in Moscow or Lincoln Highway. That being said, Evelyn Ross, in the novella, is a character not to be forgotten.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles is a book title that has almost no relationship to the theme or plot. That is not true of Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance by the same author. As you can see from the cover, News of the World was made into a movie because it is a compelling story of hardship, creating character and integrity. Chenneville is about a Union soldier, John Chenneville, coming home to the senseless slaughter of his sister and her family and the struggles he goes through to find their killer. You will find yourself rooting for John to get revenge and justice for his family.
Lessons in Chemistry is more about challenging the status quo than how to combine chemicals safely. This NYT Book of the Year by Bonnie Garmus is about stupid white men trying to control an intelligent woman, Elizabeth Zott, who refuses to accept the 1960s convention. The book was made into an Apple TV+ series I watched before reading. Subsequently, it became a Book Club selection, and I worried that it might not match the quality of the television series. It was worse than I could have imagined.
Men are retarded brutes who live on prejudices and lower base instincts, and women are primarily virtuous and put up with men to save the family. There is the lying bishop at the boy’s home who thinks only of money, the pastor who does not believe in God, the TV station manager who has to be the worst boss ever created in literature and would make Archie Bunker blush, the UCLA dean who raped Elizabeth and got her expelled from school, and her father who is in prison for being an evangelical fraud and murderer and drove his son to suicide. Don’t forget the executive at the lab who is clueless and plagiarizes Elizabeth’s work. The author feeds on stereotypes and prejudice. Still, it was entertaining.
In response to a question about understanding the conflict in Palestine, a friend recommended The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan. Certainly, there are many books on this topic, but Lemon Tree takes a refreshing approach by documenting the histories of two families in Palestine, one Arab and one Jew, centered on a home that belonged to the Arab family before the 1967 Six-Day War. Their story and struggles become a method of understanding the many decades of conflict in Israel. The dialogue between these families brings light to this challenging topic.
This book was written too early. Now that he is in the news more than ever, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk should be updated by the author to fully capture the personality of this controversial character. I read the book mainly because of the author’s work in Steve Jobs, another bestselling biography, and I was not disappointed in Musk. I can say I’m disappointed in Mr. Musk (full disclosure: I drive a Tesla) since he purchased Twitter in 2022. Nevertheless, this book deserves your attention if you want to understand Mr. Musk, and there is every reason you should since he refuses to leave the world stage.
I enjoyed and highly recommend James by Percival Everett. Do yourself a favor and get the Audible version, which Dominic Hoffman narrates. James is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim, the slave who accompanied Huck on his Mississippi River adventure. Audible says: “Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.” The review is a little over-the-top, but not by much.
I greatly enjoyed Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, an NYT best-selling book published in 2004. Again, I listened to the Audible version and was delighted with Anna Fields’s narration. I’m not an opera fan, but this book moved me closer to appreciation. Bel Canto means beautiful singing, and you will find beautiful character development in this novel about a botched terrorist kidnapping in an unnamed South American country.
We are fans of John Grisham, and I have read almost everything he has published, including Camino Ghosts. You are in the hands of a master craftsman with this book, which is part of a series about a bookstore on fictional Camino Island. I have more to say about John Grisham’s books here.
Our September Skagit Valley Book Club selection is Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, and it will be interesting to hear the comments from our Club members. This is a decidedly Christian-influenced novel about a midwestern family in the 1960s who experience miracles and heartbreak. The book follows an unpredictable plotline with characters who touch your soul. Our Book Club includes men of faith and men like I was before coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus. The discussion about Peace Like a River should be engaging.
A friend recommended Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and said it was over 500 pages (over 21 hours on Audible) and I advised that my book club tries to limit book selections to under 500 pages. Surly, he recognized my comment was more of an excuse than a reason not to read the book. Toward the last chapters, I did not want the book to end. This Pulitzer Prize winner is filled with humor, heartbreak, love and longing, addiction and recovery, structural poverty, and class struggle. There are many characters, and at times, it was hard to keep up, but they are well-rounded and engaging. The plot involves the opioid epidemic in 1990s Appalachia and the destruction that followed as lives were destroyed. It is much more than that and deserves the accolades the book has earned. I knew something about drug addiction from my years as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, but the story of Demon Copperhead had much to teach me.
Dancing at the Rascal Fair is the second novel in Ivan Doig’s Montana Trilogy. The first was English Creek, which I read a few years ago and was assigned by my Book Club. The main character in both books is the Two Medicine country in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century, where homesteaders endured harsh conditions that Doig describes in brilliant detail. I was not expecting Dancing to be a romance novel, and I almost abandoned the book at the halfway point. I grew weary of the back-and-forth love life of Angus McCaskill, a young Scottish immigrant to Montana who is better at raising sheep than deciding between two women who come into his life. My persistence was rewarded as Doig painted a picture of struggle, love, family tragedy, and yearning amid the beauty of Big Sky Country in the final and exciting closing chapters. SPOILER ALERT: A boot caught in a stirrup brought an end to life and a new beginning for a long-neglected marriage.
We should start with the rules: You can’t read one without the other, and you must read The Plot first. These two novels by Jean Hanff Korliz are closely related stories about a married couple who are both authors of best-selling novels, with one a plagiarizer and the other a homicidal maniac. Jacob Finch Bonner had an undistinguished writing career followed by spectacular success with a book based on a stolen plot from an author who died before his work was published. The fictional characters in “Crib” are the product of Bonner’s acquired plot, while the real characters in The Plot: A Novel (2021) have different names but similar roles. Bonner marries a woman with a complex background, and everything is going well until things start to unravel. His wife, Anna Williams-Bonner, becomes the grieving widow after Bonner is thought to have committed suicide, and she writes a best-selling novel called “The Afterward” that fictionalizes her husband’s death. Korliz captures that story in The Sequel, published in 2024, which begins where The Plot left off. It turns out that Anna Williams-Bonner specializes in remorseless homicide and cleverly invents rationals for killing parents, a sibling, a daughter, a husband, and strangers when necessary. If that is not enough, she also steals identities. Oh, and the night the lights went out in Georgia is when our protagonist buries her backwoods southern lawyer on top of her daughter’s coffin. You need to both books to learn how that works out.
I feel fortunate that Rocket Men by Robert Kurson was assigned reading by my book club. It is a well-written account of the successful 1968 Apollo 8 NASA mission to orbit the moon, which included the three astronauts returning home during Christmas. As you may read in other sections of the Portfolio, I was in a bunker on the Korean DMZ in the winter of 1968 and knew nothing, or almost nothing, of this historic event taking place around the moon above me. Apollo 8 is on a long list of events I missed in 1968, including the assassinations of MLK, Jr. and RFK, riots at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and the release of some excellent (now classic) rock music albums. Rocket Men filled in the gaps for me, not only about the Apollo 8 mission but of many other events in the last half of 1968. The book is also an intimate description of the crew, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, how they grew up, joined the military, became astronauts, their families, their Christian faith, and their sacrifices for the NASA mission. The book ends with four words taken from one of thousands of telegrams sent to the returning astronauts, which read: “THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.” Reading Rocket Man saved and supplemented my 1968 Army experience, for which I am grateful.
As a practitioner of faith and fly fishing, I found the opening sentence of A River Runs Through It the most compelling. Norman Maclean writes, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” The book is more about family and fly fishing than religion. It also becomes clear that rules for life in Montana are like some religious edicts; they remain flexible. Thus, the prohibition on drinking while fly fishing does not include beer drinking. The Scottish Presbyterian Maclean clan tolerates people from other faith traditions but has no respect for bait fishermen and West Coasters. This book is character-driven with enough pathos to make it a compelling read. I enjoyed the many characters, but Old Rawhide has to be the most colorful. The description of Montana geology reminded me of Bretz’s Flood and Maclean’s description of the Megaflood that carved the landscape of Western Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Another successful Skagit Valley Book Club selection.
