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.
Some lines in the book are so profound or memorable that I wrote them down while listening to the book on Audible. Here are some examples: “He looked at the cat with an expression reserved for cats carrying Jehovah’s Witnesses Bibles in their paws.” I can’t get that mental image out of my mind. How about this: “He said to her, ‘I just wanted to know what it felt like to be somebody you looked at.'” This last one gives me chills: “One man who cannot forget the past stares at the other who cannot remember the past.”
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 fictional 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 it was 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 reviewed here.
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 scourge. Ultimately, Cook concluded that a usable Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic did not exist. The Wide Wide Sea is a great read.
The “Neapolitan Novels,” written in Italian by a pseudonymous author who grew up in Naples, said that once books are written, they do not need authors. Read more here about these books.
The Demon of Unrest is the story of events leading up to the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln’s election. Erik Larson compares pre-civil war South Carolina (SC) to Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, as she retired from the world, stopped her clocks, and wore her wedding dress forever. It was a state filled with pretentious, self-aggrandizing slavers fed lies by local media about Northerners, the free states, and Lincoln’s campaign. Southerners saw themselves as morally superior and more masculine than the Yankees. As SC seceded from the Union, the Illinois lawyer demonstrated restraint and wisdom as he tried to hold the Union together until the moment SC fired the first shots at Fort Sumter.
In this time (2025) of unrest, our nation’s leaders are turning against allies and neighbors who have been at peace with us for generations. My friends who support this turn-around say that we should not care what other countries think about America, and the suggestion that such opinions matter is evidence of disloyalty. Larson finds an outside voice that should have been listened to by both sides of the conflict, British Journalist William Howard Russell, who lived in America in the 1860s and was reporting for The Times in London. His wise observations about America during the build-up to our Civil War add substance and insight to Larson’s work.
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 Cleveland’s parables deserve more thought and reflection, while others are straightforward. By the time I reached number 40, I did not want the book to end. The last parable may have been his best.
Greer Hendricks’s The Sublet: A Short Story, an Amazon Original by this bestselling author, is available on Kindle and Audible. In this engaging, plot-driven story, a ghostwriter sublets a Manhattan apartment from the aspiring author, and her life is never the same. It is a fun read and could have been a full-length thriller. But as a short story, it was a nice change of pace.
Precipice: A Novel by Robert Harris is a historical fiction novel set in 1914, as WWI was about to change the world. The central characters are Herbert H. Asquith and Venetia Stanley, two British aristocratic figures involved in an affair that could have been ignored had Prime Minister Asquith not been in the habit of littering the English countryside with classified and top-secret telegrams and dispatches. The documents end up in Scotland Yard, where we meet a young police officer who has to track down the security leak in the British government.
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio is best read in small doses without expectation of substance or flavor. I found it tedious and pointless. There is no character development in the endless parade of husbands (speed dating comes to mind) that descend from the protagonist’s attic. The “wife” becomes a Black Widow after having sex with some of the husbands and swapping them for another. One star!
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot is a revered classic and delightful read. It is a tale of poetic justice, decades in the making. Silas suffers a double loss. The truth hidden is still the truth, though known only to the victim, the villain, and God. The author (Mary Ann Evans) has a gift for creating a story and gives her reader insight and involvement in the characters’ lives. Try this wonderful sentence: “A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.” A great read by a great writer. There is “gold” in those pages.
Mad Honey is a love story, a courtroom drama, and beekeeping instructions. The hero is a criminal defense lawyer surprised mid-trial with evidence from a pathologist that upends the defense strategy. The underlying moral of the novel is that bad fathers produce dysfunctional children. I had much to learn about the lives of queen bees, drones, and transgender people. I highly recommend the Audible version.
Twist is about the perils of fixing undersea fiber-optic cables off the coast of Africa. Colum McCann suggests that the cables are the new colonialism, and writes sparingly about the process of finding the breaks in the depths of the ocean and making repairs. He leads us on a moderately interesting journey about the head engineer who controls the ship of repairmen and how his life is broken, much like the cables.
Frieda McFadden has written a series of books for Amazon in the Kindle format called the “Alibis Collection.” Death Row is a psychological thriller, a genre that is not usually part of my reading pattern. I would consider it a page-turner except for the fact that I read it on my iPad. The book was a free offer from Amazon, is only 72 pages long, and is an excellent introduction to a talented author. McFadden, a physician, has written several best-selling books and received numerous awards. I look forward to reading more of her work.
In The Road to Wisdom, Francis S. Collins offers a compelling explanation of how faith and science are combined in the pursuit of wisdom. The base of that road is truth, and the source of truth is found in Jesus. Collins graduated from Yale with a PhD in physical chemistry, then changed fields and went to the UNC School of Medicine and became a medical doctor.
Collins was the director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents: Obama, Trump, and Biden. He was also the director of the National Center for Human Genome Research and oversaw the Human Genome Project, about which he said, “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” Now that he has mapped the human genome, Collins is mapping the divide between people in our contemporary political and cultural climate, and offering wise solutions. The book is a must-read.
Russell Moore, the author of Losing Our Religion, was a solid conservative Southern Baptist preacher and theologian; yet his story is defined by his criticism of Donald Trump. Moore is most recently on staff at a nondenominational church in Nashville and Editor in Chief for Christianity Today. Moore argues that American evangelical Christianity has lost it way and church congregations are torn apart by Donald Trump.
Moore sees evangelicals walking away from evangelical churches not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what it is teaching. Thus, Christianity has declined into political tribalism and culture warfare. He is particularly critical of Christian Nationalism, saying that it is to Christianity what the Nation of Islam is to the Muslim faith. He says evangelicals have to turn away from tribalism and embrace truth and that truth is Jesus Christ. That is why the book is An Alter Call for Evangelical America.
Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969, was hailed as a great anti-war, nonlinear science fiction novel about the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during WWII. It put Kurt Vonnegut and Dresden on the map. I wasn’t ready to read it in 1969, perhaps because it was still unclear in my mind about my convictions concerning Vietnam and the anti-war efforts on campus. My focus was on recovering from my own Army experiences and my return to YVC. Reading the book over 55 years later, I can see why it was celebrated; however, I was not thrilled by Vonnegut’s writing style or Bill Pilgrim’s time travel to the fictional planet of Tralfamadore.
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.
Written in response to: Write a story that begins with an apology. NOTE: Reedsy added this warning to my story, “Content warning: Themes or references to discrimination and race.
Written in response to: Write a story featuring an animal who subverts expectations (like a snuggly tiger, or something more magical, like a literal fish out of water).
Written in response to: Before bed, you put your clock ahead one hour for daylight saving time. When you wake up, you realize you’ve gone forward a lot more than one hour.
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:
Version 1.0.0
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.
The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman
The 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.
