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.
