Wyoming: Where the Coronavirus Barely Roams . . .

The first book I've finished during the Covid-19 Crisis has an apt title: Death Without Company. 

Death without company is the unfortunate demise for a number of people around the world, especially in Italy. It's tragic.

But Craig Johnson's second Longmire mystery is a perfect escape from the news in more densely populated places. The book is set in Wyoming, the least populated state in the U.S. Less than 600,000 people. And declining. Twenty-six cases of Covid 19. You've got a better chance of getting eaten by a grizzly.

Death Without Company is full of sassy, autonomous old people. No quarantining here. The novel begins with a suspected murder at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I won't get into the plot-- it's too complicated-- but there are snowstorms and icy rivers and cold nights on the rez, as well as murder and mayhem and methane aplenty. And, as usual, Sheriff Longmire takes the brunt of the punishment (along with his buddy Henry Standing Bear).

I will definitely be distracting myself with mystery novels during the quarantine. There's nothing like a procedural crime fiction to take you away to a different place. The setting is actually significant-- it's not window-dressing. The details are important to solving the crime. You can go to New Mexico with Tony Hillerman, you can go to Northern Ireland with Adrian McKinty, you can journey to Scotland with Ian Rankin, you can roam Los Angeles with Harry Bosch . . . and it's better than a travelogue (because at any moment the narrator might get shot or stabbed).

I can barely follow the plot of most mystery novels I read-- I'm too thick-headed-- but I love observing a new place through the eyes of a detective.

2016 Book List

Here's what I read in 2016 (and despite reading nearly a book a week, I feel dumber than ever) and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can see my eleven favorites . . . and if you're really feeling crazy and literary, you can check out my previous lists, but if you're going to read one book on this list, I would suggest Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather . . . I've read it twice, and I'll bet I'll read it again someday . . . anyway, here they are-- it's a little scary for me when I peruse this list, because I can't remember all that much about some of the titles, but I guess that's what happens when you read too much;

1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)

2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)

3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam

4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes

5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World

6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)

7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)

8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)

10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist

11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)

12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

13) Dale Russakoff  The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?

14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky

15) Mohamed A. El-Erian  The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)

17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)

19) Robert J. Gordon  The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time

21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World

22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger

23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman

24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind

25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts

26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)

27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer

29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly

30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome

32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty

34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier

37) The Walking Dead 23-26

38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs

39) The Nix by Nathan Hill

40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad

43) Nicholson Baker Substitute

44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts

45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.

Rebus and Bosch . . . A Fitting End to a Great Year of Crime Fiction

Though I didn't plan it, the last two books I read in 2015 were a Harry Bosch mystery (Trunk Music) and a John Rebus mystery (Hide & Seek) and in both novels, these rather similar detectives plunge into respective Chandler-esque labyrinths of corruption, and while they suffer some hard knocks, because they both have a code of conduct, they are able to wiggle free from their mazes, whether in L.A. or Edinburgh, and breath fresh air at the end of each story . . . once again, thanks to Joyce Carol Oates for introducing me to Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin as "masters of the genre" . . . I've only been reading about these guys for a year, but-- like the great Shakespeare characters-- I feel like I've known Harry Bosch and John Rebus all of my life.

Attention: Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly

I just finished Ian Rankin's first John Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, and I think that Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin need to collaborate on a thriller where John Rebus and Harry Bosch cross paths . . . both detectives are generally glum and dour, both had traumatic experiences in the military, both are rather lonely because they view the world as a dark labyrinth of depthless anguish and violence, and they both have daughters-- Rebus is a little more religious, but he doesn't press it, and I think it would be cute if they solved a case together, like True Detectives, and then at the end of the novel, they could nurse their shoulder wounds together in the same hospital room (detectives in thriller series always get shot in the shoulder, it doesn't kill you, but it bleeds a lot).

Bosch vs. Rebus

I think I've reached the end of my detective fiction binge-- in a New Yorker article, Joyce Carol Oates recommended Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin as masters of the genre, so I read a few Connelly books and an Ian Rankin (Standing in Another Man's Grave) and I liked both authors and will read more of them . . . here is my breakdown of Harry Bosch (Connelly) and John Rebus (Rankin) . . . they are both no longer married and each has a daughter, but Bosch's daughter is a chip off the old block (a chip off the old Bosch?) and wants to be a detective like her dad, while Rebus is almost estranged from his daughter; both detectives are old school and willing to bend some rules to get their man, but while neither are corrupt like Vic Mackey, Rebus seems more willing to associate with the underbelly of society to get what he needs; Bosch seems more obsessive and unrelenting (although Rebus can be a bit obsessive as well) while Rebus is more willing to down a few pints or some Highland Park scotch to unwind; both men like music, but Bosch loves jazz while Rebus likes classic rock (and is prone to making Led Zeppelin jokes) and though it's hard to tell, because I read random books in each series instead of starting at the beginning, both men seem to be surrounded by women that they have history with . . . anyway, thanks Joyce Carol Oates . . . if you have any other recommendations, just leave them in the comments.