2025 Book List

1) The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

2) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

3) IQ by Joe Ide

4) Save Our Souls: The True Story of A Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl

5) The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

6) Never Tell by Lisa Gardner

7) The Loom of Time: Between Anarchy and Empire, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan

8) The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

9) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

10) Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig Johnson

11) The Getaway by Jim Thompson

12) Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

13) Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

14) A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson

15) Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

16) Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

17) Lexicon by Max Barry

18) Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III

19) Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman

20) The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

21) Hang On, St. Christopher by Adrian McKinty

22) Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough 

23) The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

24) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

25) Gringos by Charles Portis

26) Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

27) Red Chameleon by Stuart M. Kaminsky

28)  A Taste for Death by PD James

29)  The Trespasser by Tana French

30) Broken Harbor by Tana French

31) King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

32) Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

33) The Secret Place by Tana French

34) The Likeness by Tana French

35) Hot Money by Dick Francis

36) The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp

37) A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen

38) Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

39) Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

40) Harold by Stephen Wright

41) The Hunter by Tana French

42) Facing East From Indian Country

43) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

44) Time and Again by Clifford Simak

45) The Time Traders by Andre Norton

46) Starter Villain by John Scalzi

47) The Doorman by Chris Pavone

And a few mammoth non-fiction books that I've been reading all year on my Kindle, which I hope to finish in 2026. . .

Reaganland by Rick Perlstein

The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 by Philip Blom

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Forgotten Continent: A History of New Latin America by Michael Reid

Back From Philly with the Goods

We are back from Philly, with to-go sandwiches from Reading Terminal (including roasted pork with sharp provolone, peppers, and greens from DiNic's-- my favorite sandwich in Philly) and while I couldn't walk as much as normal while we were there because my knee probably needs THIS again-- yuck-- we still made it out last night-- we went to Double Knot for happy hour drinks, sushi, bao buns, and dumplings-- there was a line to get in at 4 PM and then we stopped at McGillin's Olde (VERY OLD!) Ale House for a couple of O'Hara's, but now I have my knee raised up on pillows, hoping that will stop the swelling, and I will be taking it easy for the rest of winter break.

Crullers, Calder, and Cheesesteaks

Typical day in Philly: donuts from the Amish bakery at Reading Terminal Market, a visit to the new Calder Sculpture Garden and Museum, a cheesesteak at Shay's, and then we retreated to Stacey's apartment so I could rest my stupid swollen knee; last night, we enjoyed dumplings at Emei and beer at Love City Brewing, where we watched the Eagles eke out a victory over the Bills . . . there's nothing like a Philly bar during an Eagles game (even if you're secretly rooting for Buffalo to take it into overtime).

The Stupor Bowl?

I thought of an apt name for today's Giants vs. Raiders game-- both teams sport a 2-13 record-- and so I came up with "Stupor Bowl" but apparently that name is spoken for, and The Stupor Bowl is "an infamous, annual underground bicycle messenger race in Minneapolis, held the day before the NFL's Super Bowl, known for its drinking checkpoints and scavenger hunt format, combining speed with endurance and liver training" and it is real, very real.

The Weather is Winning . . .

The cold weather, my swollen knee, the crusty snow, and the lack of sunlight-- these have put me into hibernation mode-- and even coffee is losing its ability to knock me out of it.

Best For Last . . .

I am assuming Chris Pavone's The Doorman will be the last book I finish in 2025, and it was my favorite-- a thriller with plenty of social, racial, and class commentary; the novel's center is a working-class doorman (Chicky) with working-class problems, and his interactions with the very, very rich residents of the fancy Upper East Side apartment where he works-- and they have very, very rich problems-- and all the problems collide into a wonderfully stressful mess: this book feels like a tightly plotted modern version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, with some Richard Price NYC tone thrown in for good measure-- definitely worth reading.

Crokinole Christmas!

My wife and I had a lovely Christmas Eve with the boys and Ian's girlfriend Kyla-- my wife made chicken cordon bleu and some fantastic mac and cheese-- and the evening was made even more lovely by my impulse Christmas purchase of a crokinole board-- I broke it out on Christmas Eve, and I don't know how we've lived our lives without this classic Canadian game of masterful flicking and dexterity-- while the board is a bit large, I'm even thinking of bringing it to my mom's house for Christmas Day-- while there were certainly many other fabulous gifts given and recieved today, crokinole might actually be one for the ages.

Like Old Times . . . But Older

Yesterday, Ian and I picked up Alex in New Brunswick, we ate some cheesesteaks, and then we all went to the YMCA and played some three-on-three hoops-- my two sons and I against some youngsters (one of whom was very tall and could dunk with ease)— and even though Ian was out of practice and cramping and I am old, Alex was able to pour in a bunch of three-pointers and mid-range jumpers and we beat the seventeen-year-old several games in a row (after I bested my children in a game of 21, due to some excellent free throw shooting) but today does not seem like old times for me . . . it just seems like I am old because my knee hurts (although the boys went back to the Y and played more basketball, but I had to lift weights and ride the bike . . . boo for old age).

The Truth Doesn't Always Sound Good

I made a musical trivia quiz today for my Music and the Arts class and part of the quiz was about which artists were popular in each decade, and I learned that the artists that sold the most albums in the 1990s were not the artists I thought were popular at the time (aside from Nirvana) because I thought everyone was listening to Pearl Jam and The Pixies and Soundgarden and 2Pac and Biggie and the Wu Tang Clan and Rage Against the Machine and Weezer and Radiohead and Beck and Jane's Addiction and Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul and the Beastie Boys and the Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins but I was in my twenties and demographically skewed . . . here's the actual top ten selling artists of the 1990s:

Céline Dion

Mariah Carey

Garth Brooks

Whitney Houston

Nirvana

Michael Jackson

Metallica

Backstreet Boys

Shania Twain

Madonna.

Trump = Don Quixote?

Donald Trump-- in one of his most deranged moves to date-- continues his quixotic battle against windmills, halting five developing wind farms off the East Coast and essentially, according to the New York Times, "gutting the industry" and vaporizing ten thousand jobs and jeopardizing billions of dollars in investments . . . Trump cites fabricated "national security concerns" as the reason for ending these green energy projects, which were supposed to power 2.5 million homes and will instead reduce the efficiency of the electrical grid and make us more reliant on traditional (and expensive) energy sources . . . what is wrong with this man, and why isn't anyone in our government standing up to him?

(Slightly) Brighter Days Ahead

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and thus the darkest fucking day of the year . . . but tomorrow we will have a couple more seconds of sunlight and by January-- and this has something to do with the tilt of the earth and angles and lag time and ellipses . . . way above my pay grade-- we'll be gaining two minutes of sunlight each day . . . which will be fantastic because when it's dark like this, I want to go to bed at 7 PM.

Follow the Link For the Recs . . .

I did my usual "Seven Books for Reading" post over at Gheorghe: The Blog today . . . if you're looking for a good book, check it out.

Not Following Directions (Because They Are Insane)

Does anyone actually:

1) rinse and drain quinoa thoroughly in cold water before cooking?

2) determine doneness by the visible germ ring on the outside edge of the grain?

because these are the specific instructions on the back of TRADER JOE'S Organic Tricolor Quinoa, and while I like to follow food hygiene instructions and recommendations--

1) quinoa grains are much too tiny to rinse in a colander-- they would go through the holes!

2) quinoa grains are way too small to examine in such a precise manner;

so WTF?

Enough With the Time Wars . . .

I'm not sure how-- serendipity, I guess-- but I just finished another sci-fi book written in the 1950s that details a war being waged throughout time . . . this one, The Time Traders, by Andre Norton, is much faster-paced than Simak's Time and Again-- although it features an American rehabilitation prison/time traveller program, a hostile advanced alien race and the Russians, and everyone is at odds with one another, this is really more of a Bell Beaker-era (2000 B.C.) survival tale, with some interesting anthropological details (and a bunch of sci-fi action) and the usual cautionary lesson, that when you fuck with the past, things are going to get ugly-- but with the additional idea that there may have been great technological wonders in the past, whether alien-made or human-made, that were lost in the haze of the millenia-- modern humans have only been around for 300,000 years . . . in the millions and millions of years of life on earth, advanced technologies could have risen and decayed and left no trace (although this is highly unlikely-- they probably woudl have left some chemical fingerprint or isotopic anomaly).

Dave "Works" From Home

I decided to give working from home a try today-- I've got a cold, and I'm losing my voice, so I didn't feel up to inspiring the youth to write without "help" from AI . . . despite my illness, I did sweep, vacuum, and mop the floors and I cleaned three bathrooms, but no matter how much you clean the floor, there's still dog hair-- it's very resilient stuff.

Even With Some Help, I Don't Think Our Brains Will Ever Work This Well

Time and Again is more profound and serious than most of the Clifford Simak books I've read (Mastodonia, They Walked Like Men, The Goblin Reservation, City) and while the book has some fun sci-fi tropes-- a war throughout time, androids that can chemically reproduce vying for human rights-- it also has that 1950s transcendent evolutionary vibe that seems naive today . . . the idea that humans will eventually, possibly with the help of alien intelligence, become something mentally more, something psionic and telepathic and revolutionary . . . and maybe I'm being pessimistic and thispsychological transcendence is possible, but I'm more of the feeling that the huan race is going to be perpetually stupid until we exterminate ourselves.

Are People Actually Working at Home?

Despite the cold and the ice and the preponderance of delayed openings in the surrounding counties, Middlesex County schools did NOT have a delay this morning-- so I'd like to send a big FU out to anyone who "works from home."

Ignoring the Unspeakable

Today was an apt day to finish  Omar El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (a title which reminds me of a book I read about the Rwanda genocide called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families) since the news is filled with unspeakable gun violence and mass shootings-- which Americans will be ignoring soon enough-- Akkad wants people to stop looking away from the horror, especially the horror in Gaza, perpetrated by what he views as the ugly business of imperialism, supported by the U.S. military industrial complex, political machinery, and media . . . here's a passage from the end that gives an idea of his tone:

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who will say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the border of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it will come to our doorstep, even our doorstep n the last coded bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it's important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things. One day it will be unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.

it is rough stuff and an especially controversial topic around my area because we have both a sizeable Jewish and Muslim population, there are people on both sides of this issue, and I don't see any resolution other than more violence, suppression, terrorism, displacement, starvation, military incursions, explosions, and horror.

More War

 

Another dark episode of We Defy Augury . . . some thoughts (loosely) inspired by Daniel A. Sjursen's book "A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism" -- I got so bogged down in the shit in this one that I've decided to take a break and perhaps pursue a different idea for a podcast-- because I really don't want to make an episode based on the book I'm reading now, Omar El Akkad's indictment about the liberal media and governmental response to the Israel/Palestine conflict One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This  . . . his point, that the logical, moral position is not halfway between the right and the left-- as they are both ignoring reality-- and the center is as morally repugnant in it's policy and more milquetoast and unfocused, especially when atrocities are being committed and a people are being displaced and destroyed . . . I'm about two-thirds of the way through and I don't see a happy ending to this story, now or in the future.

If You're Getting Up Early, You Might As Well Shoot the Ball

While I normally avoid Route 18-- it has been under construction for years-- I will sometimes gamble and take it when I'm playing early morning basketball, as there's less traffic at 6:15 AM-- but today, instead of lane closures, the entire road was closed and so I arrived at basketball late and angry and had to sit the first game-- but this did give me time to warm up, and either the extra shooting practice or my road rage inspired me and I made my first five shots, all three pointers-- so five in a row for the fifty-five year old-- which made the youngsters very excited . . . but they also started switching off and covering me very tightly . . . so I took a couple more NBA range shots, which oddly, went long, perhaps because I've been ingesting creatine and I'm super jacked-- but whatever, it's quite fun to have the hot-hand once in a while.