The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987)

Death of a Hollow Man (1989)

Death in Disguise (1992)

Written in Blood (1994)

M is well-pleased with the Inspector Barnaby books. They naturally provide a somewhat different take on storylines with which she is already familiar through the TV show, but the wonderful characterizations found in the show are obviously drawn from the novels, which is healthy and neat. She is working on Book 4 right now, so I guess it’s incumbent on me to order up the remaining three novels.

• The lovely, deadly county of Midsomer
• A book, a dilemma
• Nonfiction
• The current nightstand
• The five books you read in heaven

The Columbia History of the World
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Carrie A. Nation
Writing Fiction, Fifth Edition
The Informant
A Short Story Writer’s Companion
The Granta Book of the American Short Story
Naked Economics
Meditations from a Movable Chair
Five Skies
Barbarians at the Gate
The Fellowship of the Ring

I know I should provide links for each of these titles, but I’m short on time. Sorry!

• A book here, a book there
• A book, a dilemma
• Nonfiction
• The five books you read in heaven
• Midsomer Murders, dead tree style

Just now, though, I have a bit of a dilemma regarding a book I really don’t care to read: Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. You’ve likely heard more than you care to about this title, and so have I. However, it’s turned out that a free copy came into my hands recently, and now I’ve got a problem: read the damn thing, suspecting that it will prove at best a waste of precious hours, or consign it to some horrible yet eco-friendly fate?

I suppose that I could do both. Familiarize myself with Goldberg’s vaunted scholarship (oy), the better to make fun of him in future, then give the book the chucking it will (most likely) deserve.

But what to do with it when I’m done? I leave that up to you, gentle reader(s). Give me some choices, and I’ll try to follow through with the one I like the best. No need to rush. Believe me, there’s plenty of time.

At least the book was free.

• The current nightstand
• A book here, a book there
• The five books you read in heaven
• Nonfiction
• Midsomer Murders, dead tree style

The Don had proceeded to instruct him. “There are men in this world,” he said, “who go about demanding to be killed. You must have noticed them. They quarrel in gambling games, they jump out of their automobiles in a rage if someone so much as scratches their fender, they humiliate and bully people whose capabilities they do not know. I have seen a man, a fool, deliberately infuriate a group of dangerous men, and he himself without any resources. These are people who wander through the world shouting ‘Kill me. Kill me.’ And there is always somebody ready to oblige them. We read about it in the newspapers every day. Such people of course do a great deal of harm to others also.

“Luca Brasi was such a man. But he was such an extraordinary man that for a long time nobody could kill him. Most of these people are of no concern to ourselves but a Brasi is a powerful weapon to be used. The trick is that since he does not fear death and indeed looks for it, then the trick is to make yourself the only person in the world that he truly desires not to kill him. He has only that one fear, not of death, but that you may be the one to kill him. He is yours then.”

Sounds like people I have known.

It is often melodramatic and at times laughably crude. But for all that, The Godfather is just a terribly entertaining read.

• On his way to Iraq
• The London Line
• Yes, Cameron did it
• Disappointment, the nurse of wisdom
• Another candidate for the Darwin Awards

Making Local News by Phyllis Kanis, University of Chicago Press, 1991. Though this study of the shaping of local print and television journalism is over fifteen years old, I’ll lay odds that the process of local news-making hasn’t changed all that much. (For some reason, the old Bismarck quote comes readily to mind. What’s true for the legislature seems true enough for Channel 12, eh?)

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan, W.W. Norton, 2002. All I remember from Econ 101 (a billion years ago) is a series of epic struggles to stay awake. Looking forward to redeeming myself with this text which offers to introduce economic principles without the buzzkill of graphs, charts, or equations.

• Nonfiction
• The current nightstand
• A book, a dilemma
• The five books you read in heaven
• Midsomer Murders, dead tree style

“I’ve always wanted to buy a bookstore,” he said. “You know, sell some of those muffins and a little coffee. I don’t care if we make any money. I don’t want to lose a lot of money, but we could visit with people and get books.

“People say I could never do that,” said the man who started out teaching and coaching high school football for $600 a month in San Francisco and now makes $8 million a year. “The cynics in the world say if you’ve been in this business, to all the sudden do that, you can’t do it. I would say, maybe, maybe not.”

Kathy Holmgren laughs when told of her husband’s musing. She understands him better than anyone.

“People don’t know that side of him,” she said. “My dream is to run a hardware store. He’s the one who likes books.”

Profit margins are so slim at bookstores that selling hardware on the side sounds like a savvy idea.

Following the Seahawks’ playoff loss at snow-bound Lambeau Field this weekend, it might be a good idea for someone from the American Booksellers Association to give this man a call.

Update: Looks like that bookstore will be postponed for at least one more season.

• Clinton, writ large
• A mogul to admire?
• He’d better be worth it
• Would you really rather be in Philadelphia?
• The fantasy football report

I met Ron Carlson once. It was - oh, jeez - fifteen or twenty years ago, had to be. A poet friend of mine who teaches at a local college had invited him to address his class, and I was on hand from the bookstore to make Carlson’s published work available for nominal sums. I was delighted, as Carlson was and is one of my favorite short story writers. Did we engage in clever and informed banter and trade literary bon mots? You may rest assured that we did not. I don’t generally carry bon mots (not even sure where to buy them, come to think of it), and I was much too overawed and bashful to offer more than a mumbled “really like your work.” Brilliant.

Well, that’s neither here nor there, really. It’s mere background for my declared intention to read Carlson’s latest work, a novel called Five Skies. I haven’t had much luck with new literary fiction for a while now; much of it has seemed thin and uninteresting, and I have been relegated to rereading old favorites like Charles Dickinson and Tobias Wolff. I’m hoping that Carlson can help break the drought.

A taste courtesy of NPR:

They worked into the early dark the first day, but the three men had equipment trouble, and they didn’t drill any postholes. Darwin had stepped off the intervals and marked where to dig, but the tractor didn’t cooperate. The day would prove like so many days at the campsite to be too small a thing for the plans they made. Too often even as the days lengthened through spring and into the high Idaho summer and the two-hour twilight, the irrevocable night would rise up between them in the middle of their workings, Key turning to Darwin for the level and not being able to see him there with the instrument ready. They fell into a pattern then without having to speak about it, retrieving their gear, lifting all the tools off the bare ground into the tractor shovel or laying them on the hood of the Farmall, and a listener would have heard only this certain clanking as the hammers and chisels and crowbars and screwdrivers were gathered against the night.

“Nothing worse in the morning than finding a crescent wrench in the dirt,” Key had told Ronnie Panelli the second or third day, when the young man finally understood what a crescent wrench was, the whole nomenclature of tools coming to him in daily increments, a lesson he resisted only for the moment before he saw that these tools were somehow his too, that he would get to wield them, be expected to, without assistance. He knew the language of only two things before this and one was the street and the other was golf, his life as a caddy. If the weather threatened, the men took the extra time to locate and place the tools in the large waterproof ammo chest by their tent. And so their days ended with this regard for their tools and the days began, as they squinted over coffee, in the exhilarating open air knowing where the shovel was, the chain, the awl.

A small confession: Jealousy is corrosive and ultimately injurious to the self, but the first line of that second graf…

“Nothing worse in the morning than finding a crescent wrench in the dirt,” Key had told Ronnie…

…freighted my heart with envy.

I just hate it when that happens. But what the hell, I’ll read the book anyway.

• Things to do this weekend
• The current nightstand
• The five books you read in heaven
• Book meme
• Dead Elvis

• Bush unscripted
• Never. As in not ever.
• Slow re-entry
• Comment test entry
• The post-Thanksgiving blog entry