books read in December 2013

Fiction is in red.

205. A Prayer Journal, Flannery O'Connor
206. After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, Alan S. Blinder
207. Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, Robert Kolker (much better than I was expecting)
208. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
209. The Circle, Peter Lovesey (this about sums it up, especially the weirdly dated aspect)
210. The Tooth Tattoo, Peter Lovesey (MUCH better than the last few Diamonds - the writing about music was great. But the ending and villain were totally fluffed)
211. Good Bones & Simple Murders, Margaret Atwood
212. The Headhunters, Peter Lovesey 
213. Inside Rehab, Anne M. Fletcher
214. The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, Mark Oppenheimer (Kindle Single)
215. The Man Behind Narnia, A.N. Wilson (Kindle Single)
216. The Man with the Electrified Brain, Simon Winchester (Kindle Single)
217. It's All In Your Head, Eva Hagberg (Kindle Single)
218. Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch  
219. The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester
220. Unnatural Death, Dorothy Sayers
221. Whose Body, Dorothy Sayers
222. Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
223. Conundrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter, by Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis
224. Estranged, Jessica Berger Gross (Kindle Single) 
225. Descent: A Memoir of Madness, David Guterson (Kindle Single)
226. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy Sayers
227. Lord Peter Views the Body, Dorothy Sayers

2013 booklist 

books read in November 2013

Fiction is in red.

189. An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, William Todd Schultz
190. Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers (Inner Lives), William Todd Schultz (better than the Arbus monograph, not as good as the Elliott Smith biography)
191. The Last Place, Laura Lippman (Tess Monaghan is my new girlfriend)
192. The Sugar House, Laura Lippman 
193. Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, Katha Pollitt
194. The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece, Roseanne Montillo
195. Answered Prayers, Truman Capote
196. Devotion: A Memoir, Dani Shapiro
197. Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life, Dani Shapiro
198. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett
199. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (amazingly awful)
200. Black & White, Dani Shapiro (ditto)
201. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, Greg Sestero 
202. Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett
203. The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual, Kirsten Grind
204. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, Brad Gooch


2013 booklist

books read in October 2013

Fiction is in red.

170. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent
171. The Story of Charlotte's Web:  E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, Michael Sims
172. The Last Detective, Peter Lovesey 
173. The Summons, Peter Lovesey
174. Bloodhounds, Peter Lovesey 
175. Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith, William Todd Schultz
176. Room with a View, E.M. Forster
177. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
178. The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, Nina Burleigh
179. Cartwheel, Jennifer duBois  
180. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer
181. Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, George Packer 
182. Shadows, Robin McKinley  
183. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, Allie Brosh (not as good as the website)
184. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein 
185. The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl
186. The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales, Edgar Allan Poe (ed. Matthew Pearl)
187. In a Strange City, Laura Lippman
188. Poe: A Life Cut Short, Peter Ackroyd

2013 booklist 

books read in September 2013

Fiction is in red.

150. Red Doc, Anne Carson
151. Forty-Five: Poems, Frieda Hughes 
152. Faithful Place, Tana French 
153. The Cure of Souls, Phil Rickman 
154. Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink
155. A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit 
156. W is for Wasted, Sue Grafton  
157. Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno
158. Men We Reaped: A Memoir, Jesmyn Ward 
159. Coming Clean: A Memoir, Kimberly Rae Miller 
160. Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories, Ty Nolan 
161. Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein  
162. Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee (this was about EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES long! I feel like it should count twice!)
163. Whip Hand, Dick Francis  
164. Odds Against, Dick Francis 
165. Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier 
166. Come to Grief, Dick Francis 
167. Doctor Sleep, Stephen King 
168. City of Thieves, David Benioff 
169. The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt 

2013 booklist

books read in August 2013

Fiction is in red.

131. The Bat Tattoo, Russell Hoban
132. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, Andrea Weiss
133. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut 
134. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann (tr. Michael Henry Heim) 
135. Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg
136. Angels and Insects: Two Novellas, A.S. Byatt 
137. Fraud: Essays, David Rakoff
138. Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life, Michael Greenberg 
139. The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox
140. After Her, Joyce Maynard (THIS, this is totally IT. This IS the worst book I have read all damn year)
141. A Train of Powder, Rebecca West
142. Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, Kathleen Jones 
143. Night Film, Marisha Pessl 
144. Let Me Go, Chelsea Cain 
145. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl 
146. Flicker, Theodore Roszak 
147. Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood
148. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
149. MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood 

2013 booklist 

books read in July 2013

Fiction is in red.

111. The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry
112. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic, Steven Johnson
113. The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic, Nora Gallagher
114. Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson 
115. The Cuckoo's Calling, J. K. Rowling 
116. Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, Andrew Keen (brand-new contender for worst book I have read so far this year)
117. The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins
118. Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg
119. We Learn Nothing, Tim Kreider
120. People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace 
121. Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink
122. Summer, Edith Wharton (my edition had a great introduction by Marilyn French) 
123. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, Eric Klinenberg 
124. Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, Eric Klinenberg 
125. Angelica Lost and Found, Russell Hoban  
126. Angelica's Grotto, Russell Hoban
127. Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban 
128. I Wear the Black Hat, Chuck Klosterman
129. London Falling, Paul Cornell 
130. Broken Homes, Ben Aaronovitch 

2013 booklist

books read in June 2013

Fiction is in red.

94. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, Clement King Shorter
95. Red Moon, Benjamin Percy (seriously in the running for WORST BOOK I HAVE READ ALL FUCKING YEAR)
 96. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan
97. A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
98. The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, Michael Slater
99. Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, A.N. Wilson 
100. Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban (aww, it's v fitting that's my 100th book read this year -- I loved and loved it to pieces in my late teens) 
101. The Mysteries, Lisa Tuttle  
102. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman 
103. The Silver Bough, Lisa Tuttle  
104. Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, Alysia Abbott
105. Yossarian Slept Here, Erica Heller 
106. C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister E. McGrath
107. Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, Francine Prose
108. The American Way of Eating, Tracie McMillan
109. Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry
110. The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, Alister E. McGrath

2013 booklist

books read in May 2013

Fiction is in red.

83. Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
84. The Good Nurse, Charles Graeber
85. Call Me Zelda, Erika Robuck
86. Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, R. Clifton Spargo
87. Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee
88. Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell
89. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Occupied Paris, David King
90. The Wine of Angels, Phil Rickman
91. Midwinter of the Spirit, Phil Rickman 
92. A Crown of Lights, Phil Rickman
93. The Lamp of the Wicked, Phil Rickman

2013 booklist

books read in April 2013

Fiction is in red.

56. Standing in Another Man's Grave, Ian Rankin
57. Resurrection Men, Ian Rankin
58. Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption, Christopher Kennedy Lawford
59. The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
60. I Am Forbidden, Anouk Markovits
61. Glass, Irony & God, Anne Carson
62. Life after Life, Kate Atkinson
63. Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, Maia Szalavitz
64. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo
65. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth, John Garth
66. Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, Melanie Warner
67. The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
68. Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired "The Children's Hour", Lillian Faderman (WONDERFUL)
69. So Much Pretty, Cara Hoffman (basically R-rated Jodi Picoult)
70. Tiger, Tiger, Margaux Fragoso
71. Food Rules, Michael Pollan
72. Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, Elizabeth Winder
73. Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Daniel B. Smith
74. Dead in the Scrub, B.J. Oliphant
75. Deservedly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
76. Death and the Delinquent, B.J. Oliphant
77. Rage Against the Dying, Becky Masterman
78. Music: What Happened?, Scott Miller
79. The Other Child, Charlotte Link
80. A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb
81. Plainwater, Anne Carson
82. Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, Dan Fagin

2013 booklist 

books read in March 2013

Fiction is in red.

39. With or Without You, Domenica Ruta (well, that was fucking heartbreaking)
40. Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, Jenna Miscavige Hill (ditto)
41. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Jeanette Winterson
42. Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps, Marya Hornbacher
43. Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power, Marya Hornbacher
44. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
45. Cocaine's Son, Dave Itzkoff
46. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
47. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett
48. A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchett
49. Constance: The Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, Franny Moyle
50. The Real Holden Caufield, Michael Moats
51. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
52. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler (one of the worst books I've read in a good long while)
53. The Old English Peep Show, Peter Dickinson
54. Sleep and His Brother, Peter Dickinson
55. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, Sally Cline

2013 booklist

master list of books read in 2013

I am ALL ABOUT THE LISTS, baby. I make lists of lists.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

books read in February 2013

Fiction is in red.

17. Elegy for a Soprano, Kay Nolte Smith
18. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch (I am enjoying these A LOT. I am also picturing Peter as a young Colin Salmon)
19. Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
20. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
21. Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
22. In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
23. Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, Katha Pollitt
24.  American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson
25. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
27. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
28. To Die For, Joyce Maynard
29.  Finding Henrietta Lacks, Michael Rogers (another Kindle Single thing. Kingle? How do I count these? I have no idea. I don't care about how long they are, I just want to keep track of when I read them)
30. Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
31. Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen
32. A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp (beautifully written, only there should have been plates, not smudgy b&w reproductions -- and not of the banal postcards, but of Carter's writing on the "back." Still, lovely)
33. The Horned Man, James Lasdun
34. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
35. Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
36. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
37. Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
38. The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray 

2013 booklist

list of books read in January 2013

From my Librarything 75 books in 2013 thread (which, for me, overlaps with the Read The Books You Already Have, Dammit thread).

Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.

1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin

VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count:  a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.

2013 booklist

books read in 2013 - January

Nothing too elaborate for right now; I'm just going to split the record out by month like I did wayy back when I first had a blog, because it's harder to remember what I read when otherwise. And I'm just a little sick of fucking Goodreads at the moment.


The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.

The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.

Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield,  which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.

And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.

Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein.  I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.

Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)

Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.

(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time I kick puppies cultivate my exquisite taste.)

Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.


That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.