Reading Archives - Page 3 of 24

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

March 24, 2026 / ★★★★★, Essays, Reading

How to sum up this wise, wonderful book? Cheryl Strayed, writing under the pseudonym Dear Sugar, wrote a weekly advice column from 2010 through 2012. The questions covered the gamut of the human experience: grief, love, infidelity, abuse, parenting, estranged families, friendship, wedding planning, divorce, you name it. Sugar’s response often included heartfelt sorrow or sometimes an upbraiding, but almost always a story from her life that fit the situation perfectly. These weren’t two or three-paragraph responses. These were beautifully crafted, thoughtful, deeply moving essays. This book collects the best of those essays.

I listened to this while driving and taking walks around the neighborhood. Since this book is narrated by Strayed, the feeling of a personal connection was amplified, especially when her voice cracked with emotion as she related her own stories. There were times I would stop on a walk and marvel at this raw emotion wrapped in unconventional yet utterly appropriate advice.

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The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

March 20, 2026 / Reading, Science Fiction

An alien from a dying planet arrives on Earth to establish a sanctuary for his home world. All goes well until the alien decides to deaden his homesickness and sensory terrors of humanity with copious amounts of gin. Substance abuse runs through all of Tevis’s books. Even extraterrestrials aren’t immune. Tevis himself battled alcoholism for most of his life, so there is an autobiographical ring to the struggles that almost every character in this novel faces with drinking.

He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray, dismal morning—a morning of limp, oyster-colored weather—to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy.

The broader message of this cautionary tale is that while sufficiently advanced technology may bedazzle us, it will eventually destroy us.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

March 9, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Fast Eddie Felson is a hustler trying to make a living playing pool. He has the talent, but lacks the grit and endurance to prevail in a game that requires a gambler’s mental toughness. As someone who has spent way too much time circling a pool table in dive bars, who, in fact, met the love of his life playing pool in a dive bar, reading about Eddie’s love of the game put me in a fine reverie:

Eddie loved to play pool. There was a kind of power, a kind of brilliant coordination of mind and of skill, that could give him as much pleasure, as much delight in himself and in the things that he did, as anything else in the world. Some men never feel this way about anything; but Eddie had felt it, as long as he could remember, about pool.

There are parallels between Eddie Felson’s pool and Beth Harmon’s chess in The Queen’s Gambit (also written by Tevis). Both protagonists have a self-destructive side, both are alcoholics, and both find a way to overcome adversity with the help of a coach or a friend.

Unlike Beth Harmon, Eddie isn’t a likable person. He makes questionable decisions, treats people badly, and seems to care only for himself. This made it hard for me to root for him as he faced his demons later in the novel. Knowing more about his life before we meet him as an small time pool hustler could have deepened his character for the reader.

Still, if you have even a passing interest in pool or gambling or gritty city life, this is a great read.

The Best American Essays 1986 by Elizabeth Hardwick (editor)

March 7, 2026 / Essays, Reading

This is the inaugural volume of the Best American Essays series, which has celebrated the best annual essay writing for forty consecutive years. This one showcases the essayistic talent of some literary icons in their heyday: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Jay Gould, Julian Barnes, and Cynthia Ozick, among others.

Many of the collected pieces here failed to stand the test of time, but there were exceptions. I loved On Boxing, which I read as part of a larger collection by Joyce Carol Oates (see my review). And The First Day of School by Cynthia Ozick was a wonderful, evocative essay about the excitement and nerves of the first days of college at NYU’s Washington Square campus in the 1940s.

The standout for me was Kai Erikson’s Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters, where he muses about the deliberations leading up to the decision to drop atomic bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Why not a test on some uninhabited part of Japan to demonstrate the awesome power?

There is no law of nature that compels a winning side to press its superiority, but it is hard to slow down, hard to relinquish an advantage, hard to rein the fury. The impulse to charge ahead, to strike at the throat, is so strong a habit of war that it almost ranks as a reflex, and if that thought does not frighten us when we consider our present nuclear predicament, nothing will. Many a casual slaughter can emerge from such moods.
Kai Erikson, Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters

The notion that humans have a natural, unstoppable killer instinct is a depressing but plausible conclusion.

John Adams by David McCullough

February 28, 2026 / History, Reading

A riveting history of the people and events of the American Revolution from the perspective of arguably our most important forefather. This is timely reading to remember the causes of revolution and the original intentions of the U.S. Constitution as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I had been lulled into thinking of our Founding Fathers as selfless and intrinsically wise. McCullough dispelled any notion that these men were perfect, including Adams. The revolution led to heroic moments, for sure, but time has glossed over the miscues, indecision, and backstabbing that plague all of humanity. Adams stands out as a beacon of honesty and decency in a sea of selfishness, pompousness, and betrayal. No spoilers, but I will never feel the same about Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson!

Beyond the American history lesson, I enjoyed learning about Adams as an attorney, farmer, father, devoted husband, voracious reader, and lifelong scholar during a time of incredible turmoil and uncertainty. He achieved tremendous success and suffered utter heartbreak throughout his life, all while staying true to his personal values and beliefs. Adams embodied the very best of what it means to be American.

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The Best American Essays 2025 by Jia Tolentino (editor)

February 13, 2026 / Essays, Reading

I love essays. I have a shelf full of these Best American essay collections dating all the way back to its inaugural volume from 1986. I’ve dipped in and out of these over the years, picking and choosing what looked interesting to me.

I’m taking a different approach with the latest volumes (I read the 2024 collection last year). I’m reading all the essays straight through, cover to cover. This means I’m reading essays I probably would have skipped after the first two or three paragraphs, thinking the topic or voice wasn’t for me.

This new diligence has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because, out of 21 essays in this volume, four did absolutely nothing for me. I should have skipped these and been better off for it. But rewarding because there were a few essays I wouldn’t have read that surprised me. I either learned something fascinating or developed an appreciation for a different style of essay writing.

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The Running Man by Stephen King

February 9, 2026 / Horror, Reading

Continuing my quest to read all of Stephen King’s published works with this Richard Bachman dystopian thriller, published in 1982. The Running Man is set in a 2025 America with extreme income inequality, a polluted environment, an authoritarian government, and a population obsessed and controlled by streaming media and ultra-violent reality TV.

The hero of the story is Benjamin Richards, who signs up for the most dangerous “Free-Vee” show to save his sick daughter. Richards is tough, gritty, and smart. A badass that we rarely see as a protagonist in a Stephen King novel (hence the Richard Bachman pseudonym).

Hijinks ensue as Richards attempts to evade his would-be game show killers. It’s a fast-paced read with some good plot twists. I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say it’s another example of King’s uncanny ability to predict future events.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

February 2, 2026 / History, Reading

A meticulously researched history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Keefe delves into the motivations behind the horrible actions taken by both sides of this decades-long conflict, which I had never really understood. Ultimately, the book is a tale of tragedy and woe for both sides of a pointless war.

There were necessarily a lot of names, places, and dates included in this account, which for me didn’t translate as well in an audiobook. Reading the physical book would have been a better experience, though I loved the Irish accent of the narrator.

Foster by Claire Keegan

February 1, 2026 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.

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Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

January 31, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Set in a near-future New York City, we follow ten-year-old Vera, an exceptionally gifted yet anxious child, through a dystopian landscape of far-right extremism, absentee parenting, cultural diversity, and hilarious yet ominous technology.

Throughout the novel, Vera’s intelligence allows her to wrestle with dilemmas no ten-year-old should ever have to face alone. My heart broke for this little girl, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved.

Of course, without gravity, everyone in heaven would fall straight to hell, a word Anne Mom did not like. But that’s how the universe worked, Vera thought. You wanted to believe someone was in a pretty place like heaven, but really everybody, herself included, was living in hell.

I did not expect to be as moved as I was by the end of the novel.

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