One Year and Reading

Today it’s been one year of retirement and folks have been asking what I’ve been doing… Ongoing work on the house and backyard, gardening, traveling, our first grandchild and apparently a lot of reading. I checked my Good Reads app this morning and realized I’ve read 67 books since last September 1 including 35 novels, 6 biography/memoirs and the remaining were assorted history, political, social and music non-fiction. And listening to a lot of music of course.

Some novels by old favorite authors… Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool, Tana French’s The Trespasser, Benjamin Black’s Wolf on a String. Also Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin. I also read a lot of SF and dystopian stuff like the Expanse series and the Red Rising series that held my attention over multiple books. Over the years I’ve read everything by Neil Stephenson but somehow missed Snow Crash which I remedied last spring. Also Paulette Jiles' News of the World.

I read a lot of political books too… an essential that everyone should read is Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Also Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Noam Chomsky’s Who Rules The World, George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

Some other great reads from my list… Patti Smith’s M Train , Blair Tindell’s Mozart in the Jungle, Graham Nash’s Wild Tales, Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run and David Hajdu’s Love For Sale: Pop Music in America. Also William Knoedelseder’s Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s King of Beers.