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“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx

Even as a child, I read a lot, sometimes under the covers with a flashlight, annoying the family’s cat. You’ll find here some of my favorite books selected from the many I’ve read, chosen for various reasons as especially entertaining and informative reads.

Please note that I don’t provide links to them here because most of these authors have written many other books, or the books are even out of print. However, your public library might have a copy! (Maybe that’s the best place to find “evergreen books” from other authors, i.e., those books with staying power?)

Fiction Recommendations…

Note from 2/7/2022: I’ve pared this list down considerably and made a few new additions to focus on books that have influenced me the most.  In many cases, the author has many more stories to offer, and they might have even had better sales figures – my criteria are somewhat personal, of course.

Isaac Asimov, Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, The Foundation Trilogy

David Baldacci, Wish You Well, One Summer

Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

Jeffery Deaver, Garden of Beasts

Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle

Robert Heinlein, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Podkayne of Mars

C. M. Kornbluth, “The Marching Morons” (a novella), Not This August

Mark Sulli, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Boston Teran, Gardens of Grief

Non-Fiction Recommendations…

Note from 2/7/2022: Like the Teran book above and the Holzman book in the last list, some of the following, although fiction or reading like fiction, are serious political and societal  observations of the US and the world at large. Most are easy reading because their prose flows. All can be found on my reference shelves. You might want to add them to yours.

The January 6th Report (with a forward from Adam Schiff)

Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning

Patchen Barss, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius

Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into A Bar…

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor

Henry Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence

David Crystal, The Stories of English

David E. Hoffman, The Billion Dollar Spy

Elie Honig, Hatchet Man

Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci

Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow

Adam Kinzinger, Renegade

Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America

Kevin Phillips, The American Theocracy

Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

Adam Schiff, Midnight in Washington

Geno Segre and Bettina Hoerlin, The Pope of Physics

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Paul L. Williams, The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and the Coming Apocalypse

Bob Woodward, War

Stealth Reads – Excellent Fiction Books by New and Promising Authors You Might Not Know…

Note from 2/7/2022: If you peruse the book review archives of my blog, or the list of British-style mysteries found in the Sleuthing, British-Style collections (one published, others free PDF downloads) and other collections, you’ll see that the number of books in the list below can’t begin to represent the number of good books I read per year (I probably average between 40 and 60 even now). I never read bad ones…at least, never to the bitter end! So these books listed here are ones that have (1) stuck in my long-term memory, (2) offer exceptionally original content, or (3) have been formative in my development as an author and blogger. (They might have something to do with the author’s political proclivities or mine, for example.)

S. P. Brown, Veiled Memory

Donna Carrick, The First Excellence

Cristiano Gentili, Then She Was Born

Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies, The Best of Our Spies

P. D. Halt, When Death Imitates Art

Edgardo David Holzman, Malena

Sandra Parshall, The Heat of the Moon

Saralyn Richard, Murder in the One Percent, A Palette for Love and Murder, Crystal Blue Murder

Carolyn J. Rose, Hemlock Lake, Through a Yellow Wood, The Devil’s Tombstone

Geza Tetrallyay, Twisted Traffick