Top Ten Books on my Spring TBR

Posted on March 18, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is top ten books on our spring TBRs — but first, the tease!

It was indeed a sweltering day, but before she could turn on the air-con, she needed to expel the stale air of yesterday and let fresh air in. When will I escape from the past, or is that a futile task? (Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop)

“When I tell people what I’m telling you, they laugh at me,” Smoke said. “They didn’t used to, but they do now. They act like I’m something out of another century, some kinda throwback. I am, I guess. I’m a ——- arachnidism,” Smoke said.
“You’re a spider?” (Out of Range)

And now, books I plan on reading this spring!

Four book covers illustrating the booklist below; the covers include Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, Crossings, France - An Adventure History and The New York Game

(1) Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Charles Leershen. A modern biography of Cobb that addresses the libel written about the Peach by the likes of Al Schmuck.

(2) The Confessions, St. Augustine. Translated by Anthony Esolen. Reading for Lent and Classics Club.

(3) Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop,Hwang Bo-reum. Translated by Shanna Tan.

(4) Real England: The Battle against the Bland, Paul Kingsnorth

(5) France: An Adventure History, Graham Robb

(6) Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, Ben Goldfarb

(7) Mansfield Park. A classics club entry and the last of Austen’s adult novels I’ve not read. Why does it have to be so big?

(8) The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Barnes.

(9) Star Trek. I have two new — well, published last year new — ST books I’ve not picked up yet.

(10) More CJ Box!

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Trophy Hunt

Posted on March 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

Game Warden Joe Pickett’s peaceful fishing trip with his daughters is interrupted by a foul odor in the air — and following the scent, as the game warden must, leads him to an astonishing sight: the massive corpse of a bull moose that has been surgically mutilated, yet strangely left alone by scavengers. Days later, Joe hears reports over police radio that a group of cattle has been found mutilated in a very similar way, and goes to investigate despite the agitation and outright hostility of the sheriff — who regards Joe as a useless bumpkin despite the fact that our gentle warden has upstaged the good ol’ boy several times in this series. The creepy air around these sites of dead animals, with missing parts and skinned faces, grows menacing when two men are found in the same state. The rumors range all over the place, from aliens to cultists — but Joe, acutely disinterested in anything woo-woo, keeps ranging and digging, looking for the truth down more mundane avenues. This is an interesting entry in the series because of the supernatural atmosphere — not only the strange animal behavior around killsites, but a level of mysticism around two characters. This is the most unusual book in the series to date, as it’s more of a ‘traditional’ thriller than the more morally complex stories from early books: the baddie is most definitely the baddie, whatever it is: grizzly, demonic spirits, aliens, an extreme bovidaphobe. Joe appears to be growing as a character — more confident, based on his prior successes, even if he’s still a poor shot. His relationships with those around them are growing, too: although he has enemies like the sheriff, there are many in th community who recognize the warden as good people, and he has a genuine friend and ally in an….odd character who proves useful in unpredictable ways. That character has a strong presence here, and proves to be something of a mystic in regards to Nature. I liked how Box was able to keep characters and the reader moving through a fog until the back third, when some pieces fit together and then actions transpired to open even more cloudbreaks. Gripping, if weird.

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Safe

Posted on March 16, 2025 by smellincoffee

Alabama, including my home county, was hit hard by tornadoes last night, but the rough stuff went north of me. All of my family has checked in, but there were fatalities in the county and in Alabama. I haven’t seen any full writeups on the damage yet, just facebook chatter, but at least it’s over. I couldn’t exactly read last night, so I divided my time between listening to weather and watching Joe Pickett on Paramount Plus.

They’ve made some interesting choices with casting and storytelling, but I’m really enjoying it. +

And some twister humor!

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The Late Show

Posted on March 14, 2025 by smellincoffee

A few years ago Renee Ballard was an up-and-comer,  rising through the ranks at the LAPD’s detective ranks: then a supervisor sexually assaulted her, she reported it, and  soon found herself delegated to the ‘late show’.  She and her new partner Jenkins’ job is to respond to crime scenes that happen overnight, collecting evidence and testimony while it’s fresh and then handing it cover to the appropriate departments. Ballard is not a punchclock cop, though: she’s not wearing the badge just to pay bills, she burns for justice and, when she’s really emotionally invested in a case, will work off her own time.   At the start of The Late Show, Connelly takes us through a single shift that brings up multiple cases that snare Ballard’s heart, including a prostitute who was beaten nearly to death, and a mysterious shooting at a night club that ends with multiple fatalities, including a waitresses.  One of these cases will, in the course of a few days, also claim the life of one of Ballard’s former partners, and despite the fact that he betrayed her (he didn’t support her claim against the  supervisor, preferring instead to  close ranks with the boys),  Ballard wants to get to the bottom of it.    She’s a creative and dedicated cop, sometimes going outside the rules to get at the truth: she uses her former partner’s password to access his case files so she can follow the leads and see why he was killed, for instance, and she pretends to be a civilian calling in a house burglary so she can then ‘overhear’  the local PD going to investigate and join them for support – giving her the ability to snoop around a house that’s not officially in her case notes.  Working outside the lines has its perils, though, as we see when Ballard is attacked by a suspect and has no backup. Ultimately this was a good read: I like Ballard, especially her Hawaiian background and off-beat lifestyle, sleeping on the beach in a tent during the day when the wind and waves are right. It looks like there are some Connelly novels where she joins forces with Harry Bosch, so don’t be surprised to see more of Detective Ballard this year!

There is a strong chance that I’ll lose power tomorrow (or….worse….), so if things are quiet next week that may be why. I have a Monday review scheduled, as well as the TTT. As you can see below, with this system there’s not even anywhere to drive to to escape! The weathermen are giving off strong April 2011 vibes. I’m going to check out some extra CJ Box books in anticipation. (Speaking of: I started watching Joe Pickett on Paramount, which is based off the first book. I’m enjoying it so far, though TV-show is more of a hothead than book Joe.)

….we’ve never been magenta before……

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Winterkill

Posted on March 13, 2025 by smellincoffee

The peace of the wintry woods was shattered by rifle shots – a series of them. Game Warden Joe Pickett follows the sound and is stupefied to find the county’s leading forest service officer  massacring elk, surrounded by seven massive corpses and an ample supply of tequila. The man is not in a right state of mind, but no sooner does Joe have him arrested with plastic ties than the fed has wriggled free and run into the forest, where Joe finds him dead – shot with arrows.   As a savage snowstorm moves in, Joe struggles to get the body of the man to his truck, and barely gets to the safety of town before several feet of snow are deposited on Saddlestring and the surrounding country.   The snowstorm makes it difficult to mount an investigation, and by the time things begin moving Joe realizes that this strange murder, coupled with the presence of  a caravan of ‘sovereign citizens’ in the mountains, is going to grow into a nightmare, one spurred on by the presence of a unstable careerist in land management.   Although Joe is a good man who hates abusive authority figures, he has an especially personal stake in the drama developing on ‘Battle Mountain:  one of the sovereign citizens is the biological mother of his adopted child, April. WInterkill  is a compelling thriller marked by natural and character drama,   one that is especially fascinating because of the moral wringer it puts Joe through. 


Winterkill makes a formerly subtle aspect of these books more obvious: the land itself is a force, almost a character, powerfully shaping the story itself and the characters enmeshed in the landscape.  As with Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, the land is not a painted background, but a living presence that participates in the story.  Several of the dramatic arcs in Winterkill owe entirely to geography, especially the mountain scenes where Joe’s options are  tightly constricted by both the restricted access and the continuing snowstorm.  Speaking of the mountain, I was very intrigued by some of the characters connected to the ‘sovereign citizens’, and impressed by Box’s depiction of them,  which makes them human, if a bit paranoid. Joe’s ability to try teaching out to them despite his loathing of one of their members is admirable, and that makes his increasingly emotional battle all the more compelling towards the end, where circumstances  and his desperation to defuse a potential Waco/Ruby Ridge situation see mild-mannered Joe replaced by someone altogether, someone he barely recognizes. Box’s ability to create a story with believable humans who have different values and flaws, then throw them off one another, is quite impressive and bids me to keep reading this series.

Quotes:

“They take a woman who hates people and put her in charge of a task force to go after rednecks who hate the government,” Nate said. “This is what I love about the Feds.”

“But if you don’t start telling me the truth, and I mean every bit of it, things are going to get real Western real fast.”

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on March 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Savage Run, C.J. Box.

WHAT are you reading now? Will finish Winterkill by CJ Box tonight; halfway through Michael Connelly’s The Late Show.

WHAT are you reading next? I think I’m recovered from the burnout and will get back to some serious reading. For Lent I’m re-reading The Confessions, this time using Anthony Esolen’s translation. However, I’m supposed to be reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson for class.

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Teaser Tuesday

Posted on March 11, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is top ten books that involve…….blank. I am also drawing a blank, so I’ll just do the tease unless another TTTer’s post gives me inspiration.

“When you’re sneaking up on somebody, you might consider keeping your voice low,” Wacey hissed as McLanahan apparoached. “It’s an old, sly Indian trick.” – OPEN SEASON, C.J. Box

ON THE THIRD DAY OF THEIR HONEYMOON, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy. – SAVAGE RUN, C.J. Box

Let me put it another way. Suppose you say to someone, “Would you like
to hear an epigrammatic passage of dense prose, broken up ad hoc into lines on a page, with the occasional interior rhyme or alliteration or assonance, seasoned with a figure of speech or two?” That would describe the great majority of free verse poems in English. The answer would be ambivalent at best. If your friend is kind and patient, he will tell you to go ahead, while he rubs the back of his neck and glances toward the door. But suppose you say, “Would you like to hear a song?” Then he smiles and says, “Sure!” That is because people like songs, just as they like beautiful old Victorian houses, or a spray of flowers on a rosebush—and for many of the same reasons, which have to do with form, repetition, variation, subordination, coherence, luminosity, and the capacity to arouse wonder. People are happy to hear a true folk song, even if it is a silly song. I’ve never met anyone whose heart warmed to epigrammatic passages of dense prose broken up ad hoc into lines on a page – THE HUNDREDFOLD, Anthony Esolen

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Savage Run

Posted on March 11, 2025 by smellincoffee

Joe Pickett has encountered a lot of strange stuff in his so-far brief tenure as a game warden, but exploding cows is a first. The culprit here was a cow strapped with explosives, making players of Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 prime suspects, but since none present themselves it’s probably eco-terrorists. Joe is asked to accompany the sheriff to find the source of the strange explosion, and they are horrified to find the forest bedecked with bloody carnage — and some of the remains are human. A notorious environmental activist was known to be in the area for some kind of mischief, and he’s missing — but the bits and pieces are those of a woman, not a man. Although the sheriff initially thinks the activist hoisted himself and the girl on their own petard, the reader knows what Joe suspects: there’s more to the story.

Savage Run uses a split narrative to follow two older men doing wet work for an unknown party, work that is targeting environment activists and whistle-blowers. While Joe rides the ranges and ponders the anomalies in this case over coffee and pronghorn-gazing, he stumbles upon another little something to get his teeth into: one of the local big shots has a massive elk head in his mansion that could only belong to an un-stripped corpse of a bull found shot last summer, well outside hunting season. It’s one thing to poach, but to kill an animal and leave hundreds of pounds of meat to rot? Joe takes that personal, as he does the fact that the man brazenly lied to him and is smugly confident that his wealth and pull in the government will not only shield him, but make things difficult for Joe — as they nearly did last time when Joe was nearly suspended for looking into a man with political friends. Although the intensity here doesn’t hit Open Season‘s peak, the way Box did that in the first book can’t be replicated without losing its effect, and this novel’s culmination still kept me reading at redlights and in line. In addition to the high points mentioned in my last review — the charm of the western wilderness setting itself, the way Box makes the reader realize that environmental and social issues are far more complex than people on either side of an issue want to admin — I’d also like to comment on how strong a character Box makes of Joe’s wife Marybeth and their daughter, Sheridan. I didn’t mention this in the last review because they were so connected to the endgame, but both of Joe’s ladies are memorable personalities in their own right, especially now that Marybeth is no longer ‘great with child’ and can be more active in the plot.

And yes, I’m already knee deep in the next novel, Winterkill, in which plot happens with 40 inches of snow being dumped by a severe snowstorm.

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Open Season

Posted on March 10, 2025 by smellincoffee

It’s been a long time since I actually thrilled by a thriller — so emotionally charged up by it that I wanted to will the clock to slow down so I could finish the final chapters at lunch and not have to wait a long afternoon of work to find out what is about to happen. C.J. Box’s Open Season introduces Joe Pickett, a newly-minted game warden in rural Wyoming. Although Joe knows his business, science-wise, he’s still growing into the role as quasi-lawman, with rookie mistakes trailing him and a growing realization that this job has a lot more dirty politics than environmental stewardship. When a mortally wounded man staggers into Joe’s yard and dies on his woodpile, Joe’s desire to find out the truth of what happened puts him at odds with other lawmen and his bosses, who are fine with the write-off explanation that presents itself — and his digging puts both himself and his family into severe peril, resulting in a genuinely nail-me-to-the-seat thriller I enjoyed so much I’ve started on my third Box book in a week’s time.

A huge part of Open Season’s appeal for me was how different it is compared to most police thrillers: it’s rural. It would be hard not to be rural, given that it’s set in Wyoming, but this is especially rural because Joe is a game warden and as such spends a lot of time out in the open country, building elk fences and counting herds and investigating in-country hunting camps on horseback to make sure everyone has proper licenses and aren’t bagging more animals than the herds can contain. This is a book filled not with suits and hoods, but working-class men who wear old jeans and scuffed boots and probably keep homemade beef jerky in their pockets. As someone from a rural area, it’s wonderfully refreshing. The rural-ness is a key part of the plot, too, because there’s a potential development that could bring a lot of jobs into the area and save the dying town of Saddlestring, buuuut the woodpile corpse and what Joe’s investigation of him brings out could threaten that. This introduces another strong aspect of the book — and the second book which I read immediately thereafter — in that this is not a “lecture the reader” type book like Gray Mountain: there’s both moral and consequential ambiguity here, without sacrificing a truly hatable antagonist. I love how Joe has to weigh real consequences either way he goes: it makes his character, by which I mean his moral core, salient in a way I don’t see that often in modern fiction.

As mentioned, I’ve already read this book’s sequel and have the series’ third title in my bag, so…yeah, CJ Box is going to be something I remember 2025 for, I suspect.

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The Brass Verdict

Posted on March 6, 2025 by smellincoffee

Attorney Mickey Haller hasn’t been practicing law the last year or so, having been recuperating from being shot and a subsequent addiction to pain meds that could have destroyed his life. On the verge of getting back in the game, he receives a summons from a judge and is told that forget wanting back in, he’s been thrown in. One of his legal colleagues has been shot dead in a parking deck, and the man’s cases were all directed by the victim, Vincent, to Haller’s practice. Although the cases are a mixed lot, one of them stands out: a prominent movie producer stands accused of the double murder of his wife and her lover, the “interior decorator”. The fees from this case are a windfall, but when Haller arrives to take possession of the files, he finds that cops investigating the murder are trying to beat him to the punch. One of them, Harry Bosch, is particularly aggressive — but he and Haller figure they can help each other out: Bosch wants to take down the murderer, and Haller wants to know that whoever knocked Vincent off won’t come for him next. With the court date looming, the boys both scramble to work. The result is a superb thriller with multiple twists: I don’t know why it’s been long since I read Connelly, but I’m delighted at the return.

The Brass Verdict opens with the statement that everybody lies, and the book definitely bears that out: our main character was introduced in The Lincoln Lawyer as someone who viewed the legal system as a machine, one that he took pride in manipulating to his client’s advantage: not that he’s unethical or immortal, merely pragmatic. Haller has a good heart, if one weary and wounded: one of his new clients is a bankrupt ex-surfer who lives out of his car, and Haller offers him his first foot forward by hiring him as a driver. The story has an instant hook, of course — the Hollywood exe charged with double murder, the mysterious killing of the lawyer that may or may not be related — but the way a multitude of characters here are continually playing one another keeps it compelling. Even the good guys try to manipulate the other: while Haller and Bosch develop a grudging respect for each other throughout the book, they both want to fish more information out of the other than they’re willing to give, and Bosch is particularly adept at playing a few moves ahead in pursuit of justice. Morality is another strong element of this novel, as Haller has a gut instinct that his client is guilty as sin even as he builds a strong case in the man’s defense, incorporating factors that his predecessor and the prosecutor had overlooked or dismissed. Combined with the physical peril and mystery of the murdered lawyer, this made for a great read. Will definitely be reading more Connelly this year.

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