Russell Banks is an excellent author, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Reserve (2008) is good. Well written.

But ultimately didn’t win me over.

… set on the cusp of the 2nd World War, … raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules.

Vanessa Cole is a stunningly beautiful and wild heiress. Twice-married, she has been scandalously linked to rich and famous men.

On the night of July 4, 1936, inside her family’s remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as the Reserve, Vanessa will lose her father to a heart attack—and meet Jordan Groves, a seductively carefree local artist.

Jordan is easy prey for Vanessa’s electrifying charm. But when Vanessa becomes unhinged by her father’s unexpected death, she begins to spin out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.

Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondacks to war-torn Spain and fascist Germany …

Click PLAY or watch an interview, late in life, on YouTube.

The 24th book (2024) in the Joe Pickett series is Three-Inch Teeth.

Excellent. As are all the rest.

A rogue grizzly bear has gone on a rampage—killing, among others, the potential fiancé of Joe’s daughter.

At the same time, Dallas Cates, who Joe helped lock up years ago, is released from prison with a special list tattooed on his skin. He wants revenge on the people who sent him away: the six people he blames for the deaths of his entire family and the loss of his reputation and property.

Yellowface (2023) written by R. F. Kuang is a satire of racial diversity in the publishing industry as well as a metafiction about social media, particularly Twitter.

Super popular, it sounded right up my alley.

The first quarter of the book was engaging. An interesting plot.

June Hayward, an unsuccessful young author, finds herself the only witness to the death of her former classmate and casual friend, Athena Liu, a Chinese-American author who is an industry darling.

She decides to position herself as best friend of the author and begins to edit and re-write Athena’s manuscript, a novel about Chinese laborers in World War I.

As she changes more and more of the draft, June begins to feel ownership over the novel and decides to publish it as her original work.  …

It started to drag. Too much doom scrolling on Twitter. Too repetitious.

Finally — I quit about half way through the book.

Paul Theroux is a jerk — but I’d rank him one of the top wordsmiths working today.

This man can write.

Now age-82, Theroux’s 2024 book is as sharp and insightful as ever.

Burma Sahib is the story of George Orwell’s Burmese days. Back when he was in his snivelling early 20s.

A fictional rewriting of young Eric Blair’s years with the police in Burma. Eric Blair is Orwell’s real name.

He arrived Mandalay 1922, age-19, fresh out of Eton.

As unimpressive and pitiable as any Brit in the Raj.

His story is depressing. Mostly colonial bigotry and hateful racism.

Sunburned officer smoking and drinking their lives away.

… the young probationary policeman, bookish and too tall, is plagued not only by the vicious mosquitoes of the river delta but by a pathological awkwardness. …

Theroux, like Orwell, is the sharpest observer of the nonsenses of the class system …

Guardian – Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux review – George Orwell’s Burmese days vibrantly brought to life

Though it got mixed reviews, this book kept me going.

16-year-old Shay Renby arrives in Hollywood with $58 and a handmade knife. She’s got to find her brother before Singular does….

Odin’s a brilliant hacker but a bit of a loose cannon. He and a group of radical animal rights activists hit a Singular Corporation research lab. The raid was a disaster, but Odin escaped with a set of highly encrypted flash drives and a post-surgical dog.

When Shay gets a frantic 3 a.m. phone call from Odin — talking about evidence of unspeakable experiments, and a ruthless corporation, and how he must hide — she’s concerned.

When she gets a menacing visit from Singular’s security team, she knows: her brother’s a dead man walking.

What Singular doesn’t know — yet — is that 16-year-old Shay is every bit as ruthless as their security force, and she will burn Singular to the ground, if that’s what it takes to save her brother…

One of  Robert A. Heinlein‘s most influential novels.

The book that coined the term grok. I use it all the time.

Jubal Harshaw, a famous author, physician and lawyer, is the most entertaining character.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein (1961)

Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, brings light to all the silly, stupid conventions of Earth.

Heinlein named his main character “Smith” because he was disappointed in the unpronounceable names assigned to extraterrestrials in most science fiction.

The given names of the chief characters have great importance to the plot. They were carefully selected: Jubal means ‘the father of all, ‘ Michael stands for ‘Who is like God?’

It’s a philosophical and thought providing read.

Plenty of sex to keep the teenage male audience absorbed.

Stranger is one of many books which pose provocative situations, challenging conventional social mores.

The importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government.

The free love and commune living aspects led to the book’s exclusion from school reading lists in the USA.

I still like the book — though this review is not wrong:

 The New York Times, Orville Prescott received the novel caustically, describing it as a “disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism”; he characterized Stranger in a Strange Land as “puerile and ludicrous”, saying “when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers”.

Bill Gates liked it too,

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