Hey everyone! Wow! It’s been a minute!
The new year has started and I haven’t had a post in over four months or so. There is so much to talk about in the land of teaching and writing, however, I’m going to go in a different direction; reading.
I’ve always felt weird having blairclintonbooks being the handles and title of my social media and website since I only churned out one self-fulfilling book so far (the other one has stalled out on this laptop, but will be starting back up for the new year!). I figured I might as well include books that I have read this year with an end-of-the-year book critique. This could be a way to promote some books that I really like and hopefully give you some ideas on what to read. I will also have some books on there that will have you questioning my ability to even pick out readable books.
Now, I’m definitely not a professional book critic, and everyone has their own opinion on what is a good read or not. I’m not going to go into full critique mode and discuss literary nuances such as grammatical uses, connotations, or hidden meanings in deep sub-text writing, whatever that is. Nope. This is all going to be very surface level. And, of course being in the education field, there will be a grade attached to each book based entirely on how I felt. No rubric nonsense!
Here they are, as close to chronological order as I can remember…
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
Right off the bat in the new year, The Wager turned out to be easily one of my favorite books. It’s one of those books where you say to yourself They have to make a movie out of this! And what do you know? Martin Scorsese is producing it as I write this! Anyway, back to the book.
The Wager is a true story of a British fleet starting in 1740, where they are in the midst of the war with Spain over some insane reason of a Brit sailor having his ear severed. The Brits send this fleet to chase a Spanish treasure ship all the way across the Atlantic to Brazil, then down and around Cape Horn around the southern tip of South America.
This passage between the Horn and Antarctica is supposedly the most treacherous to sail around with incredible waves, severe storms depending on the time of the year, and hurricane type winds. The odds of even successfully sailing around this part of the Earth in one piece was not in your favor, but the British fleet and The Wager went ahead with the pursuit anyway. This ultimately causes the fleet of ships to break apart and lose each other.
Eventually, The Wager wrecks on a deserted island off of Patagonia. The men of the wreck have to survive the elements for six months. While on the island, order of command breaks down and against the captain’s orders, a group of men make a small boat out of the wreck and sail away, incredibly making it back to safety, thinking they left their captain and his followers to die back on the island. However, when they returned back to Britain as heroes, their tale of mutiny on the island makes it back to haunt them when they find out their murderous captain survives.
This book has it all. Adventure, murder, the testing of the human spirit and social order. Grann also does a fabulous job in describing what day to day life was like on these ships of almost 300 years ago. The characters are what really brings this book to life. Captain Cheap, I felt, was portrayed as someone desperately looking for glory and wealth while escaping poverty from back home and didn’t quite have the best interests of his crew in mind. John Byron is just a young teenager stuck between deciding to stand with Cheap or the other men. Finally, John Bulkeley is the man everyone comes to trust over Captain Cheap when order breaks down on the island, creating intense moments.
Official Grade: A
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Favorite author came out with a new book? Sure, why not.
Far and away, Stephen King is my favorite author with the most books I have read. It seems that he has written somewhere around 126,723 books so far, and they just keep on coming.
Fairy Tale felt different to read than your typical King book, to me at least. For once, this setting takes place in the midwest, Illinois, than your typical Maine location. Not that it has any big ramifications, but a little departure from the norm. The happenings of this book starts with high school kid Charlie Reade, who lives with his widowed father. As he gets ready to finish high school, he gets involved with taking care of a notorious neighborhood recluse when he finds him with a broken leg outside his large, outdated house alongside his aging (also notorious) dog. Feeling a strange connection to him through the brutal death of his mother years ago, Charlie helps the old man recover by running errands and taking him to hospital visits.
As the months go by, the old man’s health starts to deteriorate, as he’s holding back a secret that he’s actually dying of cancer. All the while Charlie is trying to figure out how this man has no history of family and a strange stockpile of gold in his house, not to mention a strange shed that is locked with menacing noises emanating from it.
Finally, the old man is about to succumb to his cancer so he finally tells Charlie the secret of the shed. Inside, there is a portal to a fantastical world. There is a machine in that world that can turn back your age, making you young again and gold can be readily found there. However, not all is well in this world as forces of evil have taken over, all but eliminating the righteous royal family that preceded it. It is now up to Charlie to go down to this world and defeat the ghastly villains that have taken over, or it could have devastating consequences for the world he and his father live in now.
This wasn’t the only book where a portal existed in a Stephen King novel. 11/22/63 also has a portal component to the story. However, this one was one of the funnest novels I read from him. As always, the description of the otherworld and its characters were unique and rich. You become easily attached to the characters and find yourself rooting for them. I highly recommend this book!
Official Grade: A-
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Do you want to live forever?
While checking out some books in a St. Paul bookstore, I happened to come across this one, Homo Deus. I was immediately pumped. I knew it was written and published just before the pandemic, but I completely forgot about it. Harari came out with his seminal book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind a little over a decade ago, and I read it because of a recommendation. It changed my life in the way I think about us and the history of our human race. So now finding this one and having the opportunity to read it and learn how he envisioned the progress of the human race into the future was a no-brainer to buy it.
I was somewhat disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, Harari is a genius historian and philosopher, but it was the philosophy part that got me. It’s not my strong suit and I felt it was a bit much for me. I felt my eyes turning into glass at points reading this book.
This book was still great to read and learn about what has already transpired after he wrote this book-like AI and how that is starting to grab a hold on society and how it may potentially take over us; the people who created it.
Harari also does fantastic work writing about the future of healthcare, and how life expectancy may head north of 120-150 years through the use of AI and nanotechnology that can erase diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. He makes you think about having the same job and/or spouse for over one-hundred years, and how we may have to continually reinvent ourselves.
I still would recommend this book. However, Sapiens would be worth looking into first.
Official Grade: C+
Skin Primo: And The Early Days Of Chicken Island by Brain Adams
I have been looking forward to writing about this one! There is an incredible story about how I got a hold of this one. At my book launch party for Mediocre Teacher in March, a longtime friend of mine, Brian Adams, came up to me towards the end of the party to tell me he had also written a book. I was blown away by this because I never even knew he was in the process of writing one! Most of our friends didn’t even know that he did! He told me it was an on and off process that took him around ten years to complete. Now writing my own fiction book, I totally understand what he was talking about. I was dying to read his book, and he just happened to have a copy, so we swapped books. It was a surreal moment.
When I got home I immediately started reading it. I was completely surprised! What a story! In this book, Skin Primo is a teenage boy who lives on a deserted island with his uncle. The unique characteristic about Skin is that he is part amphibious due to a top secret science experiment on that island years before. A hurricane tears the island apart, ending the experiment, and forcing Skin to live the rest of his days, secretly, with his uncle on that island.
The company, however, is still in charge of that island, and visits the island with their scientists and thugs from time to time. That is why Skin’s uncle had been relegated to live there, to make sure everything runs smoothly at the island. All the while, Skin grows up living the life as a growing teen, exploring the surrounding islands and swimming the vast ocean with his amphibious traits. One catch though, his uncle has made it clear that Skin cannot be found out by the company. Skin only has one outside contact, and that is lifelong friend Helena Moss, the stepdaughter to the evil president of Moss industries, the company responsible for Skin’s condition. Helena keeps his secret of existence from her stepfather.
As Skin gets older, he has the desire to leave and explore what he is missing, and with the help of Helena and a boy fishing just off the coast of his island home, Skin just may get that chance, if Moss Industries don’t find out about him first.
Skin Primo was incredibly fun to read. It was smooth and the plot was clear in the direction it went. The style and voice was like listening to Brian speak to me. The play on words and dialogue made the characters have distinct personalities. Brian also does a tremendous job with his description of setting. From Skin’s enchanting island home to the underwater world he builds, Brian makes it feel like you are actually there. Also, when on their adventures to find out what Moss Industries were up to, Brain takes Skin to other islands of vastly different settings and characters, which keep you wanting to go to more places.
Brian published this entire book himself; which is even more impressive. It does need some polishing because of it, but I am excited to have one of my students to give this book a shot.
Official Grade: A (C’mon, how could I give my buddy anything lower?! But in all seriousness, considering it was self published, it really knocked my socks off!)
First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks
This seems to be out of the norm of what I would read, and it is. However, I just finished Brian’s book and had nothing waiting for me, so I looked to my bookshelf and here was this one that had been sitting there for a couple of years, unread. This was a random Christmas present from my mom and I wondered why in the world she thought I would be interested in this. Sorry mom.
First Principles looks like a textbook, and in ways, it was a textbook. Essentially, it’s about how the founding fathers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison relied heavily on philosophers such as Aristotle, Cato, Cicero and others to shape the ideals of the nation. Now, I noted earlier in the Homo Deus review that philosophy and I don’t mix well, but it was a bit easier in this one. Ricks did well writing it in a way that was easy to understand and relate how these men applied their own contributions through these ancient scribes.
Ricks also writes how these men grew to be the leading men of a new nation. Washington wasn’t considered a scholar by any means, but it was leadership he gained from reading about the Greek and Roman civilizations. Adams fancied himself after the Roman leader Cicero, but really didn’t have the eloquence of him. Jefferson was by far the deepest philosopher of the group, who used the Greek philosophy of democracy the most out of the bunch, while Madison was more radical in his ideals in economics and democracy. Their differences clashed together and set the foundation for where we are today.
Ricks also writes about their warts as well; specifically in the area slavery. Although these men are revered in the history of this nation, they really had a chance to end slavery right then and there, but failed.
Finally, what’s important to note about First Principles is that it shows how these men somewhat anticipated the election of Trump and they had the safeguards put into place to try to contain somebody who has authoritarian ambitions. As Jefferson wrote, “…bad men will sometimes get in, and with such an immense patronage, may make great progress corrupting public minds and principles.”
Official Grade: B This book was better than I anticipated. It reads easy enough considering the topic. I would not recommend this book for Trump voters, however. It goes against practically all of their beliefs of their idea of a democratic society.
City on Fire by Don Winslow
city on fire don winslow – Google Search 
This was my highly anticipated book of the year! Don Winslow has become one of my favorite authors starting with his The Power of the Dog cartel trilogy. In his second and final trilogy, which is the City on Fire series, I started in on his second book, City of Dreams.
This book is the continuation of the intense mafia warfare which started in the 1980s between Irish and Italian gangs in the city of Providence, Rhode Island. In the first book, things were relatively peaceful and even friendly between the two rival gangs as they had an agreement to which parts of the city and municipal controls they were in charge of. But, of course, it took an Irish idiot who couldn’t keep his pants on around an Italian’s girlfriend that ticked down the first domino, leading to years of killing between the two gangs. The series centers around Danny Ryan, who turns into the reluctant leader of the Irish gang when war between the two gangs start. In a downward spiral of betrayal, drugs, murder and destruction of mafia infrastructure, Danny is forced to leave Providence with his aging one-time mafia boss father and a small posse to a new life in Los Angeles.
While in Los Angeles, Danny starts from the bottom with new identities not only for him, but for the rest of his crew. They try to shed their criminal past and make a go of normal, quiet lives. It isn’t until an old acquaintance of the Irish family comes to ask for help in an advisory role for a movie he is producing on the story of what happened in Providence that Danny finds himself in the middle of the old war again.
On set, Danny finds himself falling in love with the film’s leading actress who, surprise, has a shady past of her own. Now attracting TMZ type attention, news starts to travel back to Providence where the Italians, who are missing a boatload of cash from stolen heroin, learns that Ryan is on the West Coast.
Official Grade: A I got this right before a Euro trip this summer and was pretty much done with it halfway through the trip. The pace and style of writing makes it hard to put this book down. The intricacies of Mafia culture and the movie industry were a fascinating mix to me. Also, it has been announced the City on Fire series will be made into a film down the road. City in Ruins will be Winslow’s last book as he will be retiring, which is a huge bummer, but I’ll be impatiently waiting for that one to come out in April of ‘24.
Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry
Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. This one, I lost.
There are plenty of excuses for why I chose this one. First, I finished Winslow’s book in the middle of a trip. Second, an airport bookstore in Spain is not going to have a ton of titles in English. Lastly, I was in a time crunch and was rushed out of better judgment.
I’m not going to really waste a ton of time on writing about this horrid book. Basically, it’s a Middle Eastern terrorist group, with the help of an evil pharmaceutical genius, creating a biological weapon that will turn whole civilizations into zombies while they have the only access to the antibiotic that can prevent themselves from turning into the walking dead. Pharmaceutical guy thinks this operation is just a way to make a ton of money until he realizes that the terrorists actually plan to use it to wipe out all Christians, especially those living in the U.S. It is up to a down-and-out cop and a new secret government agency to stop the apocalypse.
Official Grade: D- I guess I was wanting to read a horror novel as well, but this was a bit overdone for me. Way too much on the 9/11 references and the Islam religion fanaticism. I felt like I was watching an A-Team episode mixed with the movie 28 Days Later, which I should have known that was what I was buying.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I never would have thought I would have read this one, but ma and I swapped books and I ended up getting this one. Besides, I just read the mind numbing Patient Zero and needed to go into a different direction. Why not go with the old Russian classic? Besides, I’ve read a couple of books with Russian settings including one of my favorites, Gentleman from Moscow, so this one couldn’t be that bad, right?
Crime is the Russian classic that starts off with a genius, but destitute student of criminology, Raskolnikov. He is desperate for money to escape the impoverished conditions he is in, so he kills a local pawn lady along with an innocent bystander, who just happens to walk in on the crime. After the murders, Raskolnikov quickly steals whatever the pawn lady had and tries to justify to himself that the killing was a necessity, and therefore justifiable. At times he would have made the nihilists of The Big Lebowski proud.
As the community tries to find the murderer of the pawn lady, Raskolnikov starts to lose his nerve. On top of this, his distant, but loving mother and sister visit him to introduce him to the man his sister is to marry, which he is repulsed by as he views it as a marriage of wealth and convenience, so he does everything in his power to stop it.
As he is managing all of his crises, Raskolnikov finds himself helping a prostitute, Sonya, who had just lost her father to an accident and is now having to provide for her sickly mother and siblings. As both start to develop feelings for each other, he cannot help himself from telling her of the crime he has committed, plus the lead investigator is pretty much on the verge of solving the crime anyway. There are some Tell Tale Heart vibes in this.
Official Grade B+ I really liked this book! I thought it was going to be daunting reading the 600+ page book, which at times I had to Google certain things about 1860s St. Petersburg, and also realize official and secondary names to women as I guess was custom back then. Reading these cultural timepieces to me is interesting. We get to see behaviors and attitudes of people in Russia at this time.
The Little Liar by Mitch Albom
This is another book coming from Mitch Albom, whom I always liked listening to his commentary on ESPN and am well aware of his other books.
In The Little Liar the story takes place in the city of Salonika, Greece, during WWII. Salonika, at this time, has a large Jewish population, and the Nazis are spreading their terror to the outer reaches of Europe, and have now reached Greece. Their takeover happens gradually with Jewish business establishments, next was their synagogues, then finally their residences, where the Jews are forced to live in Salonika’s ghetto, except for the blonde haired Jewish child who cannot tell a lie, Nico, who happens to successfully evade being sent to the ghetto.
Luck eventually runs out on Nico, who is discovered by Nazi officer Udo Graf, where he realizes that Nico is incapable of telling a lie. Udo uses Nico’s truth telling for his benefit by having Nico unwittingly spread false information that all of the Jews in Salonika are heading off to a relocation camp where there will be jobs and reunification with family, rather than the truth that they were being sent to their deaths to the concentration camps.
By the time Nico finds out he had been spreading falsehoods, it’s too late. Practically all the Jewish population has been sent to Auschwitz or other death camps, including his entire family. Immediately, Nico resolves to find his family, but he will never be able to tell the truth again if he wants to find them. Once again he evades being captured by Nazis through the use of his newfound talent.
Little Liar continues to follow Nico through his journey of trying to find his family and the decades after the tragedy where he continues to live a life of lies, along with storylines of his long lost friend, Fannie, and his brother, Sebastian. Each of those two are dealing with their survival of the holocaust in their own way as well.
Official Grade: A- This was a great book by Albom. It’s told from the viewpoint of Truth, which kind of reminds me of the WWII novel, The Book Thief, which was told from the viewpoint of Death. Albom does a great job in setting the stage with Salonika and creating characters you root or hate on, then showing glimmers of the other side of their personalities. The only thing I would nitpick on is the plot really fast forwards through the decades after the war, or maybe it was just me wanting more Albom.
Sea of Tranquility By Emily St. John Mandel
It was time to get out of the historical fiction funk and get into the science fiction department for a bit. I’m not a sci-fi novelist expert by any means. There are authors I’ve read and really enjoyed like Dan Simmons and his Hyperion series (shout out to my cousin for that recommendation), Stephen King with his Dark Tower series, and H.P. Lovecraft with his short stories. It is a genre that is really starting to grow on me.
With Sea of Tranquility, it was a different turn of events from the typical sci-fi that I’m used to. I’m used to the time traveling of other planets and the definitive good vs. evil, but this book is less so.
It starts out in the early 1900s with Englishman Edwin St. Andrew visiting Vancouver. While walking through the woods, he comes across a sound of a violin playing and a strange noise of what would later be an airship, then he blacks out. Days later he would be visited by a man who would question him about the sound he heard.
Towards the end of the century, a young woman is visiting the same tree and is able to record the same sounds Edwin heard earlier. Later, she is encountered by the same man who questioned Edwin from the past, and asks about the recordings.
Two hundred years later, a famous author who is a resident of the moon is visiting Earth for a book tour. While on the tour a pandemic is starting to break out and she’s anxious to get back to her husband and child back on the moon. She is nearing the end of her tour when she is interviewed by a man who asks about a scene from the book of violin music and the sound of an airship taking place in a forest.
The man who is asking these questions is time-traveler Gaspery Roberts, who is a 25th century resident of the moon. He’s working for his sister’s company which is starting to figure out an anomaly where centuries/time is starting to bleed into one another, and the question they are trying to solve is if society is just a simulation of something bigger.
Official Grade: B+ This book was somewhat hard to grasp at first on what it was trying to get at, for me. There’s quite a bit of time looping that makes you put the pieces together of just what’s going on; making me have to reread certain parts. Good thing this book was a quick read! Mandel does a good job in the end tying all the pieces together on these four parts of the story, and does reveal the question if we are indeed living in reality or are we just some sort of test run simulation. I’d totally recommend this book if you’re up to putting pieces of this puzzle together.
The Strange By Nathan Ballingrud
The last book of the year! I got this book while doing some Christmas shopping as I was finished with Tranquility. I was still in the mood for a bit more sci-fi and this one came recommended from one of those staff notes on the book shelves. So why not give it a whirl.
In The Strange the story takes place in the 1930’s, on Mars, which was discovered all the way back in the 1860’s by a man known as Peabody. Mars already has a few functioning colonies with New Galveston as their main hub, where fourteen year old Anabelle works in her parents’ diner along with their dishwashing robot, Watson.
However, tragedy strikes when Mars loses all communication from Earth. No supplies, tourists, incoming ships or news come to Mars for going on a year. Worst of all, Annabelle’s mother went back before what is now known as “The Silence” started, and does not know if she or her father will ever see her again. New Galveston is starting to wither and descend into despair.
One night, while Belle and her father were closing up the diner, they get robbed by a notorious gang that lives in the outer regions on Mars. What food they take is of no consequence to Belle and her father, but it’s her mother’s recorded messages; the only thing they have left of her, that devastates the father and daughter.
After Belle’s father is later arrested for murder, she realizes she has nothing left to lose and she sets out to retrieve her mother’s voice with the help of the last pilot who came from Earth; who is a recluse drunk, a gnarly woman who was with the gang that robbed her, and Watson. What she finds is a world on the brink of destruction, with other colonialists slowly being sucked into the inner life of Mars. Time is running out for any hope for everyone else on the planet.
Official Grade: B+ This was a really enjoyable book! I really thought Ballingrud did well by giving the major players in this novel distinct characteristics, which played perfectly into how the plot unfolded. The pace of this book was great as there really wasn’t a spot where my eyes started to glaze over from boredom. The nitpick of this book would be how it ended. I felt there were some strings left untied, but that’s always the intention of the author.
Well, that is all for this (maybe) annual book review. Again, I’m no expert literary critic, so reader beware. As the New Year starts, I’m looking forward to the books that are staring at me right now. I just started Fraud by Zadie Smith and then it’s The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Don’t forget Don Winlsow’s last book, City of Ruin coming in April!!
