#25 Happy Thanksgiving 11/27/2025 and Some Really Good Reads!

Thanks to my parents, Mildred and Harry, who read to and with me at the outset and the teachers at St. Pauls, Hammond especially those early teachers-Edna Hoemann, Bill Hoffmann and Dave Brandt who really got me going. Especial thanks to the public librarians at the Harrison Park Branch who let me read in the Adult Area and made many good recommendations!

So, what's worth your time and effort to read? My last 8 months of fun reading-in alphabetical order- includes Lou Berney's DARK RIDE, a shorter work from the Edgar Award Winner who seems to be undeservedly a little under the radar as an author. Hardy "Hardly" Reed is a 21 year old "actor" in a local "horror" theme park, usually stoned who is totally irresponsible. But one day while waiting to pay a ticket at the city hall, Hardly sees two children, ages about 7 and 9, sitting on a bench near him. Both appear to have physical injuries and don't respond when he asks if they are okay. When their mother collects them and ignores Hardly's questions, he takes on a first-time inquiry into what's going on. And for his first time, Hardly's  looking out for someone else, plotting how he'll uncover their story. The trail heads downhill for Hardly as the parent's background presents violence and crime. 

James Church, a pseudonym for a retired US intelligence officer who worked primarily in the Koreas is next up. His six book series begins with A CORPSE IN THE KORYO(2006) through The GENTLEMAN FROM JAPAN (2016) and present amazing insight into life in North Korea. Inspector O is with the capital city police but gets entangled with national and international politics and crime in the richly drawn and quite horrible environment of North Korea under the Kim dictatorship. If you like Arkady Renko (Russia) books by Martin Cruz Smith and the Philip Kerr Bernie Gunther (Germany) series, give Church a try. You won't regret it.

Sulari Gentill, a Sri Lankan author living in Australia, has a new novel FIVE FOUND DEAD to add to her Rowland Sinclair series and her Woman in the Library. Australian crime fiction author Joe Penvale and his twin sister Meredith are celebrating his post-cancer with a trip from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. Their deluxe trip is interrupted when bodies start showing up in the train cabin next door and throughout the train. They realize that not only are they in danger but someone is mimicking Agatha Christie. And then the covid epidemic totally changes the train trip.

Best-selling author Tom Perrotta has a new novel, GHOST TOWN that presents an author returning to his suburban New Jersey town after decades away to participate in the dedication of a building named for his late father, a firefighter, who died in a rescue attempt. The author Jimmy Perrini returns by memory to his 1970s town that he grew up in after his mother's tragic death as he was just graduating 8th grade and starting high school. He relives those tough years with his distant father while he hung out with the wrong guys and with a girl at school who relies on the Ouija board for all her and Jimmy's instruction and decisions.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan is a big book- 452 pages-- that contains so much.  The world and lives of four people are offered intertwined with the past of post-WW 1 parents, into and through WW ll into the recent past, all focused on a small town, Bonhomie in northwest Ohio. Two married couples, one native to Bonhomie and the other resettled there from the big city, Columbus, are four individuals who have history as an abandoned baby raised in an orphanage, a person who can hear from the dead, a WWll sailor who barely survives a torpedo attack of his ship, another man who can't physically serve the war effort, and a beautiful woman. Their lives intertwine in very realistic, historic stanzas in this highly colored novel. 

Callan Wink's debut BEARTOOTH is set in Montana just outside Yellowstone NP. Two brothers scrape by cutting timber for fire wood while trying to preserve the cabin their late father built. An offer from a questionable man, The Scotsman, who lives near them offers money to them to smuggle elk antlers out of the Park- highly illegal. As the plan is underway and begins to unravel, their lives are dramatically altered. Again, one worth reading,

 #24  March 6,2025    

So another year has gone by and What's Ted Reading? Not that anyone has asked or clamored for a new Stuff to Read but here are some high points from 2024's reading,,,in alphabetical order:

Kevin Barry's Heart in Winter is set in 1891 mining town of Butte Montana and it doesn't get colder or more desolate than that. Tom Rourke is a poet, photographer's assistant and man about town as an alcoholic, drug user and general degenerate. When assisting with wedding pictures of newly arrived east coast bride Polly Gillespie and copper mine captain Long Anthony Harrington, Rourke falls madly in love with Polly. Following a short honeymoon, Polly is ready to escape husband and Butte and head west to San Francisco with Rourke. They steal one horse and head west into the winter wilderness. Polly has some history back east and her husband wants her back so he has the Butte sheriff hire a trio of Cornish trackers to catch the couple. Not necessarily a Happy Ending but the book really lays out the place and period very believably.

Armando Correa's Silence in Her Eyes is a winner. Leah Anderson (28) lives near Columbia University on the 3rd floor of the Mont Cenis apartments on Morningside Drive. She has akinetopsia (motion blindness), a rare neurological disorder. She hasn’t seen movement since she was 8. People think she’s blind, but Leah sees a lot-in static images. Her senses of smell and hearing have risen to almost superpower levels as she registers snapshot views. She lives very quietly with contacts of her doctor, the housekeeper and an elderly neighbor until a new neighbor awakens her with noise from a volent fight next door. Alice is trying to leave her abusive husband but it's not going well. Leah tries to help but is limited and when her apartment is broken into at night, it's too much.

Erik Larson's latest The Demon of Unrest is relevant and timely review of how Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor became the focal point for the South's moves to secede from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln. The book is equal parts a history of secession moving from South Carolina across the South and what was happening inside the fort as the few soldiers short of food, ammunition and materials to repair the fort prepared for the inevitable. The book really illustrates how quickly things get out of hand and become inevitable.

Lois Lowry's latest Tree.Table.Book is an interesting departure for the two-time Newbery award winner. Sophie Winslow is an 11 year old schoolgirl and very best friend is 77 year old Sophie Gershowitz and they share everything over their daily cup of after-school tea. When Sophie senior seems to be slipping a bit, Sophie junior hears that her son is looking into placing his mother into assisted living in another state. Sophie junior, with help from her neighbor friend, Ralphie, begin working on cognitive practice sessions with elderly Sophie. This leads to her opening up her life story which is a real eye-opener for her friend.

Another non-fiction book worth reading is Rick Steve's On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer. During covid lockdown, Rick re-discovered his journals and photographs from his 1978 trip from Europe across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. This is what transformed the piano teacher into the travel writer and organizer, but it was not an easy journey for two young guys on public transportation and cheap housing and food. Lots of illness and travel drama but equally beautiful photos and stories of the hippie trail.

Finally, Holy City by Henry Wise, a debut novel, is the hard telling of life in very rural, south Virginia. A sheriff's deputy returns home after working in Richmond, the title's Holy City,  and is confronted with a murder and an accused black man who claims innocence and the deputy believes him. The local black community hires Bennico Watts, an unpredictable private detective from Richmond, to find the real murderer and Watts and the deputy try to work together. And "try" is the operative word as they both bring Richmond attitudes to a very rural Virginia.