True Grit by Charles Portis

True Grit by Charles Portis is an entertaining novel that was turned into an equally entertaining 2010 movie with Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin.

Portis tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross retaining U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track down and bring to justice the man, Tom Chaney, who murdered her father. Joined in the quest initiated by Mattie is a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf.

One thing that the movie did, which was actually a remake of a 1969 film starring John Wayne, was show just how amusing the scenes written by Portis were. It's a tremendously fun western story set in 1870s Arkansas and Indian Territory. 

The skill with which Portis sets scenes and provides dialogue is remarkable, with the writing a first-person account by Mattie Ross done decades after the fact. Among many great stories in the book is the saga of Mattie's horse Little Blackie, from when she acquires him from Col. G. Stonehill through to the conclusion of the book.

The Siege by Ben Macintyre

The Siege by Ben Macintyre is an interesting work of nonfiction book A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World. 

Macintyre details the 1980 hostage crisis at the Iranian embassy in London, with twenty-six hostages taken. The perpetrators were Iranian Arabs from the Khuzestan region of Iran, where the Arabistan people were persecuted by the government in Iran, and the effort was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein, with he an enemy of Iran.

This occurred six months into the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Iran, and six days prior to the hostage-taking in London, eight U.S. soldiers were killed during an effort to rescue hostages. The Iranian government said the CIA was behind the London embassy attack, and that Iranians there would be happy to die as martyrs. 

It's a fascinating account from Macintyre of the six-day event, which the attackers believed would be over a day, including the eventual raid on the embassy by British SAS forces acting on the go-ahead from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a solid follow up to his first book, The Tipping Point from 25 years ago, and the new effort subtitled Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

In part one, "Three Puzzles," Gladwell writes about bank robbers in L.A., Medicare fraud in Miami, vaccination rates, and the dangerous quest for achievement, as told through the story of the fictional town Poplar Grove and its wave of teen suicides.

Part two, "The Social Engineers" includes the decades-past integration of Lawrence Lane in Palo Alto, CA and the concept of the Magic Third, the point at which something becomes normalized or integrated. If about individuals, when you get to three, you have a team, not just a single person or a friendship between two people. 

Related to the concept of ratios, Gladwell, tells a fascinating story about Harvard University, and the varsity women’s rugby team. He notes that Harvard competes in more D1 varsity sports than any other university in the country, and that Harvard has a two-track admissions process, the first for people who simply compete based on merit, and second for ALDCs, or Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (children of rich people), and Children of faculty. The ALDCs leave admissions control to university discretion, and there is a corresponding impact on the makeup of the student body. Gladwell makes the point that varsity sports are a mechanism by which Harvard maintains control of admissions decisions, and whether nefarious or not, that that maintains group proportions within the student body.

Also included is the story of the Marriott outbreak, where a hotel in Boston became an early epicenter of the covid virus. It was interesting from the perspective of how specific individuals have the propensity to be superspreaders. Gladwell refers to it as the law of the very, very, very few, and we can somewhat tell who those people are based on the characteristics of that person. This raises the question of whether in the future people identified as potential superspreaders will be treated differently than others.

Part three, "The Overstory," includes the L.A. Survivors' Club about holocaust discussion and the impact of the 1978 tv miniseries Holocaust. For decades after the war, the Holocaust wasn’t spoken of much. Many people wanted to simply move past, to not get bogged down in thoughts and discussion of things horrible. The show airing then had a huge impact on people using the term and opening discussing the atrocities that happened.

Gladwell also writes about how the tv show Will & Grace had an impact on gay marriage becoming law, it normalized behavior, showing that homosexuality wasn’t a problem to be solved.

The conclusion to the book includes detail on the opioid crisis. Gladwell notes how select states forced doctors prescribing opioids to make triplicate carbon copies of the prescription (one for the doctor, one for the pharmacy, and one for the bureau of narcotic enforcement), and how those states have had way lower rates of addiction. There’s also an interesting point made about opioid superspreaders, doctors who prescribe way more opioids than others, similar to covid superspreaders, or pollution superspreaders.

The Bookshop by Evan Friss

The Bookshop by Evan Friss is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A History of the American Bookstore. 

Friss covers topics including a bookstore run by Benjamin Franklin, the New York City bookstores Three Lives & Company, Books Are Magic, and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (closed down in 2009). Also detailed are sidewalk booksellers in NYC and Parnassus Books in Nashville, run by the writer Ann Patchett.  

Barnes & Noble and Amazon Books (now closed down) is also detailed, along with mention of people who put on seminars about how to open and run a bookstore.

The book has interesting content, especially the stories of modern-day bookshops.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a remarkable memoir about she, her siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen, and parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Sometimes Rex or Rose would have jobs, but often they wouldn't, and they didn't believe in public assistance, so the kids would go hungry and the family bounce from city to city when bills would come due or trouble arose, doing what Rex called "the skedaddle" in the middle of the night. Among many other small towns in the Southwest, they lived in Battle Mountain, NV and Blythe, CA before moving Phoenix and then Welch, the West Virginia hollow town mining town where Rex grew up.

It's a wild story of abdication of parental responsibility, one where Rex and Rose wouldn't do adult things, because "why should they have to?" Rose had a teaching degree, but fancied herself an artist, not someone who would waste their days working. When Jeannette later had a great opportunity come her way, the response of Rose was to say it's not fair that Jeannette should have that instead of her. It comes out late in the book that as they lived this itinerant and poverty-stricken lifestyle, Rose from her family owed land in Texas worth roughly a million dollars, but wouldn't sell as she wanted it to keep it. 

Rex at times would have jobs, but focused more on his drinking and telling of his grand plans. He would talk about how he was going to come up with a new way to extract gold from the ground, and the ensuing fabulous wealth would be used to build the family a Glass Castle, a home he often shared the meticulously created designs for with his children. But when there would be money coming in, Rex would take the paycheck and buy booze. 

It's an amazing book, including the memorable scene were Jeannette was chastised by a college professor, asking her what she would know about hardships faced by the underclass.

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell is a short and  interesting book subtitled A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. Rundell in separate chapters covers animals including the seahorse, American wood frog, lemur, golden mole, wombat, narwhal, pangolin, and Greenland shark.

Rundell notes that in the last fifty years, the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. She makes a compelling argument that these animals, many which teeter on the brink of extinction, have a right to remain, and celebrates in the book just how interesting and different they are.

The American wood frog allows itself to freeze solid for winter, with it's heart stopping for the season. The Greenland shark can live to be over five hundred years old. The swift flies at least ten months a year, sleeping in the air, with one brain hemisphere shut off while the other remains alert. The golden mole is the only mammal with iridescence, and the Somali golden mole to our knowledge has never been seen alive. The book is written as a call to act, to not give up on vanishing animals and to do the climate change mitigation needed to keep many of these species in our world.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is a novel based on real-life events, as Hunter tells a story taken from the life of her grandfather and his family, starting in 1939 as they celebrate Passover in Radom, Poland. 

Hunter notes that of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than three hundred survived. The matriarch and patriarch of the Kurc family are Sol and Nechuma, and their five children (and their spouses) are Genek (Herta), Halina (Adam), Jakob (Bella), Hunter's grandfather Addy, and Mila (Selim), along with Mila and Selim's young daughter Felicia.

Addy was apart from his family during the war as it impossible for him to return from France where we was living to Poland, which fell early in the war and was split between German and Soviet control. Sol and Nechuma were forced out of their house and Genek and Herta sent to a labor camp in Siberia. In Poland, ghettos were created, and later liquidated, and there were many times various family members could have been killed, but survived due to both bravery and good fortune.

The story spans from Europe to Asia, briefly Africa, then Brazil, and ultimately America and the conclusion of the book is a powerful one, with the fate of various family members unknown during much of the war.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is an engrossing novel that features the characters of Tova Sullivan, Cameron Cassmore, and Marcellus the giant pacific octopus. It's an ingeniously put together book with first-person narration from Marcellus interspersed throughout and a really fun read.

Cameron is a young adult without much going on in his life who goes from California to the small town of Sowell Bay, Washington in search of his biological father.

Tova is the cleaning person at Sowell Bay Aquarium, by herself after the passing of her longtime husband a few years prior, and only son Erik decades before, and is contemplating a move to Bellingham, where she can "not be a burden on people." 

There's also the local grocery store owner, Ethan, who befriends Cameron, and likes Tova. The connections between the characters both develop and reveal themselves and it's an exceptionally nice story that Van Pelt provides in her debut novel.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work of nonfiction that's described as one where Coates "set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."

The book starts talking about language, and the sports stories that captivated Coates in his youth, and then gets into stories, and how stories of places not actually always what they are. 

There's three distinct parts, first on a trip by Coates to Dakar, Senegal, then on his time in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally Palestine. In South Carolina he's confronted by often racist mythology, and in Palestine, sees the repression of Palestinians by Israel.

The Barn by Wright Thompson

The Barn by Wright Thompson is an important nonfiction book subtitled A Secrete History of a Murder in Mississippi. Thompson recounts the killing of barely fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, covering the historical conditions that led to the murder, the events around it, and what happened after, up to present day.

It's an often-repeated idea, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Just as the last remaining people who fought in WWII are dying, with it so important that we remember the evil that was attempted to be perpetrated by the Nazis, it is also crucial that we remember the racial injustices that precipitated Emmett's murder to try to prevent them today and in the future.

Emmett came from Chicago to Mississippi to stay with his great uncle Moses Wright and cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker. Emmett was in a store with a woman, Carolyn Bryant, behind the counter and what likely occurred is he handed her money for a transaction, touching her hand in the process, rather than putting the money on the counter. She took offense and angrily followed him out of the store, and Emmett then whistled at her. For the rest of her life, Bryant would repeat an impossible to have happened lie of what Emmett said and did to her in the store.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam came to Moses Wright's house and demanded to take Emmett, J.W. with a gun drawn, ready to shoot anyone who would resist. Willie Reed saw a pickup truck go by with Emmett in the back, and later heard him crying out while being beaten in Leslie Milam's barn on the property he rented within the thirty-six-square-mile grid Township 22 North, Range 4 West. Emmett had a broken skull, broken wrist, and broken femur, and then was shot and killed, with his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Willie Reed testified to what he saw, and then was sprinted out of Mississippi at night. He went back to a month later to testify to a grand jury, and immediately left the state again. Wheeler Parker and Moses Wright also had to leave Mississippi as it was too dangerous to stay. During the trial of Bryant and Milam, the defense argued in from of Emmett's mom, Mamie Till-Mosbley, that it it wasn't him that had died, he was fine, and this was all a conspiracy cooked up by the NAACP. Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury of their neighbors and extended family, with at least six other people that were likely at the site of the murder never charged. 

Thompson delves into the conditions that led to the killing with no legal consequences. He covers a history of slavery, segregation, and the Mississippi Delta land that cotton has been farmed on. At this time of the Emmett's murder, politicians in Mississippi were working to prevent the May 1955 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools from taking effect locally. It wasn't until 1969 that a federal judge demanded that Mississippi comply with the ruling, and when Clarksdale, MS public schools reopened after Christmas break, 574 of the 585 white students had changed schools, going to segregated academies. 

Emmett would have recently turned eighty-year-old, and places like the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS and the Till Institute in Chicago work to keep his memory alive, just as this excellent book does.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King is a fascinating work of fiction about someone travelling back in time to try to stop the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Thirty-five-year-old Jake Epping goes through a portal that takes him to 1958 and takes the name George Amberson, living first in Maine (including the town of Derry, where It was set). In Maine, he attempted to prevent a young girl from being paralyzed by a straw bullet, and save the lives of a mother and three of her children, all murdered in their home. He then went to Florida and finally Texas (both Dallas / Fort Worth and the 1,200 person town of Jodie). While in Jodie, he met and fell in love with Sadie, a fellow teacher at the high school.

During his years living in the past, Amberson found it to be obdurate, it didn't want to be changed. As he would attempt to do things that would alter history, roadblocks would present themselves and have to be overcome. Also, changes made to the past would cause a butterfly effect, begetting other changes.

He went through the portal several times, with each new trip to the past resetting history, cancelling out any changes he caused during previous time travel. It was a compelling book and the ramifications of what might have happened had Kennedy lived are fascinating to consider, and written about by King in the postscript.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library, is a novel about a math teacher in the U.K. who is gifted a home in Ibiza and, without anything else in her life after the death of her husband and long-ago passing of her child, goes to the Mediterranean island.

It's a story of mystical things, with powers and an unexplainable lifeform in the ocean, and new beginnings as the main character navigates the world she finds herself in and attempts to make a difference in it.