I have stories here from 2 different Best American Mystery & Suspense, but I’m not recommending either volume, since I didn’t read a lot of them. The stories seemed child-cruelty heavy or animal abuse heavy, and I’m not really into either of those things. And there’s some I’m not fond of the kind of noir in either of them. So it’s up to you if you get these two volumes. 

So here’s what I liked back in February…

February 2025

Bernier, Ashley-Ruth M., “Ripen,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. When editors are lazy with the Best Americans and do not put the stories in any kind of reading order, the opening story is a real crapshoot. I’m always braced for something that does not give me any ideas as to the way the volume will go. As a result, I approach the first story with trepidation, and usually that trepidation is justified.

In this volume, though, the first story, “Ripen,” is well written, powerful, and memorable. I was happily surprised by the entire thing. The setting is rich, the characters vivid, and the story itself strong. Read this one.

Cho, Winston, “AI: The Ghost in Hollywood’s Machine,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. (This story online has a different title.) Fascinating piece that could have been written about any emerging technology, really. AI will change how business gets done all over the planet (is changing?), and Hollywood is no different. It will make some things easier to “film” such as massive crowd scenes (already is, in fact) but it might cost a lot of jobs. As in a lot of jobs. And the kind that normally don’t get taken by technological change…as in the jobs of creatives. I think we’ll see a lot of these articles in the future as we try to figure out how to live with this newest thing in our lives.

Cobo, Leila, “Guarding Celia Cruz’s Legacy,” Billboard January 11, 2025. Fascinating interview with Omer Pardillo, who manages the Celia Cruz estate. It’s about how he got the job, how he goes about maintaining the estate, and the heart of the estate. He lists where the revenue comes from. He says it’s mostly from recording royalties and brand partnerships. It’s really fun to see his joy at all of the success the estate’s been having. At one point, he states that it’s not bad for an artist who’s been dead for 21 years.

Cole, Alyssa, “Just a Girl,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby, Mariner Books, 2024. This story, written as a series of online TikTok posts, DMs, texts, emails, and online articles, is devastating and heartbreaking and extremely powerful. Tiana, her first year in college during Covid, starts posting updates on TikTok, and gaining a following. She tries a dating app, encounters a gross guy, and calls his yuckiness out on her TikTok…and then he and his friends start going after her. Everything spirals after that. What’s amazing about this story is that you can see the joy leaching from this young woman as she realizes how terrible the world can be—and how dangerous it is for young beautiful women. Highly recommended.

Freimor, Jacqueline, “Forward,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. Normally, I wouldn’t read a story that looked dense and difficult, but the format (and the footnotes) are the point of the story. It’s an amazing work of fiction, with a great reveal. Yes, it takes concentration to read it, but it’s really worthwhile.

McClintock, Pamela, “Ryan Reynolds Multitasks Like a Mofo,” The Hollywood Reporter,  December 13, 2024. There’s a lot of fascinating quotes in this interview with Ryan Reynolds, whom The Hollywood Reporter dubbed their Producer of the Year. He does a variety of things besides act, and seems to enjoy all of them. The quote I like the most is at the end:

…it’s all an emotional investment. If you can create emotional investment in anything, any brand, it creates a moat around that brand that really, I think, facilitates the resilience and allows it to weather the storms in the bad times. And yes, that’s the part I love.

I think I love it too, although not as much as actual writing and making things up. Still, lots of good stuff to think about in this interview.

Zeitchik, Steven,“The Other Rebuild,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2025. 2025 has been such a shitshow already it’s hard to remember that the LA Fires happened only a few months ago. We seem to be moving from tragedy to tragedy, heartbreak to heartbreak, every single day, and we lose track of what others have gone through. A number of my friends went through the fires and fortunately, in this round of the climate change blues, very few of them lost their homes. (I can’t say that about previous California fires.) But everyone’s mental health took a nosedive. Many moved to different digs in the same town while others are leaving their LA homes. It’s an ongoing tragedy, and this is a piece from the early days. Important.

I haven’t yet finished reading  The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, because I needed to take a break. The book has a slant that is very white-male oriented. It’s also filled with some challenging pieces that aren’t holding up to the 26 years since the book was printed. (I swear, New Journalism is soooo self-involved.) But some of it is good and interesting and I’ll come back to it when the mood suits me. I doubt I’ll ever recommend the book, but watch: there will be a time when I recommend more essays from it.

I read one of the best novels I’ve seen in years and some great articles. So January was quite a success…which is why this list is so late. It took a while to chronicle my reading.

January 2025

Anders, Charlie Jane, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Space Time,” New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Tachyon, 2024. I absolutely love this story. It’s everything a certain kind of space opera should be—fun, preposterous, believable, tense, and adventurous. All wrapped into a neat and well-written package. A wonderful gem of a story.

Crais, Robert, The Big Empty, Putnam, 2024. The best book I’ve read all year, maybe in the past few years. I love Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Pike doesn’t show up until halfway through this book because Bob is so dang good at point of view and the way a story should flow. I don’t have a lot of time for leisure reading, and right now, my lack of time is significantly worse. So I did the readerly thing. I stayed up past my bedtime, and Dean literally had to pull the book from my hands. I still read it in two days. Fantastic. And no, I’m not going to tell you much more than “fantastic” because, as with all of Bob’s books, to say more is to ruin a surprise. (I might have already said too much, in fact.)

Deaver, Jeffery, and Maldonado, Isabella, Fatal Intrusion, Thomas & Mercer, 2024. Yep, I have an Amazon link only for this book, because I just discovered something very unpleasant. This book (and a bunch of Deaver novellas) are only available in ebook on Amazon. Sorry about that! I read the book in paper, which is how I prefer to read, so I had no idea that this had happened until the moment I was putting the book on the list. Sigh. It makes me, as a reader, more than mildly pissed off.

The book is good enough. It’s not as good as most Deaver books, but it’s better than a lot of thrillers. I’ll read the next book in the series, and if I like it, I’ll pick up one of Maldonado’s books. Collaborations are a difficult animal. They can be something better than both writers, especially if the book is something they wouldn’t have written without the collaborator. I suppose Deaver could argue that he wouldn’t have had a character like Carmen Sanchez, but except for a few chapters that I suspect were all Maldonado, she felt very generic. So I don’t think this collaboration enhanced the two writers’ work (I’m saying this without having read hers). But this is a good way to while away a few hours.

Fekadu, Mesfin, “The Loophole That Landed Muni Long a Grammy Nom,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. The online version of this article has the title “Muni Long Explains How She Made It,” and I think that is a better title for the content here. Muni Long has been around for awhile, and she has followed her own path. There are some great quotes in here, but the best was her response to how she got paid for her streaming content:

Sometimes you look at your quarterly statement and you’re like, “Oh wow, $1,000 for 500 million streams. Great. That’s awesome.” The sheer volume that I have to write in order to make an income that makes sense [is insane]. What saved me is that I have quality and quantity, whereas some of these people, all they have is one or two records.

Quantity and quality. She’s right. We’re doing the same. Take a look at this one, even if you’re new to Muni Long.

Harris, Robert,, Vintage Books, 2016. I really like Robert Harris’s writing, although his topics don’t always interest me. I picked up Conclave after seeing a review of the film. A lot of my favorite actors are in it, and since I like Harris, I thought I should give the book an eyeball before watching the film. Glad I did. There’s a nice moment toward the end of the book, something completely unexpected and yet set up. It worked for me, and might not have worked in the film (which I have not yet seen). Of course, that had me looking through more Robert Harris for the books I’ve missed. I mostly didn’t order the ones on the topics that I don’t care about, but I did preorder the next. I love his courage as a writer. He’s always doing something interesting. This is a novella, filled with his great characters and marvelous writing. Oh, and for the interested: I am not Catholic, although I was in and out of Catholic churches as a kid because so many of my friends were Catholic. So I have a passing familiarity with some of the rituals, but no great interest in the church or its habits. I still found this fascinating.

Heinz, W.C., “Brownsville Bum,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. I had never heard of W.C. Heinz before reading this book. Yet many of the other writers in the front half of the book (at least) mentioned him as the best of the best. Well, this is my favorite piece in the book so far. It’s a 1951 piece about someone named Bummy Davis who was a fighter back in the day when fighters could kill each other in the ring. This one reads like a short story—the life and death of kinda thing. The writing itself is sharp and crisp, the events breathtaking. The murder, at the end, shocking because it happened in a bar, not in the ring. If you find the book, read this one first.

Rose, Lacey, “Selena Gomez is Waiting For Your Call,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 20, 2024. Last fall and early this year, there were a lot of interviews with Selena Gomez as the Oscar and Grammy hype heated up. She has a good team. But she’s also a great interview because, as young as she is, she’s had an amazing career. She knows who she is, and she’s blunt about it. I can’t encapsulate this long piece in any coherent way, except to say all writers (and Selena fans) should read it.

Royko, Mike, “‘A Very Solid Book,'” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. A lot of the work in this book is dated. So dated, in fact, that I had to look up some of the rivalries just to see what was going on. But this piece by Mike Royko from 1987 is familiar. I was 27 at the time, and aware of the Mets/Cubs rivalry.

Some idiot at some NY publishing house asked Royko to review a book about the Mets. And oh, did he. This piece is not dated, once you knew about the rivalry, and it is one one of my favorites. I just read it again, out loud this time to Dean. It’s a very short piece that is, ostensibly, a review of a book by Mets first baseman (at the time) Keith Hernandez. And Smith was a Cubbies fan through and through. The book is solid, you see, because it can survive being thrown against a wall…

Really worth reading

Score, Lucy, Things We Never Got Over, Bloom Books, 2022. Okay, this is annoying. As I set up this post, I discovered that Lucy Score’s ebooks are exclusive to Amazon. Same thing as the Deaver/Maldonado above. Grrrr. You can get the paperbooks anywhere you want, but to get the ebook, you have to go to Amazon. You can’t even go to her own website/store to get the book. Sorry about that. Get the paper. She has some lovely deluxe editions.

However, I did find the book on Amazon. I had just finished something else (what I can’t remember) and the algorithm suggested this book. I did what I often do and read the first chapter. And wowza is it good. Seriously, this first chapter is worth reading even if you don’t pick up the book. The chapter is a masterclass of information flow. The chapter title is Worst. Day. Ever. The first paragraph is a perfect hook:

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into Café Rev, but it sure as hell wasn’t a picture of myself behind the register under the cheery headline “Do Not Serve.” A yellow frowny face magnet held the photo in place.

Each paragraph builds on that. With each page, the situation gets worse and worse and worse. You—well, I—had to go to the next chapter immediately. The book ends up being a tiny bit long, and for a moment verges on “if you two only talk to each other, this would end” but by then I didn’t care. The book is fun, the writing is great, and the characters are a hoot. So pick this one up…or at the very least (writers) read that first paragaph.

Smith, Red, “Next To Godliness,” The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam with Glenn Stout, HarperCollins, 1999. My father, who was born in 1914, used to talk about the great sports writers and announcers from his life. He also talked about great players, so many of their names are familiar to me. Others, not quite as much. But Red Smith was quite familiar. His name was in the air all the time in our family, and also in the various writing classes I had. Red Smith was one of those writers even non-sports fans enjoyed.

Back when my father imprinted on baseball, there was radio, but it was local only. So games played outside of the area weren’t aired. The readers had to rely on the print media.

“Next To Godliness” describes an entire game in maybe 1,000 words. It also describes the reaction to that game from Smith himself. It’s lovely and well done. There’s a reason this man’s work was remembered—at least for another 50 years.

Smith, Thomas, “Dua Lipa Talks 2024,” Billboard, December 14. 2024. I love Dua Lipa’s stuff. I run to it. I also enjoy how she’s running her career, in the same way that I admire the way Taylor Swift is. These women are taking charge in a way that most musicians do not. So read this. She’s interesting and what she’s doing with her business is also great.

Verhoeven, Beatrice, “John M. Chu,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 13, 2024. Fascinating interview with John M. Chu, released just before Wicked came out. (If you haven’t seen Wicked, oh, you must! It’s marvelous.) Lots of great material here, mostly about being courageous. Lots of behind the scenes on his various movies as well. In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians, and more. Read this one.

Weir, Keziah, “Give And Let Give,” Vanity Fair, October, 2024. I’ve been thinking about this interview ever since I read it, particularly as one particularly nutty billionaire chainsaws his way through American government, another sends his fiance into space, and the rest don’t seem to give a rat’s banana about actual human beings.

Melinda French Gates, former wife of Bill Gates, is also worth billions, and she’s giving it away, systematically, to charity after charity. She says it’s not easy, because she had to have the right organization in place to help funnel the money, and then she has to figure out where she can do the most good. Note the difference: Do The Most Good. Yeah, she’s not the only ex-wife of a billionaire doing this.

It’s fascinating to me that the wealthy women understand their social responsibility and the bulk of the men…do not.

I read holiday anthologies only in the holiday season, so sometimes it takes me years to finish one. There are two here that took years to finish, but I found stories I liked in both of them. And then there is the Library of America Christmas stories collection. I didn’t get far into it, but I will be reading it for several more years. It’s a slow read, because the stories are chronological and I can already see that I disagree with some of Connie Willis’s choices. (Prerogative for the heavy reader.) She leans more into sf/f than I would and of course, completely ignores romance. And also, much of the mystery oeuvre. Still, worth looking at, I suspect. I’ll know more in a few years.

Of course, I read a lot more than that as well. My schedule slowly freed up (as much as my schedule can) and I had some time for reading, leisure and otherwise. Here’s what I liked from the leisure.

December 2024

Brown, Leah Marie, “Finding Colin,” Winter Wishes, Zebra Books, 2017. This novella comes from a book with no attributed editor, something that always annoys the heck out of me. No matter. The stories were good enough, but “Finding Colin” was charming. It has a great voice, a great sense of humor, and a story problem that made me vaguely uncomfortable (and I think the author intended that). A hardcore fan spends her vacation dollars to track down the man of her dreams, an actor named Colin. She finds out where he’s filming his latest movie and…well, the story goes from there. And it didn’t go the way I feared it would. It’s a lot of fun, and well worth reading.

Dunne, Griffin, The Friday Afternoon Club, Penguin Press, 2024. I feel an affinity for Griffin Dunne. I was going to write that I have no idea why, but that’s really not true. Dunne is a survivor. His family was famously dysfunctional. His beloved sister was murdered. He dropped out of school (understandably, as he recites the incident), and yet has managed to have a major career in the arts. Given his history, he shouldn’t have survived, and yet he has.

His father, Dominick Dunne, came to my attention after he had lost his daughter and became a crusader for justice. He continually wrote about the way the courts and the justice system failed victims’ families. His aunt by marriage, Joan Didion, has been one of my favorite writers for my entire life. (That’s her on the left, arms around her daughter.)

So I wanted to read this book to read about the family, which I knew was interesting, but also to read about Griffin Dunne, whose work I’ve admired since he was the only memorable part of An American Werewolf in London. The book is well written (not surprisingly) although it clearly retools the stories that Dunne has probably been dining out on for years. Still, there were some surprises, particularly from his good friend Carrie Fisher, and some truly sad and heartfelt moments. The book ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter, and it should end there. But that leaves another twenty years or more of his life to discuss at some point.

Even if you have no idea who any of these people are, you might want to read this. It really is a testament to survival and stubbornness and lots of other fascinating things.

Lipshutz, Jason, “In Control,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. This is a fascinating—to me, at least—article about a badly managed company (Warner Music Group) that turned itself around with new management. Considering that’s what’s happening with our WMG Publishing right now, this was an exceedingly timely and hopeful article. Dunno if you all will find it as interesting. Hope you do.

Meier, Leslie, “Candy Canes of Christmas Past,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I have no idea when I first started this book, but I note that I recommended Laura Levine’s story in 2020. Which means I haven’t picked it up since then. So…four years later…I was in the mood for cozies again at holiday time, I guess.

Leslie Meier’s story features her regular heroine, Lucy Stone, in a story that takes place in two time periods—when she is a grandmother and her kids and grandkids come to visit, and when she’s a young mother, dealing with a new home and a toddler, while pregnant in a new town. The house is a fixer-upper and it’s falling apart around her, yet she makes time to solve an old crime involving glass candy canes. The 1980 details are marvelous, the discomfort of advanced pregnancy plain, and the stress on young parents also vivid. The mystery is meh, but I always find that with cozies. The read, though, was great.

Mitchell, Gail, “Quincy Delight Jones,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. It’s hard to believe that Quincy Jones is gone. He was perhaps the influence on all music in the last 60 years or more. If you don’t believe me, read this piece, and think about the choices Quincy made, the talent and creativity he brought to everything he did. Then maybe watch “We Are The World: The Greatest Night In Pop,” a documentary about something that just seems impossible now. It was impossible then too, but Quincy helped pull it off. If you’ve never thought about Quincy Jones, well, you’re in for a treat.

Oppenheimer, Mark, “The Gonzo Life and Tragic Death of ‘Heff'” The Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024. I found this to be an utterly fascinating character study of a…well, I don’t want to say tragic figure, but someone whose life didn’t turn out the way anyone thought it would. John Connery Heffernan III was one of the people behind the movie Snakes on a Plane. That ended up being his biggest success. Then after a few years of being somewhat famous, he disappeared from his friends’ lives. That led Oppenheimer to track him down only to learn that Heff was dead. So, Oppenheimer wanted to know what happened. This story is as strange as the movie.

Provost, Megan, “Teaching Possibility,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2024. Apparently, the University of Wisconsin selects a book for every student at this incredibly large campus to read each year in the Go Big Read (for Go Big Red, a school saying) every year. This year’s book was by Rebekah Taussig, whose book is part of Carolyn Mueller’s class in disability and identity. The interview is with Mueller, but I also suggest you pick up the book…after you’ve read the interview, of course.

Walker, Joseph S., “Crime Scene,”  The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. I think this is the only story that made it into both Best-of collections for 2023, and it deserves to be there. The crime scene in question is the scene of President Kennedy’s assassination. The story is smart and twisty, and like my notes on most smart and twisty stories, I can’t tell you much more than that without ruining it. Just pick it up and enjoy.

Willis, Connie, “Introduction,” American Christmas Stories: The Library of America Collection, Library of America, 2021. Connie’s introduction on the history of Christmas storytelling in America is fascinating. I knew much of it, and feel like she missed a few things (L.Frank Baum, for example), but overall, this is really worth the read. Well researched and well considered.

I remember August better than I remember July. (Whew.) We held a successful anthology workshop. We learned a lot. We made a lot of progress on truly good things. And…we had to hire a lot more lawyers than the two we usually deal with. Such fun that was/is. [sarcasm alert]

I did get a lot more reading done in August than I did in July, but still not as much as I would have liked. Although some of that reading was for the anthology workshop, which I can’t count here, but you will see many of those stories in the coming year, as we revive and rebrand Fiction River. (Oh, I’m looking forward to that.)

So you’ll find some interesting books here, and just two articles to match my necessarily short attention span from that month.

August 2024

Baxter, John, Montemarte: Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, Harper Collins, 2017. I plucked this out of my TBR pile because I needed something that was not going to challenge me in the front part of the month. I just needed vignettes, which this has in abundance. What I did not expect was how many story ideas I got from this. Quite a few! I hope I’ll have a chance to get to them before getting distracted by something else. There are a lot of fun things here, as always with a John Baxter travel “guide.”  (It’s an excuse for great literary and historical essays.

Cabot, Meg, No Judgements, William Morrow, 2019. A fun and dramatic book from Meg Cabot. This one is set on a Florida island as a hurricane bears down. Our heroine is a clueless New Yorker who had never lived through severe storms before and can’t quite believe the locals when they tell her that she has to do certain things. Of course, there’s this one particular local who helps her…

One of the most fun things about this book for me is that I lived on the Oregon Coast for 23 years. We had hurricanes, although they’re not called hurricanes in that part of the world. We had Big Storms. And no one from the outside could believe that things would be bad. In fact, when there were tsunami warnings, people drove to the Oregon Coast to watch the big wave hit. Friends of ours had to yank tourists off the beaches so they wouldn’t be killed. (I kid you not.)

So there’s an extra layer in this book for me, but I think you’ll enjoy it even without that. This is Meg Cabot at her most fun.

Nevala-Lee, Alec, Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Dey Street, 2018. Alec’s book is a Hugo and Locus Award Finalist. I bought the paperback when it came out. (Note: I’ve linked to a ridiculously priced ebook.) When the book came out, I picked it up a few times, cherry-picked a few references using the index, and got grumpy. I fell into the mistake so many writers make, which is that the book I held was not the book I would have written. Let me say to me (and to all of you who do that): Well, duh. If I was going to write the book, I would…ahem…write the book.

I don’t know what made me pick up the book in August, but I’m so glad I did. It kept me entertained while a lot of the above stuff happened in my life. I had met Isaac a few times, and the bastard groped me every single time. I nearly killed him once in an elevator, because my reaction to being grabbed like that is to hit someone as hard as I could with my elbow, and I refrained only because it was my first Nebula award ceremony as the editor of F&SF. I had a thought that maybe whoever groped me was someone famous—and it was a frail Asimov. His delicate ribcage was only a few inches from my deadly elbow. That would have been bad.

Needless to say that while the rest of the world admires the heck out of that man, I do not. I didn’t know much about Campbell other than the stories the old timers told about him, and I had avoided reading/listening to stories about Hubbard. OMG, that man should have been in jail. Heinlein, whom I had met and who was bombastic as hell, came out the best.

Kudos for Alec for writing about all of these men, warts and all. I love the analysis of what sf became because of them and what still needs to be changed. As worthy a book as I have read in years.

Rose, Lucy, “The Worst Thing that Can Happen is You Suck,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2024. This is a roundtable interview with actors John Hamm, Matt Bomer, Nicholas Galitzine, Clive Owen, David Oyelowo, and Collum Turner. I love the roundtables that The Hollywood Reporter does because they get a group of professionals together to discuss their art. There’s always something in the roundtables that mean something to me. Here, there are quotes I circled from Clive Owen…

I have never listened to anybody else. Ultimately, you are the one who has to go to work every day. I do what I want to do because that’s what’s going to sustain me through it.

…and John Hamm…

But yeah, to Clive’s point, agents and managers can all bat a thousand in the rearview mirror, they can always tell you what they thought after the thing came out and it was good or bad. It’s in the moment that you have to make the decision. And the worst thing that can happen is you suck.

I love that last part, which is also the title of this piece in the printed form. “The worst thing that can happen is you suck.” Exactly. And that’s not so very bad, now is it?

Silva, Daniel, A Death in Cornwall, HarperCollins, 2024. I’m fascinated by the way that Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series has changed since the Trump era began. Silva’s books were always on the edge of modern politics, as close to real politics as possible. But it became clear that Silva was struggling with the constant changes instigated by Trump in his first term, and then the worldwide unrest in Biden’s term—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the utter mess in the Middle East.

Silva solved it by returning Allon to his roots; he was a painter and an art restorer who also became a spy. (And then a super spy.) Now, he has retired and gone back to restoring amazing paintings…and solving worldwide art-related crimes. This crime starts in Allon’s former residence on the Cornish coast of England, with the death of a reknown art history professor and scurries along from there. Highly recommended.

Stoynoff, Natasha,“Brooke Shields Wants You To Know She Is Just Fine,” AARP Magazine, April/May 2024.  Because of the year I had in 2024, I sometimes find it hard to remember articles I had marked as long ago (and far away) as August. I have dumped a few magazines without recommending anything from them because, for the life of me, I have no idea why I marked a certain page.

Not so with the April/May AARP Magazine. I picked it up to see what I had recommended, didn’t see my usual mark, and frowned at it. I distinctly remember reading the Brooke Shields interview and finding it both wise and inspiring.

Brooke Shields and I are of an age. She’s younger, but not by much. And by the time she was being exploited all over the world, I was old enough to feel icky about it, but young enough not to know why. This article addresses her past, yes, but it also looks at her now. At least from this interview, it seems that she has accepted both her age and the changes that aging brings. I recommend this article to everyone.

July was pure 2024 for us, too much work and too many (bad) discoveries, only to learn how wonderful life can be, as friends stepped in even when no one asked. It was good and hard and…well…not conducive to reading. Still, I have some things to recommend.

July, 2024

Bowen, Sarina, Bombshells, Tuxbury Publishing, LLC 2021. I adore this book. Some of Sarina Bowen’s hockey books are hit and miss for me. I like sports, but I’m not a die-hard hockey fan (even though I grew up around it). However, women’s sports fascinate me. The Bombshells of the title are her made-up women’s pro team, set in Brooklyn, dealing with the disparity with which two teams, owned by the same billionaire, are funded different. She throws a very good romance in the middle of this, but even better are the sports details. One of the best Brooklyn Bruisers novels. And I’ll note that she seems to have her ebooks available only through Amazon, which is a huge mistake, imho. You can get a paper version. That’s the cover I have here.

Huston, Caitlin, “Only Murders in the Building Musical Is a Twisty Tribute to the Theater,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2024. Apparently, this awards-edition of the Reporter repurposed this article, but this was the first time I had seen it. It’s a fascinating look at writing incidental music for a show that revolved around a murder on stage. They ended up writing the entire musical. A great piece on the creative process. And, oh, if you’re not watching Only Murders in the Building, you might want to. There’s so much about mysteries and cozies and writing (and TV and movies and theater) here. I have loved the show since it started. It’s a lot of fun.

Kuga, Mitchell, “Across The Aoikiverse,” Billboard, April 27, 2024. Fascinating interview with Steve Aoki. He first came to my attention when I moved to Las Vegas, and he was DJing everywhere or so it seemed to me. For years, I didn’t realize how many pies he had his fingers in. Then I realized how many people he worked with, but I had no idea exactly how many until I read this interview. There’s a long section in here about collaboration and about how it feeds the creative brain. Read this one.

Riedel, Michael, “Once More With Feeling,” Vanity Fair, April, 2024. Cabaret was the first musical that taught me the power of the book. By that, I mean the script for the musical. The book and the music together create a marvelous musical. I first saw Cabaret in production as a freshman at Beloit College, all by myself (one of my first forays in going to performances on my own). I thought the show was amazing, powerful, groundbreaking, and heartbreaking. I staggered out of that production feeling gutted and alone, unable to talk to anyone about it because I was the only one who had seen it.

Later, I saw the film of Cabaret. I have yet to see another version live. But when I saw the film (and a film of the production), I realized just how amateurish that production was. And still, it was powerful, because you can’t defeat the power of the book no matter how terrible the performers are.

I’m fascinated by Cabaret. A theater here will be performing it through February, and I’m trying to gird myself up to see it. Dunno if I will. It’s a tough show in good times…and these are not good times.

Michael Riedel’s piece, though, shows that Cabaret wasn’t ever designed for the good times. I learned so much about the history of the musical and the reaction to it. Fascinating stuff. I don’t know if you’re as interested in theater history as I am, but if you are, this is definitely worth your time.

Rose, Sarah, D-Day Girls, Broadway Books, 2019. I initially bought this book as a gift for a friend who was born on D-Day and loves reading D-Day material. (And bonus! Loves reading about strong women.) Then I looked at the book and thought I would like to read it too. Of course, I didn’t get to it right away…as in 5 years later I finally picked it up.

One of my favorite time periods to read about is WWII. I thought I knew a lot about D-Day, which is essential, but didn’t interest me much as a military operation. (I’m not that big on military history.) But D-Day Girls is spy non-fiction about amazingly courageous women. They risked life and limb to get everything ready. One woman actually had a child with a man who had no idea that she was a spy. (He was French Resistance.) He got captured, and later she did too, leaving the baby with the nanny, who finally had to turn the child in to a home for orphans. I can’t imagine what went through everyone’s minds, and how they survived (however imperfectly). There are stories like that throughout, many not told outside of letters and diaries.

I recommend this highly.

I read a lot of fiction, but didn’t feel like recommending all of it. Nonfiction seems to be capturing my attention more.

I did, however, get back to reading short fiction, which felt good.

Here’s what I liked in November.

November, 2024

Babb, Kent, “Football Bonded Them. Its Violence Tore Them Apart.” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. This essay starts in 2022, when a group of former college roommates met in a bar and one of them asked a fateful question: If you had known then what you know now about football, would you play?

They had gone through the trauma of loss together, because they lost a friend to traumatic brain injury. Some of them refuse to believe that the game caused the injuries. Others know it did. And the problems inherent in the game drove a wedge between them.

I find this sort of thing fascinating because I find sport fascinating. Unlike almost everything else in life, you hit your peak when you’re in your 20s, not when you gain age and so-called wisdom. At the point when you understand things, your ability to function physically drops off. I can’t imagine living with that, and yet people do. In fact, I do, because Dean was a professional athlete. So I watch him struggle with being less effective and just as competitive. This essay is on that point…with the added terror of CTE. Read this one. It’ll make you think.

Bain, Katie, “Since She First Left Home,” Billboard, October 5, 2024. This profile was fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, it’s interesting to read how a woman created her own producing career. But also, for me, it was fascinating to read about someone who lived in the same town as I did when I did, only she was a lot younger. LP Giobbi’s parents were Deadheads who lived in Eugene, Oregon and went to the County Fair all the time. I went once. It was not my scene, man. But Giobbi grew up there, and the fair is home turf for her. Being raised among people who loved the Grateful Dead—and remembering when Jerry Garcia died (which was devastating for so many in Eugene)—gave me a whole new perspective on something I lived through, making this one of the more interesting profiles I’d read in quite some time.

Bowen, Sarina, “Blonde Date,” Extra Credit: Three Ivy Years Novellas, Tuxburry Publishing, 2022. Finally, Sarina Bowen’s covers are appropriate for her books. I have an older copy. This novella dates from 2014, when it was a standalone, but I got the Extra Credit book in paper—apparently before 2022. I plucked it off my shelf during a difficult month, and read all three novellas. I love “Blonde Date.” It focuses on a young woman who had a horrendous dating experience, and for a reason I won’t tell you, has to see the guy who treated her badly. (All of this before Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings.) She ends up going with a guy who is appalled by what he sees. And the story progresses from there. Told with great sensitivity and a lot of heart. By the way, apparently, the only way to get an ebook is via Amazon Kindle. (Mistake, imho.) I linked to the paper on B&N.

Bowen, Sarina, “Studly Period,” Extra Credit: Three Ivy Years Novellas, Tuxburry Publishing, 2022. The second novella in the book, “Studly Period,” is about a tutor who is working with a college hockey player whose first language is Russian. It’s a lovely piece about understanding, both in language and in life.

Fader, Mirin, “Greg Oden’s Long Walk Home,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. I lived in Oregon when the Portland Trail Blazers picked Greg Oden first in the draft over now-superstar Kevin Durant. Portland needed a big man, and Oden was huge. He was a good player. But everyone knew that big men got injured easily. I’m not sure if that’s still true, but it was true then, before sports medicine improved player health tremendously.

In other words, the choice of Oden was iffy and quickly became a mistake. While Durant grew and became a major player, Oden got injured fast and almost never played. And then, when he got released from the team, I—like so many other fans—didn’t think of him again.

He was badly injured and constantly battling the problems that come with injury from weight gain to opioid abuse. He was isolated because when he went out, he was famous enough that people would catcall him and call him names. The least offense was that he was a mistake. It took him years to recover, and some of that came with the help of a good woman, whom he married. He grew and went home to Indianapolis and Butler University. He’s coaching now because he’s come back to the game.

This is an amazing story of survival, and I will never look at someone who failed after succeeding in the draft the same way again. (Let me say that the draft itself makes me nervous, in this country where there were things like slave auctions and such. The echoes bother historian me a lot.)

Fleming, David, “A Mother’s Vow To Find A Dallas Mavericks Barbie Leads to a Worldwide Chase,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. I am not a Barbie fan. I am one year younger than the doll, and those early years were fraught. Not just in the world (no adult seemed to approve of Barbie) but also in my family. My mother made me emotionally pay for anything and everything I tried to do with Barbie.

That left a hangover and a bad taste for me. I didn’t realize until the Barbie Movie in 2023 that Barbie had become an icon and a role model for generations of women. Cool. Interesting.

I also didn’t realize that in the 1990s, Barbie was marketed to sports fans. She wore the uniform of a variety of teams, and one of them, in theory, was the Dallas Mavericks. I say “in theory” because a woman who collected Barbies couldn’t even find evidence that the doll was actually produced. She needed it to round out her collection. I’m not going to say much more, because this essay explores her quest, but it’s interesting and worth reading, even for non-Barbie fans.

Krugler, David, “Two Sharks Walk Into A Bar,” The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. From the title through the entire piece, “Two Sharks Walk Into A Bar” is glorious and unexpected. The best part? I don’t really play pool, and everything about this story was clear. Everything. That’s the mark of a good writer and a good story.

Lawson, Wayne, “Setting The Stage,” Vanity Fair, September 2024. Great essay on American theater in the 1950s in an otherwise mediocre issue of Vanity Fair. Wayne Lawson knew some big names before they became TV/movie famous, back when they were struggling actors who were shaking up Broadway. I know a lot about American theater in that time period. I didn’t know any of this. Fascinating stuff.

Lee, Michael, “Kobe Bryant’s Little Mambas Are Still Playing, For Him and Each Other,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. When Kobe Bryant died in January of that awful year 2020, he was on his way to basketball practice with his daughter, and two other players, their parents, and another coach. Eight people in all, not counting the pilot, went down in that crash…and left the rest of the team behind. They were thirteen and grieving. And then Covid hit.

They still play. They’re still learning. But mostly, they work with each other because they have a couple of experiences that no one else has had. They were coached by Kobe and they have survived a horrendous life event. They have heart and they continue to play. Read this one.

Mallory, Michael, “What The Cat Dragged In,” The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. This is a story about a reporter who is down on her luck. I love stories like this, and then this one mentions cats and well, if I didn’t like it, the story would have been a complete failure. Turns out I loved it, and that’s pretty much all I can say without ruining it.

McCluskey, Sean, “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday,” The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. I try to teach writers that titles are important, not just something to slap onto a story. And then, Sean McCluskey goes and proves it. You will understand this story without the title, but the title makes it just that much better. Top-notch piece of work.

McManus, Jane,  The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, Triumph Books, 2024. I love the volumes of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. It’s one of my favorite reads every year. And this one is light years above the others. Every article is good. Even though I’ve picked several here (and in October), those are just my favorites. They’re not any better than the others. They just hit something with me. So if you want to read great articles and good essays, pick up this book.

Rankin, Ian, Midnight And Blue, Mulholland Books, 2024. It feels like I waited forever for this Inspector Rebus novel, but I think it was only a year or two. Then I get this and read the blurb (never read the blurbs) and decided I didn’t want to read it after all. You see, Rebus was arrested for murder at the end of the last book, and this one opens in prison. Because this is Ian Rankin, I know he actually researched the prison he’s using for his character. I didn’t want to read a prison novel. But I finally gave in and read it, and I’m glad I did. It’s quite the courageous and interesting novel, impossible to put down. If he hadn’t ended it the way he ended it, though, I wouldn’t have continued with the series. But he did right with us all. It’s a really good novel.

Rushin, Steve, “The Table-Slamming, Ketchup-Spraying, Life-Saving Bills Mafia,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. I have never been more than a casual fan of sport…until I got season tickets to the Las Vegas Aces. Those women and their fans have become my tribe. I get it.

So reading about the Buffalo Bills fans, called the Bills Mafia, was fascinating. Mostly because this was about the development of the organized fan base. They have a wild reputation—well deserved, it seems—but also, they organize for charity. A lot. And they pick the charities and they also help fund-raise for individuals. They’re amazing. Read this one.

Sohn, Emily, “The Catch,” The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by Jane McManus, Triumph Books, 2024. Fascinating essay about a woman whose name I recognize…not as a writer, but as someone involved in horse racing in the 1990s. I did not know that Virginia Kraft was a pioneering sports writer in the 1950s. She worked for Sports Illustrated and actually covered sport at a time when women were usually relegated to the secretarial pool.

At first, in this piece, I kinda identified with Kraft. She bulldozed her way into her work and continued to push despite her gender. I did that a lot in my 20s and 30s, when I was working for others. Sure, I was the first woman editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction but that’s not why I was the editor. I was the editor because of my abilities. I figured editors always got the degree of crap that I got, and only later did I learn that a lot of the hatred directed toward me came because of my gender.

But that’s kinda where the similarities end. Kraft was a walking bundle of contradictions. A woman who hunted big game and loved her pets to distraction. A woman who didn’t seem to notice the pain of others in some circumstances, and caused it in others. A woman who had a lot of opportunity but never used it to help other women.

This is a great profile of a forgotten writer and a trailblazer, which shows that just because someone was the first doesn’t mean they were the kindest.

I don’t remember much about June, except that I was going balls-to-the-wall to save my business. I was also writing and getting some other things done. Dean was still healing from his fall/surgery, and I had massive dental appointments. So, I guess I remember things in general but not in specific. I have no idea how I managed to read anything, but I did.

As I’m writing these up, I’m discovering some interesting things. Such as Otto Penzler’s Bibliomysteries, an anthology filled with novellas, does not have an ebook edition. The novellas are available separately. I read the hardcover. I managed a couple of novels, but only one was worth recommending. And then there’s the memoir, below, which I just adored.

So…here’s what I loved way back in June (!)

June 2024

Baum, Gary, and Giardina, Carolyn, “Going, Going, Gone,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 14, 2024. I vividly remember when I learned that film canisters stored in Hollywood vaults were actually burning. That the archival copies of classic films were disappearing, gone forever because of bad storage. I was worried, horrified, and appalled.

The same thing is happening with digital files, although they’re not actively burning. Digital films are being stored, badly, and sometimes not even the correct copy is in the archive. Read this article and worry, as I do, about some of your favorites. Let’s hope that this gets solved.

Couch, Aaron, “William Shatner: THR Icon,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 14, 2024. A great interview with William Shatner. He was chosen as a Hollywood Reporter icon. The interview goes into quite a bit of depth about his long career, so I found it fascinating. And then there’s this quote:

I’ve bumbled my way through my life with a growing realization that all the plans you have for your life are dependent on the guy driving a car behind you or in front of you. The accidents that you have no control over, whether they’re physical, like falling down a flight of stairs, or emotional, like the person you love the most doesn’t love you — and everything in between — you have no control over. So you may think you’re like, “I’m going to control. I’m going to choose that motion picture,” or go onstage choosing elements of your career, thinking you’re making a career move. It has nothing to do with reality at all.

Yeah. Ouch. But sooooo true.

George, Elizabeth, “The Mysterious Disappearance of The Reluctant Book Fairy,” Bibliomysteries Volume 2, edited by Otto Penzler, Pegasus Books, 2018. This story is fantasy. Delightful fantasy. And surprising in its own way. I cannot say much more except to add, wow, did I like it.

Lovesey, Peter, “Remaindered,” Bibliomysteries Volume 2, edited by Otto Penzler, Pegasus Books, 2018. Perfect little cozy mystery about cozy mysteries. And collecting. Even the opening two sentences are cozy-perfect. “Agatha Christie did it. The evidence was plain to see but no one did see for more than a day.” Lovely. And a very enjoyable read.

Morrow, Bradford, “The Nature of My Inheritance,” Bibliomysteries Volume 2, edited by Otto Penzler, Pegasus Books, 2018. Fascinating story about a wayward son who inherited over 50 Bibles upon his father’s death. Quirky and heartfelt, it’s one of the most memorable stories in the volume.

Paretsky, Sara, Pay Dirt, William Morrow, 2024. Paretsky wrote a VI Warshawski novel mostly set in Kansas, which is where Paretsky grew up. I missed the Chicago stuff a great deal, but the book is strong without it. And V.I. is marvelous as usual. Worth the read.

Penzler, Otto, editor, Bibliomysteries Volume 2, Pegasus Books, 2018. I loved this volume. I’d read some of the novellas before, when I was ordering ebooks. And “The Little Men,” by Megan Abbott, which I thought I included in a previous Recommended Reading List, but can’t find at the moment.  This volume will keep you entertained for days. It did so with me.

Pompeo, Joe, “Death & The Masque,” Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Issue, 2024. I’m not sure why this piece caught me, but it really did. Maybe because I was on the fringes of punk rock for decades. Maybe because I’ve been in dingy squalid little punk clubs, back when I was too stupid to understand the danger. Maybe because there’s an edginess here that interests me on a deep level. Whatever it is, I found this piece fascinating. I think you might too.

Taupin, Bernie, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me, Hachette Books, 2023. When I finished Bernie Taupin’s memoir, Scattershot, I immediately did two things. First, I ordered an ebook copy for a friend whom I figured would like it. (She liked parts and loathed parts. I’ll get to that.) Second, I knew I had to recommend it….but…I also realized that if I met Bernie Taupin, I doubted we would get along. There’s a lot in this book that I find—well, let’s just say the man and I don’t seem to agree about a lot of things. One thing we do agree about, though, is art and its importance. He is the lyricist behind some of my all-time favorite songs. He has a perspective that shows up in the book that is both skewed and spot-on.

He clearly wrote this, not some ghostwriter. And someone at Hachette ordered a light (or non-existant) copy edit. (This bothered my friend, a former copy editor. I just decided to go with it.) I was hooked from the author’s note forward. He starts the book this way:

I never intended this to be a conventional autobiography. My brain doesn’t work that way. I have no sense of specific timelines, and recollections and dates are as bad as my sense of direction.

Then he goes on to quote Lou Reed, who said Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean I know what it’s about. Taupin adds, What people want isn’t always what I can provide. Information on lyrical composition isn’t always forthcoming, certainly not when the keys to recall are lost. Who, and why, and what they’re about is ponderable but never definitive.

I underlined much of this book, some of it about art, some of it about business. I also smiled at the connections. His introduction to New York came through a writer for Cashbox named Eric Van Lustbader. Some of you will recognize him as a fiction writer, not a music journalist. They bonded over sf and fantasy, and they loved some of the same authors I loved (many of whom I knew). That was a lovely surprise. There are others throughout, such as the fact that he comes to Las Vegas every year to participate in the PBR, the Professional Bull Riders competition. You see, he has a ranch and horses and…really, just read this. You’ll be happy you did.

Anyway, I want you to enjoy all of the holiday stories that I’ve loved these past years, which is why this list exists. No

I love holiday stories of all kinds. I save up the stories to read during the season, and I find that I enjoy them more when I do this. I also love to write holiday stories. I’ve published three collections of them under my Rusch name. I write an entire Santa Series under my Kristine Grayson name. In fact, we’ve rebranded the series and will be doing a Kickstarter on it starting mid-December. (The Kickstarter will be a short one…and you’ll get your ebooks before Christmas.) We are doing the Kickstarter to celebrate the rebrand and Santa Claus Lane, the brand-new novel in the series. Notice there is no link yet. We will have one in a week or so.

Thursday (Thanksgiving), the WMG Holiday Spectacular Calendar of Stories sends out its very first story. Subscribers will get a story per day between now and New Year’s Day. The stories this year are phenomenal. You can still sign up to get yours by clicking here. If you don’t want to commit to a story per day, you can sample some of the stories. We publish a compilation of the previous year’s Calendar of Stories, and the one for 2023 just appeared. So did the single-volume anthologies. These feature stories in the same genre. In 2023, we had hardboiled stories, romance stories, and stories about secrets. You can order one or just all three. (You’ll note that we’re slowly redesigning this project as well.)

This list below is a compilation of all of the stories I’ve recommended since I started posting the Recommended Reading List. The list is growing quite long, which pleases me. I have left the descriptions as they were in the original Recommended Reading list, so some of them mention that it’s not Christmas time or something else that’s going on while I was reading. Eh. Just go with it.

I have also had to stop listing the individual authors in my tags. I just haven’t had the time to add them.

Not all of the stories are easily available any more. In the last few years, I tried to fix all of the links as well. Some had expired. But I’m keeping the listings here in case you want to search for them. I had a lot of fun revisiting the list this year. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed many of these stories. I suspect you’ll enjoy them as well.

Happy holiday reading!

HOLIDAY RECOMMENDED READING LIST

Allyn, Doug, “The Snow Angel,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January, 2014. (Also in The Best American Mysteries 2015) Detective Dylan LaCrosse gets called to a crime scene outside a beautiful home. A dead girl, dressed as if she were going to prom, dies in the snow. She had waved her arms and legs before dying, and she looked like a perfect snow angel.

Somehow, Doug, who is one of our best writers, imho, manages to throw a novel’s worth of twists and turns into this fantastic story. I thought it might be simply a good Doug Allyn story (and you know you’re in the hands of a great writer when good is exactly what we expect, and we hope for more) until the last section. And that section made the story absolutely perfect. Read this one. It is a holiday crime story, but you can enjoy it year round.

Arnold, Jeremy, Christmas in the Movies, Running Press, 2018. This pretty little book provided a lot of entertainment for me in this dark year. I found some movies I hadn’t seen, so I watched them. I remembered ones I loved, and thought about watching them (which was enough). There were some delightful facts in here, and some lovely photos as well. And yes, that means I recommend you pick up the hardcover…

Baum, L. Frank, “A Kidnapped Santa Claus,” Short Stories For Christmas, Saland Publishing audiobook, 2013. I believe this story was read by Bart Wolffe, but I’m not certain, and the book listing doesn’t say which stories he read. The story itself was a revelation for me. Yes, this is L. Frank Baum, the man who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and published it in 1900. I had no idea he wrote Santa stories, but he did, and this one, at least, is surprisingly modern. I mentioned it to Dean, and he had known about Baum’s Christmas stories. They were a surprise to me.

Some things aren’t the same, of course. Santa lives in the Laughing Valley, not the North Pole, and the elves and such are very different creatures than the ones we’re used to. But the sleigh, Santa’s midnight ride, all of that is quite modern. In this, Santa gets kidnapped on Christmas Eve and can’t make his ride. Very tense, and quite exciting. I have no idea how the story would be to read, but I found the audiobook marvelous, and worth recommending. I haven’t listened to all of the stories in the collection, but I plan to eventually.

Balogh, Mary, Someone To Trust, Jove, 2018. To be honest, I wasn’t ready to read anything at all romantic. I wanted murder and mayhem. But my favorite mystery writers disappointed me last month, so I picked up Balogh, whose work I adore.

I was worried as I started this one. It is part of a series that I’m greatly enjoying, but this book seemed very peripheral at first. The opening is set at Christmas, with a wedding from the previous book. I wouldn’t call this a holiday novel, though, although it is appropriate to read at the holidays.

Then the book switched up. Balogh usually doesn’t have villains in her novels. If someone is truly dastardly, they’re dastardly and dead. In fact, the effects of one horrible man launched this entire series. But this novel has a true villain. She’s a narcissist who showed up in previous novels, but not in a starring role. She is as believable as Balogh’s other characters, which is to say, very believable. Chilling. By the middle of the novel, I could not see how our protagonists were going to deal with her while keeping this a romance novel. (If it had been a mystery, she would have been a corpse or the murderer by the middle of the novel.)

Needless to say, Balogh pulled it off. I devoured the last part of this book, worried for our characters, and reassured, as romance novels do. A nice read for a dark time of year.

Baxter, John, Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, Harper Perennial, 2008. A wonderful little erudite book about an ex-patriate Australian cooking Christmas dinner for his wife’s family in France. No pressure there.

This is beautifully written, with lots and lots and lots of great descriptions of setting and food and food and setting. Lots of history of certain customs and traditions. It even has a bit of suspense: will he get the piglet he wants for the centerpiece of the dinner, will it (or any piglet) fit in the oven in the old farmhouse, and will the family eat the finished product, made with “unusual” (read: Not French) spices? By the time I got to the piglet section, I actually cared about all of those things.

A lovely little Christmas book, and one that can be read outside of the holiday season, if you’re so inclined. The clash of cultures stuff is particularly nice.

Burton, Jaci, All She Wants For Christmas, Carina Press, 2010. I read this book at night while I was trying to read a graphically violent book. I didn’t want to read that book before bed, and this one—with a country music singer heroine—spoke to me, even though it’s not Christmas time. (I think it shows how desperate I was to get away from that book that I went not only to a romance, but a Christmas romance.)

This is the first book I’ve read by Burton. I liked it. It was heartwarming, just like it should have been. I ordered the other two books in the series the moment I finished it, which tells you she did well. In fact, she did so well, she’s the one who convinced me I didn’t need to torture myself with that other book any longer. So I didn’t. I’m reading romances again instead.

Burton, Mary, “Christmas Past,” anthology with Fern Michaels, JoAnn Ross, and Judy Duarte, Kensington Reissue 2017. I’ve clearly been in the mood for holiday mysteries and I was happy to find this one. I’d read half of this book two years ago, and finished it this year. This story is about a woman who fled (and survived) an abusive husband. He’s dead, but manages to torture her from the grave. (His plans are fiendish, and fascinating.) Well written and intriguing, this story made me look for more of her work. I wondered why I hadn’t bought any of it, since it all sounded like things I’d be interested in. And then I saw the covers. They were/are appropriate for the genre, but not to my taste. They actually sent me away from her books. I’ll see how the novels are, but this story is great. Perfect if you’re in a holiday mystery mood.

Cach, Lisa, “A Midnight Clear,” Mistletoe’d, Kindle Edition, 2011. A lovely holiday novella, set in New York at the end of the 19^th century. The period details are fun—I had no idea that was when the Christmas card habit started—and the characters are great. Catherine has spent years being wined and dined by her rich aunt, going to London, Paris, and on what was once called the Grand Tour. Catherine has met European royalty and American royalty. She wears fine clothes, and she has an eye for beauty. Sort of. Because Catherine is terribly near-sighted and too vain to wear glasses.

She comes home for Christmas, to her family’s not insubstantial house in a relatively small town, and one of her wealthy suitors follows her. But she also meets a man whom she has no idea is wealthy—William, the owner of the general store. She’s not attracted to him at first because she can’t see him, literally. Then someone (William?) buys her a pair of spectacles and has them anonymously delivered, and suddenly she can see everything much clearer.

A great deal more happens here, including a magical wish by an innocent young girl (is that where the spectacles come from?), and some proper comeuppance for a very bad person. The story is lovely, the details good, and all of it will put you in a wonderful holiday mood. Enjoy!

Cach, Lisa, “Puddings, Pastries, and Thou,” Wish List, Leisure, 2003 (also in Mistletoe’d). I have no idea where I got this anthology, which also features Lisa Kleypas, Claudia Dain, and Lynsay Sands, but I read it for two reasons: First, I’m still puttering through my Kleypas binge, and second, I always read a Christmas romance anthology over the holidays.

I have to say, though, that I really hated the design of this book. It doesn’t do what romance anthologies (heck, all anthologies) should, which is point you to the authors’ other work. In fact, the stories themselves have no byline. You have to look at the table of contents to see who wrote what.

The Cach story was a nice surprise. I’ve probably read two dozen such anthologies over the years and the stories are often sweet but predictable. This one wasn’t predictable. I’ve discovered Mary Balogh through such an anthology, and now I’ll seek out other work by Cach.

This is a witty story of a down-and-out woman whose immediate family was dead and who depends on the kindness of her distant relations. Only they stuck her with an elderly woman who had either dementia or Alzeheimers (of course, the story doesn’t say since it’s set in Regency England). She was the 24/7 caretaker, and she barely had time for herself. She also barely got enough to eat.

When the story begins, our heroine Vivian has just moved in with another set of distant relatives, and must contend with a jealous 17-year-old who is about to debut. I’m all set for a Mean Girls story—the 17-year-old doesn’t want to share her glory days with a lesser cousin—but the story doesn’t work that way.

The 17-year-old does set Vivian up with a seemingly undesirably hero, who is a bad influence not because he’s a rake or an alcoholic, but because…well, let me simply say that it has to do with morals that no longer exist. He had done something honorable in our world, but dishonorable in theirs.

The entire story centers around the feasts over the holiday, and Cach delineates them with loving care. It’s pretty clear that Vivian will go from being a bony distant relation to a fat lord’s wife, and we’re cheering for her the whole way.

And the story made me hungry for pastries. Enough said.

Cafferata, Patricia D., editor, Christmas in Nevada, University of Nevada Press, 2014. I liked this little book. It examines the history of the holiday throughout Nevada’s history, using primary sources. Primary sources means that there are a few breathtakingly racist pieces in here, mostly from the white point of view, mostly of the good-intentioned kind (let us help these poor unfortunates). Just be forewarned as you read that some of the pieces are definitely of their time.

I did like a lot in here. Most of it is ephemeral in a good way, and brings out the kind of detail that the writer in me loves. For example, people often used tumbleweeds as Christmas trees. I was thinking about that on one of my runs, and then I saw one of my neighbors a few blocks over had strung some lights on a tumbleweed on her porch. I would have just thought that weird before, but I’ll wager it was a family tradition. There’s a lot of fun stuff like that. So if you like holiday history, pick this one up.

Cantrell, Rebecca, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” Yultide Thrills: A Christmas Anthology, 2023. I love this story. Rebecca captured the child’s point of view beautifully. This story takes place on two levels: The child’s goals and dreams and desires and what really happened, which we as adults understand. So well done.

Cantrell, Rebecca, “Twinkle (A Joe Tesla Christmas), Yultide Thrills: A Christmas Anthology, 2023. I had a moment as I read this story. I love Rebecca Cantrell’s work, but she often violates my reader rules. I decided life’s too short to read about children or pets in jeopardy (and yes, I know. I’m a hypocrite. I put children and pets in jeopardy in my work). But for relaxation, I try to avoid those things. Rebecca has no qualms about threatening every living creature in one of her books, and sometimes she carries through with those threats. Writers, that adds to stakes.

So I started her collection of Christmas stories. I can relate to the introduction, but in it, she says the stories get progressively darker. Now realize I have not yet read her Joe Tesla novels. So I had no idea how those stories work. And what should happen right off the bat? A little girl appears with a kitten in her pocket. Now, if this were the Hannah Vogel series, I’d be super worried. Okay, I was super worried anyway. So I peeked at the ending, saw that I could tolerate it, and went back and read the entire heartwarming and remarkable tale. I loved it.

It was the only holiday story I read this year (2022). The season, as I said above, got away from me. I didn’t even get to finish the collection. But I will. It’s on my next-year holiday pile. And I may even sneak it in earlier.

Cantrell, Rebecca, Yultide Thrills: A Christmas Anthology, 2023. I started reading this collection during Christmas of 2022, when Rebecca first published it, and finished it this year (2023). I love her voice and the stories here. Some of them are very dark, which doesn’t bother me at all, but might bother some of you. I got the paper edition, and there are some design issues. You  might be better off with the ebook. Also, this is a collection of Rebecca’s work, not an anthology ( a mistake a lot of authors make), so if you expect stories from other writers, you’ll be disappointed. If you just pick it up for Rebecca’s work, though, I can promise that you won’t be disappointed at all. I think it’ll add to your holiday reading for next year.

Davis, Sam, “A Christmas Carol: Nevada Style,” Christmas in Nevada, edited by Patricia D. Cafferata, University of Nevada Press, 2014. The Christmas in Nevada book starts with a short story written around 1870 or so, and tinkered with a few times. Cafferata says the version here is the original version (complete with some 19th century language). The story is about a saloon, looking for a piano player. A mysterious one shows up on Christmas. The story reminds me of Twain, and certainly shows how much he was influenced by his time here. The ending made me laugh out loud.

Dermatis, Dayle A., “Desperate Housewitches,” Uncollected Anthology: Winter Witches, Soul’s Road Press, 2014. I’m behind on some of my Uncollected Anthology reading from the previous group (including Dayle’s story), but I couldn’t pass this one up, just based on the title.

Trust Dayle to write a winter holiday story about the solstice and magic. She manages to combine the claustrophobia of a suburban neighborhood with the competitiveness that women sometimes engage in with holiday ritual. Only the holiday ritual here isn’t decorating a Christmas tree or singing carols (although there is a discussion of carolers that made me chuckle). Nope. This one is about pagan rituals. The story’s wonderful, funny, and a do-not-miss.

Dubé, Marcelle, McKell’s Christmas, Falcon Ridge Publishing, Kindle edition. 2013. McKell, a cop in Manitoba, finally gets a Christmas Eve off. He has dinner with his girlfriend’s friends. One friend brings a new boyfriend, and tensions rise—just not in the way you’d expect. The Canadian setting is real, the mystery is fascinating, and the characters excellent. Pick this one up.

Dubé, Marcelle, Running Away From Christmas, Falcon Ridge Publishing, Kindle edition, 2012. I read this one after the holiday because I simply couldn’t wait until next year. Faith can’t take another Christmas alone, so she runs away to Vancouver B.C., where…well, I’d like to say the holiday stalks her, but it’s not quite like that. It’s sweeter. A wonderful story, no matter the time of year.

Fry, Hannah and Evans, Thomas Oléron, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas, The Overlook Press, 2016. A dense but fun little book that uses math to prove all kinds of things like Santa exists. Maybe. Kinda. Not in the way you’d expect. And how to wrap gifts properly. and how to divide dessert, and win at Monopoly, and many other fun things associated with the holidays. The book is pretty too, so I’d suggest the tiny hardcover edition.

Green, John, “A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle,” Let It Snow, Speak, 2009. Okay, I get it now. This is the first story I’ve read of megaseller John Green’s, and it’s a lot of fun. This is one of three linked holiday romances in the Let It Snow volume, and is perhaps the liveliest one.

Set in the middle of a Christmas blizzard, three friends get called by another friend to get to the Waffle House ASAP because a trainload of cheerleaders (literally) are stranded there. The adventure is the journey to the Waffle House, and all the character arcs, etc., punctuated by reports from the Waffle House itself. Extremely fun, extremely memorable story.

Hallinan, Timothy, “Chalee’s Nativity,” The Usual Santas, no editor listed, Soho Crime, 2017. Amazing story about two orphans on the streets of Bangkok. Apparently, Chalee has appeared in Hallinan’s work before. Well written, heartbreaking in a good way. Worth the price of admission.

Herron, Mick, “The Usual Santas,” The Usual Santas, no editor listed, Soho Crime, 2017. The title story of this wonderful collection is a title story for a reason. A group of Santas working at a disreputable mall discover a problem among them. When Dean and I teach, we talk about writer stages—Stage One Writers are learning grammar, etc. Stage Four writers have learned their craft and have added some tools to the bargain. Stage Four Writers break lots of rules because they know how.

Herron is Stage Four, and this story shows why. With the exception of one minor character named Joe, everyone else in the story is named Santa. And they have dialogue with each other attributed to Santa. And it all works beautifully. I love this story. I wish I had written this story. I wish I could read it for the first time all over again. Wonderful and worth the price of admission.

Hockensmith, Steve, “Fruitcake,” Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime, Kindle edition, 2010. I love Steve Hockensmith’s short stories, partly because they’re so memorable. I couldn’t get fruitcake out of my mind for days—much as I wanted to. I’m not fond of fruitcake. Many others aren’t either which is the impetus for this story of regifting and murder.

Hockensmith, Steve “Naughty,” Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime, Kindle edition, 2010. Funny story about a down-on-her-luck woman, Christmas “elves,” a department store, and a rather unexpected crime. Fun and memorable.

Hockensmith, Steve, Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime, Kindle edition, 2010. I have no idea how many of Steve Hockensmith’s short stories I’ve read in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine over the years. Quite a few, judging by the ones I remembered and reread in this collection. It’s a collection of Steve’s Christmas stories, all of which I liked, many of which I loved. Even the copyright page is funny. My only quibble with the volume? In it, Steve mentions he’s too busy to write short fiction these days. So I say, Stop sleeping, Steve! Write your books, but write short stories too. Whatever it takes. Maybe it takes y’all to buy this book to get him to write more short stories. So do it.

Hunter, Madeline, “A Christmas Abduction,” Seduction on a Snowy Evening, Kensington Books, 2019. This comes from another of those anthologies that weirdly does not give the editor credit. Oh, I hate that.

The anthology has three novellas, along with excerpts from upcoming novels, which I mostly skipped. I bought the anthology because of a different author, but this is the story that I found memorable. I’d heard a lot about Madeline Hunter, but I’ve never read her work before (that I remember). She managed to set up a heartbreaking scenario for our heroine, one that our hero understands without her telling him about it, because he already knew bits and pieces of the story. He just put it all together for her.

Novellas a tricky, particularly a romance novella with villains, which this one has. Hunter pulled off the villain in a way that I had expected only because I’m a writer, and because I realized about 20 pages from the end there’s only one person who could be the villain. But she did the work delicately and in a delightful manner.

If you like holiday novellas, you’ll like this one. It’s like no other that I’ve read.

James, Eloisa, “A Mistletoe Kiss,” Mistletoe Christmas, Avon, 2021. I bought this anthology when it came out and then kinda forgot about it. I remember picking it up the next year, looking at the god-awful cover and assuming it was indie published and probably had a bad interior design. I didn’t even look to double-check. This year, I did double-check, and realized that nope, this is an Avon book with a bad interior design and a terrible cover. And it was an anthology, not a group novel, which I had also assumed.

The novellas in the book are linked to each other by setting and one event. It’s a Christmas revelry, sponsored by a dying duke. Every one of the four authors who have written for this have set their stories at that party. I had high hopes for all of the novellas, but only two are worth recommending.

This one, by Eloisa James, is the best in the book and an absolute delight. Turns out that the duke’s daughter has been the one who has put on this amazing gathering for the past several years, making it the party of the season. There’s a lot of great family interaction here, a wonderful romance at the heart of it, and believable misunderstanding. Really well done.

James, P.D., The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories, Knopf, 2016. This tiny little book pleased me in a thousand ways, and made me sad. First, the pleasing part(s): the stories, the design, the way it felt in my hands. I loved the attention to detail here.

The part that made me sad? P.D. James died in 2014, and will not be writing any new books. I suspect the estate might approve more things like this, and I’ll read it all, but it won’t be the same. After I finished this, I thought that I might reread some of her books. Can’t decide if I will or not. I remember them so vividly…

My one complaint with the volume is that there is no copyright page that lists where the stories were first published. I love that kind of information and am sad to see that Knopf left it out.

Anyway, this volume is wonderful and worth reading. I’m going to highlight a couple of the stories that I loved below. Surprisingly, to me anyway, the stories without her usual main character Adam Dalgliesh were the ones I preferred. Maybe because those were atypical cozies. I dunno.

James, P.D., “The Mistletoe Murder,” The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories, Knopf, 2016. The title story of this collection is the title story for a reason. This is a very strong mystery, filled with honest misdirection (meaning it was all there in plain sight, but still hard to see) and great characters. A long-time mystery writer reflects on a strange family Christmas she attended in 1940. I love the discussion of mysteries versus real life murders, and all kinds of tiny details. If I say much more, I’ll ruin it.

James, P.D., Sleep No More, , Knopf, 2017. I have no idea who is handling P.D. James’s estate, but kudos to whomever is. This is the second year that the estate has released a group of previously uncollected short stories in a beautiful edition just in time for the holiday season. None of the stories struck me as spectacular James, but regular James is still better than most writers out there. The opening story, “The Yo-Yo,” stopped me right at the beginning and made me check when it was first published. Not because it was dated, but because the observation at the beginning—that a simple item, found after death, might seem to have sentimental value, and that value might be completely misconstrued. That’s an observation someone older has, not someone young. And sure enough, she wrote that story in her 70s. Some of the stories here are Christmas stories, a few are not. All are worth reading.

Johnson, Craig, “In The Land of The Blind,” The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sanford, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. I haven’t read any of Johnson’s Longmire series, until I read this short story. A short holiday tale without the usual holiday sappiness. In fact, a drug addict takes some people hostage in a church on Christmas Eve. The way that the hostage situation gets resolved is one of the most logical things I’ve seen. Well done.

Johnson, Maureen, “The Jubilee Express,” Let It Snow, Speak, 2009. Jubilee’s parents get arrested in a brawl at a collectibles store the day before Christmas, so they send her to spend the holiday with her grandparents. She has to take a train, which stalls in the middle of a blizzard in a small town. She doesn’t want to sit in the cold train for hours (and maybe days) so she hikes in the snow to the Waffle House, followed by a gaggle of cheerleaders. I thought I had the story figured out twice, and I was wrong both times. Loads and loads of fun, with great characters and lots of heart.

Kaaberbøl, Lene, and Friis, Agnete, “When The Time Came,” translated by Mark Kline, The Usual Santas, no editor listed, Soho Crime, 2017. A dark and brooding story featuring the duo’s main character, Nina Borg. Thieves break into what they believe to be an empty building during the holidays, only to discover someone in extreme distress. If I say much more I ruin it. But suffice to say I had no idea how this would end up, and loved the way that it resolved.

Klavan, Andrew, “The Advent Reunion,”Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January, 2011. A Christmas ghost story that packs a heck of a punch. Very short, very powerful. If I say any more, I’ll ruin it.

Kleypas, Lisa, Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor, St. Martin’s Paperback, 2011. I saved this one for my holiday reading. In fact, I bought it in October when it first came out—and honestly, I could’ve read it then, despite the title. Because this isn’t a Christmas story; it’s a fall holidays story. Halloween makes a major appearance and Thanksgiving is hilarious, even though the book itself isn’t funny, but heartwarming.

Holly’s mother died in April, leaving Holly’s uncle Mark as her guardian. Mark has never been around children, doesn’t know what to do, but he enlists his brother Sam, and together they try to make a home for this poor little girl who has given up speaking since her mother’s sudden death. Six months later—in September—Holly writes a letter to Santa: she wants a mom for Christmas. Not that Mark wants to marry or anything. You get the rest of the plot, of course.

But the book is set on the San Juan Islands in Washington State, and it’s clear that Kleypas lives in the Northwest because the details are great. The characters are even better, from Holly to Mark to Maggie, the young widow who has just started a toy store. Realistic, sensitive, and touching. You can read this one at any season of the year (but fall would be best).

Kroupa, Susan, “Walter’s Christmas-Night Musik,” Laurel Fork Press, Kindle Edition, 2010. A wonderful story about Christmas Night visitors. Unlike the previous Christmas night visitor stories you’ve read, these visitors are a surprise. I’d like to be visited by these folks. I found myself thinking about this story long after I finished reading it.

Let It Snow, Speak, 2009. I normally label books by author, but I have no idea how to label this one, because it’s listed in three different ways on the three different websites I went to. So I gave up and did this.

Let It Snow is a series of linked holiday romances written for young adults, but really, who cares who the target market is? The stories work. All three of them are good, but the first two are so good that I found myself a bit disappointed with the third. Had I read it as a standalone, I probably would have loved it.

The sense of teenagers at loose ends on the night before Christmas in a blizzard comes through all of the stories. The romances are believable, the stories powerful, and the settings wonderfully done. If you need some holiday reading, pick up this book.

Levine, Laura, “The Dangers of Candy Canes,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I love Laura Levine’s voice. I wasn’t in the mood for saccharine stories in 2020, and while this story is a cozy, the voice takes it out of the sweetly simpering. I started the story on Christmas Eve Day at breakfast and tore through the entire thing, often chuckling out loud.

Levine, Laura, “Nightmare on Elf Street,” Secret Santa, Zebra, 2013. The voice in this piece caught me from the very beginning. In fact, I read it before I read anything else in the volume and, as a stickler for reading anthologies in order, that’s truly saying something.

A freelance ad writer thinks she’s going to get an advertising account; instead, through mishaps, she gets hired as a Santa’s Elf at Toyland. She doesn’t correct the mistake because she needs the money. The story’s a typical cozy—a rather bloodless (deserved) murder, lots of suspects, and a goodly amount of humor.

I laughed, fell in love with the cat, and enjoyed the situation. I’ll be looking for Levine’s other books, which is exactly what novellas like this should make me do.

Lovesey, Peter, “The Haunted Crescent,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, Vintage Crime, 2013. A delightful Christmas ghost story with a twist that I never saw coming. I shall say no more, except to remind you to go and read this one.

Lyons, Kay, The Crash Before Christmas, Kindred Spirits Publishing, Kindle edition, 2011. A delightful Christmas romance. I figured out what was going on at the end of chapter three, but most readers won’t. This novel, about a bush pilot who crashes in a blizzard and is rescued by a mysterious woman, is occasionally creepy, and very suspenseful. It’s a great holiday read; I suspect you’ll enjoy it year-round.

Macomber, Debbie, Jack Frost, Debbie Macomber Inc., 2023. I find it fascinating that Debbie Macomber, once the queen of romance, self-published a Christmas novella. Once upon a time, her publisher(s) would pair her stories with the stories of other writers so those writers would get sampled by Debbie’s audience and that would boost their sales. Not so much anymore, I guess.

This is a classic Macomber holiday story. A holiday situation, two somewhat prickly characters, and a holiday solution. She is a master at combining holidays and romance. In this one, a woman misjudges her new coworker until they get stuck together one night when the power goes out. The journey to the happily ever after is not predictable, and the novella is fun.

Macomber, Debbie, Twelve Days of Christmas, Ballantine Books, 2017. I have no idea how I’ve never read a Debbie Macomber book before. I’m not even sure I’ve read one of her Christmas books, and she’s the queen of Christmas romance. I have a hunch I thought I wouldn’t like the novels, because they’d be overly religious and dealing with people I didn’t want to read about.

This one caught my eye in the grocery store, of all places. I read the back cover blurb, and immediately picked up the book. Julia has troubles with her grumpy (and gorgeous) neighbor. She decides to kill him with kindness and blog about it for twelve days. Of course, this is fraught with issues. The blog’s witty, the characters are real, the situation is uncomfortable. I read the book in an evening, and found the novel charming. I’m not going to run out and buy all the back Christmas books of Debbie’s, but I’ll read a few when I find them. This was a lovely way to start my holiday season. The book is worth your time.

MacDonald, John D., “Dead on Christmas Street,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, Vintage Crime, 2013. This story, first published in 1952, feels surprisingly contemporary. A woman dives out of a seventeen-story window. The death gets investigated, of course. The forensic details are accurate for the time, and the entire attitude expressed here feels like something someone could have written now. MacDonald was/is a master, and stories like this prove why.

McBain, Ed, “All Through The House,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, Vintage Crime, 2013. This is an 87th Precinct story of McBain’s that I hadn’t read before. It’s Christmas Eve, and Carella is alone in the precinct. People continue to show up, seemingly re-enacting the Nativity. But it’s McBain, so emphasis on “seemingly.” I loved this story. You will too.

McPherson, Catriona, “Mrs. Tilling’s Match,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December, 2020. “Mrs. Tilling’s Match” is part of the Dandy series that McPherson writes. I’ve never read the series, but this story stood alone just fine. (I have a hunch I might have missed a thing or two, but still…) The story is set at Christmas 1934, and deals with a note that the cook of the family receives. It’s emotional and creepy, in a good way, and the tension was quite surprising. Looks like I’ll have to investigate some of her books.

Meier, Leslie, “Candy Canes of Christmas Past,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I have no idea when I first started this book, but I note that I recommended Laura Levine’s story in 2020. Which means I haven’t picked it up since then. So…four years later…I was in the mood for cozies again at holiday time, I guess.

Leslie Meier’s story features her regular heroine, Lucy Stone, in a story that takes place in two time periods—when she is a grandmother and her kids and grandkids come to visit, and when she’s a young mother, dealing with a new home and a toddler, while pregnant in a new town. The house is a fixer-upper and it’s falling apart around her, yet she makes time to solve an old crime involving glass candy canes. The 1980 details are marvelous, the discomfort of advanced pregnancy plain, and the stress on young parents also vivid. The mystery is meh, but I always find that with cozies. The read, though, was great.

Morgan, Sarah, Miracle on 5th Avenue, HQN, 2016. Eva’s upbeat grandmother taught her to be the sunshine in every dark room. So when her grandmother dies, Eva doesn’t know how to grieve. She’s going to spend the holidays house-sitting (and decorating) a penthouse apartment on 5th Avenue.

Said apartment belongs to Lucas, a thriller writer, whose wife died suddenly. Lucas hasn’t told anyone that he failed to take the scheduled trip out of town, so when Eva shows up–in the middle of a blizzard, natch–she encounters the Big Bad Crime Writer.

Funny, wry, charming, with tons of insights about writing and the perils of falling for a writer. Don’t know how I missed Sarah Morgan, but I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

Nordeen, Juliet, New Year’s Shenanigans, 2019. The first full length book in the Modesta Quinn series finds our heroine investigating a break-in at a legal pot-growing facility in the rainy New Year up in Washington State. Modesta Quinn made her first appearance in our Holiday Spectacular, solving a crime around Christmas. I loved that story, and had high hopes for the novel. It more than lived up to my expectations. Lots of great procedures, marvelous descriptions, a good plot with some surprising twists, and excellent characters. I hope Juliet continues with this series, because I’ll continue to read it.

Page, Norvell, “Crime’s Christmas Carol,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, Vintage Crime, 2013. I’m sure Dean had heard of Norvell Page, but I never had. Page was a prolific writer for the pulps in the 1930s. This story was first published in 1939, and was a riff on O Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” only with a heck of a criminal twist. Yet somehow Page managed to pull off a happy ending. The story becomes more poignant when you remember that it was written and published during the Depression.

Patterson, Irette Y., “Worth,” Saturday Evening Post, December 19, 2014. A lovely short Christmas piece by Irette. I read it on Christmas Eve, and it really added to an already special day. A short story about money, holidays, and love. This one’s good any time of year.

Patterson, Kent, “The Wereyam,” A Fantastic Holiday Season, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, WordFire Press, 2013. Kevin put together a holiday anthology of the stories that the writers who used to gather for our Christmas holiday parties wrote and read to each other for those gatherings. Kent’s “The Wereyam” is one of my favorites, so when the book arrived, I sat down and reread this story immediately. It not only holds up, it’s better than I remember.

We lost Kent in 1995, and while it was hard on all of us personally, I think of the loss to writing, and I mourn. He was just getting started in what would have been a fantastic career, and he died suddenly. I’m so glad that this story has been reprinted. Take a look. See if you don’t love it too.

Penzler, Otto, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, Vintage Crime, 2013. It took me four holiday seasons to finish this book, not because it was a slog to read, but because there were so many stories. And they were mostly to my taste. I think I skipped maybe three of them completely. The book is nearly 700 pages long, and the pages are in columns, so it probably would have been 1400 to 1500 pages long if the design was different.

Usually I complain about how the best American series is laid out, and Otto is the series editor for the mystery volume. But he has no say in the editorial layout: that’s clearly mandated by the publisher. All of Otto’s other anthologies have narrative flow.

This one has a great editorial conceit. The book is divided into sections. For example, the book starts with the section “A Cozy Little Christmas” and ends with “A Classic Little Christmas.” As is appropriate for a book that covers the entire genre, the book starts with an Agatha Christie story (Peroit) and ends with another (Marple). In the middle of the book there are a wide variety of other sections, from “A Scary Little Christmas” to “A Modern Little Christmas.” My tastes veer away from cozy and classic, so my favorite parts of the book were in the middle.

I was disappointed to come to the end of the book. I had been at reading it for so long that it had become a holiday tradition for me. Unfortunately, I have a great memory for stories, and I rarely read any twice. Otherwise, I would start all over again next year. Great volume. Lots of fun. Pick it up.

Peters, Ellis, “The Trinity Cat,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2013. This particular story, originally published in 1976, the story is about a real cat acting in a real cat way. Set on Christmas Eve in a small English village, the story features an older woman’s murder, a tight cast of characters, and some wry observations. It’s a cozy, but not a light or funny one. I enjoyed it a great deal.

Reed, Annie, “The Case of the Missing Elf,” Thunder Valley Press, Kindle Edition, 2010. One of the nice things about the revolution in e-publishing is that you can buy a single short story of an author’s work just as a sample. I already knew that I liked Annie Reed’s stories, but I also know she’s not a household name. I hope that changes.

This is one of her Dee and Diz fantasy detective stories. Diz is an elf, although not a traditional one, and Dee is a woman with an added gift. There’s a bit of romantic tension involved, but that’s not at the heart of this story. Like so many stories on this month’s list, this is a Christmas tale. And the missing elf is not the Jolly Old One, but his occasional impersonator, Norman. Fun, and thought-provoking, in a Christmasy kinda way. It’s a nice introduction to Annie’s work.

Reed, Annie, “Essy and The Christmas Kitten,” Kindle edition, Thunder Valley Press, 2011. This story is not as sweet as the title implies. Instead, it is a bit dark and moody, so much so that I read with one eye half closed, worried that something would go wrong. But it is a Christmas story in the best way, and quite memorable. One of my best Christmas reads this year.

Reed, Annie, “Roger’s Christmas Wish,” Kindle Edition, Thunder Valley Press, 2010. Somehow I missed this in last year’s Christmas reading. Young Roger’s grandmother moved in with him, taking his room. His parents are unhappy, and so is Roger. All he wants for Santa to do is make his grandmother leave. The story is sweet, with unexpected twists. It’s also a nicely done e-book. I read it in the Kindle app on my iPad and it felt like I was reading a real book. Nicely done.

Reed, Annie, The New Year That Almost Wasn’t, A Diz & Dee Mystery, Thunder Valley Press, 2013. I love Diz & Dee so much that I bought one of the stories for Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds. So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that about a year ago, Annie had written one and I had missed it! I ordered it immediately, read it immediately, and enjoyed immensely.

The woman pregnant with the New Year’s baby goes missing. Not the first baby born in the year, but the baby who will become the ancient guy by December 31. Great concept, and it becomes even greater when we find out what happens to the ancient guy when his job is done. I’m not going to spoil it. Read this one.

Ridley, Erica, “Mischief and Mistletoe,” Mistletoe Christmas, Avon, 2021. The other well done novella in this volume comes from Erica Ridley. The story features a young woman whose mother fears she will never marry, but the woman herself is more interested in her writing than she is in any kind of relationship. In fact, she fears that the relationship might end her writing forever. I haven’t seen this conflict before in a Regency romance, and found it intriguing. This (and the James) are worth the price of the book.

Ross, Barbara, “Logged On,” Yule Log Murder, anthology with Leslie Meier, and Lee Hollis, Kensington, 2018. Surprisingly tense story about baking, of all things. Julia Snowden wants to make a french dessert called Bûche de Noël, but she can’t pull it off. Then her mother reminds her that an elderly neighbor used to make it for Christmases past, and it was good. Thing is, as Julia learns to bake with her neighbor, she also learns that a lot of people the neighbor knows have died of gastric issues around the holidays. Is the cranky elderly woman a serial poisoner? Or is something else going on?

I did not see the ending coming, which is lovely and surprising and fun for me. And the writing is excellent, and just thinking about the story makes me hungry. One of my favorite reads of December.

Ross, Dalton & Snierson, Dan, “Let’s Make A Christmas Movie! (Or Not)” Entertainment Weekly, December, 2021. This article is for everyone who has watched one of the roughly 150 Christmas movies that come out on Lifetime, Hallmark, Netflix and other channels, and thought, “I can do that!” EW “tasked” (their word) to write and pitch a holiday movie, which they did. Their experiences should be a lesson to all of you who want a career writing screenplays. Make sure you have a strong backbone and can take criticism. And stuff your know-it-all side into a closet somewhere. Really worth reading, for writers and non-writers alike.

Ross, JoAnn, “Dear Santa,” Silver Bells anthology with Fern Michaels, Mary Burton, and Judy Duarte, Kensington Reissue 2017. I found this volume in a discount store. Originally, the book came out in 2008, but apparently, it’s been reissued. I was getting pretty burned out on Christmas stories by the time I picked this up. The only reason I started JoAnn’s story is because I like her work and because it was about a mystery writer. The writer’s name is Holly Berry, and there’s an actual reason for that. Not a funny reason. A sad and heartwarming one.

Anyway, Holly gets caught in a snow storm in the mountains and sees a reindeer cross her path (Blitzen?). Then she crashes her SUV. Of course, she’s rescued by a hunk of a man who also happens to have the world’s cutest daughter. He’s mayor of the most Christmassy town in the United States, and owns an inn. And in the context of the story, all of this is believable. And wonderful. And charming.

And…and…I cried at the end. Not a delicate little tear running down the side of my face, no. A gasp-y sobby kind of crying that only a few authors have achieved for me in the past—at least with something sweet. So pick up a copy of this book. The paperback is super cheap right now, so if you prefer that format, it’s cheaper than the ebook.

Runyon, Damon, “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2013. Every time I read a Damon Runyon story, I realize how much I enjoy his work. I just never seem to seek him out. I’m not sure why. I loved this one as well. First published in Collier’s in 1932, this story is firmly set in its era. It begins in a speakeasy, involves a drunken pact, and…works. Somehow. I loved it.

Seabrook, John, Jingle Bell Pop, Narrated by Erin Moon, Audible Studios, 2018. I don’t recommend audiobooks often, because I spend half my listening time on podcasts. But a friend recommended this, and I do have an Audible membership, so I downloaded it.

Jingle Bell Pop was one of the free selections for December 2018. I assume it’ll still be available after that.

It’s a behind-the-scenes of the business of Christmas carols. I knew a lot of the stories, but the modern ones, I did not know. The author interviewed songwriters, and calls Christmas pop hits “an annuity.” Yep. If the contracts were good, the writers earned and earned and still earn. Writers should listen to this one, just to see how copyright can be your friend. The book is an hour and 14 minutes long. Well worth listening to.

Shalvis, Jill, “Bah, Handsome!” Merry and Bright, Kensington, 2019. An early Jill Shalvis holiday novella that has most of what I love about her writing. (Not enough goofy animals, though.) Hope runs a B&B, and the lawyer for her mean-as-sin brother who loaned her money arrives to collect. In the middle of a snowstorm. During the holidays. Yes, yes, you know how it will end, but there sure is a lot of tension and how-will-this-resolve? in the journey. Lots of fun.

Shalvis, Jill, Hot Winter Nights, Avon, 2018. I really have no idea how Shalvis makes her characters so winning, but she does. Molly Malone, the office manager for other characters in this series, wants to take an active part in investigations. Everyone else tries to thwart her. But she has two elderly elves who claim that something’s fishy at Santa’s Village, and she’s going to investigate. Lucas Knight doesn’t want her to, but knowing she won’t stop, he decides to help.

Some of the scenes in here are laugh-out-loud funny, especially as the elderly elves speak their minds. But there’s a lot of tension too, when it becomes clear that those elves were on to something. One of the most fun things I read all month.

Shalvis, Jill, The Trouble With Mistletoe, Avon, 2016. I bought this book last year and pulled it off my TBR shelf this year, after finishing something particularly bad and particularly dark. The book was the perfect antidote to that awful, dark novel. Shalvis has an incredible voice, and she creates spectacular characters, including the four-footed ones.

Willa owns South Bark, a pet shop that specializes in grooming and pet care. She’s covered in “puppies and poo” when who should walk in but Keane, the guy who stood her up on the only date she tried to have in high school. To make matters worse, he doesn’t remember her. His great-aunt dumped her tempermental cat on him because the aunt was having a health crisis and had no one else to turn to. He needs to board the cat, at least while he’s at work, because the cat—named Petunia by the aunt, rechristened PITA by Keane (Pain in the ass)—tends to show her displeasure by ruining anything she touches when she’s alone.

The meet-cute is so cute, I read it to Dean. Beneath the fun plot are serious issues, from abandonment to loveless middle class households to building your own family. I was halfway done with the book when I ordered the rest in the Heartbreaker Bay series. I had to refrain from ordering everything she wrote, because she’s written a lot. I’ve already worked my way through this book and a novella (which is fun and too slight to recommend), and I’m starting into another tonight. So, yeah. Read this. Everyone is great. Including PITA.

Smith, Dean Wesley, “Jukebox Gifts,” WMG Publishing, Kindle edition, 2010. I love Dean’s jukebox stories. The conceit is this: for the duration of a single song, played on a jukebox, the person who chose the story can time travel to their strongest memory of that song—and maybe change the past. “Jukebox Gifts” is set at Christmas and is both heartwarming and heartwrenching.

Tursten, Helen, “An Elderly Lady Seeks Peace at Christmastime,” translated by Marlaine Delargy,” The Usual Santas, no editor listed, Soho Crime, 2017. Delightful story about a regular character of Tursten’s named Maud. Maud is an octogenarian who uses people’s prejudices to change the world around her. She just wants a quiet Christmas, and she’ll resort to anything to get it. I’m definitely looking for more of Tursten’s work (preferably translated by Delargy, who found a perfectly wry voice for Maud).

Unknown, “Josephine and The Scary Santa: A Jarbridge Christmas,” Christmas in Nevada, edited by Patricia D. Cafferata, University of Nevada Press, 2014. While I love the Christmas in Nevada book, it’s also deeply irritating. I have no idea when or where some of these pieces came from, nor do I know who wrote them. It’s clear, from the different voices, that Cafferata did not write most of the summaries. They might be from newspapers, but which ones and when is pretty unclear, even from the introductions.

This particular true story is about how little Josephine Cooper and her family spent one Christmas in Jarbridge in the early 1920s. Very short, and very delightful.

Unknown, “The Richest Christmas: Snowbound on the Swallow Ranch,” Christmas in Nevada, edited by Patricia D. Cafferata, University of Nevada Press, 2014. This particular incident happened in 1923. Five-year-old Sheldon Olds lived on the ranch with his father, who worked there. A blizzard came in at Christmas time and no one could leave to celebrate, so the Swallows held a celebration for everyone stuck on the ranch.

Sheldon was particularly terrified because he and one of the Swallow children had actually set fire to some straw in the barn about a month before. They had to hide in the sheep dip to avoid punishment. This story is about the repercussions during his meeting with Santa. Charming little piece.

The Usual Santas, no editor listed, Soho Crime, 2017. I loved this book and gave it to a number of Christmas-story loving friends. It’s beautifully designed, with lots of great extras inside. Visual extras. And there’s no editor listed, which pisses me off because clearly, someone edited this book, and put a lot of thought into it. The someone divided the stories by type (“acts of kindness”; “the darkest of holiday noir”) and put together a pleasing order of wonderful authors. This is a spectacular little book, worth every moment you spend with it.

Westlake, Donald, “The Burglar and The Whatsis,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2013. First published in Playboy in 1966, this story is as much sf as it is mystery. If I say much more about the story, I’ll spoil it. It’s very short, it has a couple of twists, and it made me laugh. In fact, it’s my favorite story in the volume so far (which isn’t saying a great deal, since I only managed about 100 pages of this massive tome before I stopped to save the rest for next holiday season).

Westlake, Donald, “Give Till It Hurts” Christmas at The Mysterious Bookshop, edited by Otto Penzler, Vangard Press, 2010. Losing Westlake was a tragedy. I love his Dortmunder stories and this one, written for the customers of Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Bookshop, is marvelous. Laugh out loud funny, as most Dortmunder stories are.

White, Ethel Lina, “Waxworks,” The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, Vintage Crime, 2013. Ethel Lina White wrote seventeen novels, two of which became classic films, The Lady Vanishes and The Spiral Staircase. I hadn’t heard of her until I encountered this story, but it soon became clear why Hitchcock felt her to be a kindred spirit.

Sonia, a young reporter, has decided to make her reputation by spending New Year’s Eve in the Waxworks, ostensibly to catch the haunt or whatever it is that was causing all the spooky noises. She describes herself as “not timid” and “fairly perceptive” and believes she can solve this mystery.

Only things get a little more mysterious as time goes on. Someone dies, and some really spooky occurrences happen, and Sonia…well, read this. You’ll soon forget, as I did, that it was written in 1930. I actually pictured a waxworks I’d been to recently as I read it. Probably the most memorable story of the volume for me so far.

Willis, Connie, “All About Emily,” Asimov’s, December, 2011. (Also in A Lot Like Christmas) For years, Connie Willis’s holiday stories, published in Asimov’s, were part of my Christmas traditions. Then, she got deeply involved in her excellent novels, All Clear and Blackout (which I recommended earlier), and she stopped writing any short fiction at all. Which is, I think, a crime. I love Connie’s novels, but I adore her short work.

“All About Emily” riffs on the movie All About Eve, and explains the film for those of you who missed that marvelous classic. The story is set in New York at Christmas, and our heroine is the aging actress who might be threatened by a new up-and-comer, Emily. And yet, something about that girl….

It’s a fun story, especially if you love old movies, Broadway, theater, and New York at Christmas time. And it manages to be good science fiction as well. It’s nice to have you back, Connie. Please continue writing short fiction while doing your novels.

Willis, Connie, A Lot Like Christmas, Del Rey, 2017. I had completely missed this book when it first came out. It’s a collection of Connie Willis’s Christmas stories. An expansion, really, of her original collection, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, which I have. I looked to see if I was doing the recommended reading when that book came out, and realized I hadn’t been. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to recommend this collection, because it’s wonderful and full of stories that I just love, like “Newsletter” and “Epiphany.” But I read those stories so long ago that I can’t really comment on them well. So here’s the thing…any story in this collection that was either in Asimov’s in the last century or in Miracle gets my vote.

I read the ones that were published elsewhere or which had a more recent copyright date when I got my hands on this particular collection. I also read all the essays. I am recommending individual pieces from that particular subset of things. Oh, and I wrote about “All About Emily” in a very early Recommended Reading List from November of 2011. (It also shows up in the annual holiday list every year.)

In other words, you’ll find a few Willis stories singled out in this Recommended Reading list, but don’t view them as the only good ones in this collection. They’re all good. Some are just more to my taste than others.

And one other thing…the recommendations at the back. I don’t agree with a lot of them because apparently my taste and Connie’s diverge on the best holiday fare, but that’s great. It allowed me to rethink some of my likes and dislikes. I suspect they’ll do the same for you.

Willis, Connie, “Just Like The Ones We Used To Know,” A Lot Like Christmas, Del Rey, 2017. Maybe my favorite of all of Connie’s Christmas stories, this story is about a truly unlikely snowfall and the power of wishes. It’s lovely.

Willis, Connie, “Now Showing,” A Lot Like Christmas, Del Rey, 2017. I love this story, although it does feel like it was set 100 years ago instead of ten years ago. That’s how much has changed. It makes me nostalgic for a time when movie theaters were teen hangouts and social media was…different. The story is fun, and worth reading, even though it feels like something much older than it is.

Willis, Connie, “Take A Look At The Five And Ten,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December, 2020. The arrival of a new Connie Willis tale is always great news. This is one of her holiday novellas. It’s good, but not great, Willis. Good Willis is still five times better than what anyone else is doing. Well worth your time. I have included a link to the Subterranean edition, which looks pretty.

Yi, Melissa,“Blue Christmas,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January/February, 2019. Melissa Yi, a doctor, writes a good series about Hope Sze, also a doctor. In this story, Hope goes to Christmas party, and observes things the rest of us never would. Lots of misdirection here, very well done, and some marvelous character building, with a lot of tension. And the meaning of blue…well, you’ll see.

May, 2024

Huston, Caitlin, “Fiction Forward,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 6, 2024. When someone tells you something is not possible or that it won’t sell or that no one is interested, think on this story. I can’t tell you how many people have told me over the years that fiction audio, especially podcasts, doesn’t get an audience. Yet the most-nominated podcast in this year’s Ambies was a fiction piece. If I say more, I’ll rival the word count of the piece I’m sending you to. So go take a look.

Macintyre, Ben, Rogue Heroes, Broadway Books, 2016. After reading The Mosquito Bowl,  which I recommended in February, I found myself scanning my World War II books to find another interesting volume. I ended up reading Rogue Heroes, which was fascinating and cringeworthy at the same time. Macintyre does not flinch at some of the brutal depictions of his protagonists or of the war itself. I found the entire thing fascinating and deeply uncomfortable.

McQuiston, Casey, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, Wednesday Books, 2022. I think I owe an apology to Casey McQuiston for letting this book sit on my shelf for two years. I had an early edition of the book with a cover that screamed romance. I thought I knew what the book would be about, but wowza was I wrong. That’s how I’ve reacted to all of McQuiston’s books. I literally judge them by their covers and find them wanting. Then I read the books and I fall in love.

Shara Wheeler kisses our protagonist Chloe, her rival for valedictorian at Willowgrove Christian Academy, and then disappears. Just walks out of school and goes somewhere else. The mystery of Shara Wheeler’s disappearance, her behavior before she vanishes, and a few other fascinating pieces that I can’t tell you because Spoilers! is what made me read this book in a month in which I had no time.

Get this one. Share it with your friends.

Tringali, Anthony, and Cox, Stephen, “‘Over the Rainbow’ Under Suspicion,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 6, 2024. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my years of studying copyright, it’s that figuring out of music copyright has been stolen isn’t as easy as it looks. But it does look like Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg might have lifted most of the melody for “Over The Rainbow” from a Scandinavian composer named Signe Lunde. Whether or not the lifting was intentional is up for debate. Whether or not it matters depends on how the information is presented. Signe Lunde was a woman who was well known. She also became an active Nazi sympathizer. Those are just some of the fascinating twists in this article. I suggest you read it, and see what you think.

Weprin, Alex, “The AI Perils Buried in the Fine Print*,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 27, 2024. Fascinating analysis of all the conundrums buried in what we’re all calling AI. People are interested in using it, but aren’t sure how or why. Corporations are having similar dilemmas. Really worth the read. It’ll give you something to think about.

Well, I did the reading. You all know that. I just didn’t write up my likes. And to be completely honest, I put up the March list after leaving out one publication because I had so many recommendations from it. I wanted the March list up, so I moved everything from that magazine to April. That’s On Wisconsin for Winter of 2023. I needed to complete something, so I sacrificed accuracy for completion. Ultimately, I didn’t include everything, because some are UW specific and went into my library. But you’ll find a lot from that issue down below.

I’m slowly catching up on writing about the reading. For context, I did this reading in April, but wasn’t able to write much about it until July, August, and September. There’s a lot of great stuff here, though, and most of the articles are free. Take a look.

April 2024

Benson, Harry, “Ticket To Ride,” Vanity Fair, February 2024. I seem to be collecting a ton of articles about the Beatles first visit to the U.S. in 1964. Because it was sixty years ago, everyone is writing and sharing pictures. Harry Benson, though, was traveling with them, and saw the change from famous band to pop icons. Of all the articles I’ve seen, this is the best.

Cartwright, Lachlan, “Take The Cash or Fight? Media Moguls Split on AI Deals,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 14, 2024. I’m pointing out this article to show you (especially you creatives) that the AI fight is complicated. So many people are trying to figure out what the generative AI future will be, and some people are hedging their bets. Some of it is because of the money, but some of it reflects the uses of AI. So read this and keep it in mind as we see more and more articles on generative AI.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, We Were Eight Years in Power, One World, 2018. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power is one of the most banned books in the United States. I’d been meaning to read it for years, and finally decided, heck, I’m going to do so. My copy is now dog-eared and underlined, with lots of yellow sticky notes. It’s an important book. It’s a meditation on writing, from a man who reread the essays he wrote while Barack Obama was in office after he knew that Trump had been elected. Some of the essays—particularly the first, about Bill Cosby—were dated even then. Some have become dated by now. But so much in here is still important, still worth reading. A lot of it is uncomfortable to read as well, in a challenging and good way. And much of it is filled with truths, including one that’s important in 2024, now that we have another cadidate of color.

Like this:

For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.

Or this:

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under the skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishment to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police.

I found lines and paragraphs and entire pages like this, all worth underlining, all still (sadly) true. This is an amazing book, one you might want to read and discuss with friends.

Gardner, Chris, “‘I’m Bloody Tired of Hiding,'” The Hollywood Reporter, February 28, 2024. Fascinating interview with Lynda Obst, the megaproducer, who has been in the business forever. Apparently, getting older and having a cancer diagnosis has made her a lot more forthcoming. A blunt and fascinating “no-whining” interview with a woman who has succeeded in the business longer than many of us have been alive. The attitude that gets her through everything when something goes wrong? They won. We lost. Next. You know, that’s kinda my attitude too. It works.

Glicksman, Josh, “A League of Their Own,” Billboard, February 10, 2024. A fascinating roundtable, timed before the Super Bowl featuring professionals who have, over the past few years, combined music and sport to create a whole new market. I’ve circled and underlined this to death. Pay attention to the discussion of rights here, and the possibilities presented by a whole new market. Then open your mind to changes in writing and marketing. You might not see what I’ve seen here, but you might get a picture of some of it.

McManus, Karen M., One of Us is Lying, Delacorte Press, 2017. I think, considering the spring I had, this book appealed to me just from the title. Only in the book, the liar is a mystery and unfortunately, in our lives this spring, the liar was not a mystery. Still, this is a fun, fascinating mystery novel which is pretty much the Breakfast Club as a locked room mystery. (Someone dies in detention.) Good characters, good writing. I enjoyed it enough to buy the sequel.

McManus, Karen M., One of Us is Next, Delacorte Press, 2020. I really didn’t think that McManus could pull off a sequel to One of Us is Lying, but she did. The ending was a bit abrupt, but that was okay. (It wasn’t okay when I finished the next book, which just…ended.) This was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Mitchell, Gail “Superstar: Usher,” Billboard, February 10, 2024. Fantastic article on what it means to be an artist with a long career. I circled and underlined a lot in here. Usher discusses creativity, staying relevant, whether it’s important to stay relevant, and remaining inspired. He also discusses how to keep all you’ve done before out of your head, as well as what the expectations of you are.

The article ends with this quote:

We’re as powerful as we choose to be. That’s what got me here. I just believed and didn’t pay attention to what anybody else had to say.

If you plan to have or already have a long career, read this.

Prince, Daisy, “Barbarians at the Glades,” Vanity Fair, February 2024. Fascinating and creepy article about Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, the changes that have occurred to both communities since the arrival of MAGA has upended the old order, and a bit about generational wealth. I’m sharing because this is a time to share the unease.

Provost, Megan, “What It Means To Succeed,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. The interview with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new provost is mostly about AI and his ideas about the way that AI will alter academia and the way that research gets done. I’m collecting all this AI information; I find it fascinating. I hope you do as well.

Schmitt, Preston, “Creating The Badger Brand,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. Wow. This is an amazing article. The UW was one of the last major universities to license its logo. It also had some issues figuring out what the logo was. (In fact, in a future issue, a man wrote in contesting some of the information in the article. After you read it, you’ll see why.) If you want to see the complexities of trademark and licensing, check this out.

Steinhoff, Jessica, “Surprising Stories From the UW Archives,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2023. This article made me want to travel home again, if only I could. I’m not surprised at some of the stories, like the material from the Sterling Hall bombing in 1970, but others did surprise me. I didn’t know, for example, that the 602 Club was an unofficial gay bar. And I certainly didn’t know about the mandolins from 1893. Take a look, just for the cool history.