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 did start two different mystery anthologies that were so bad that I abandoned both of them. One, filled with historical mysteries, had every other story about slavery. And not in a useful plot way, but in an oh-yeah-this-slave-will-volunteer-to-help-us-for-no-reason way. Blerg. I scanned the front of each story by the middle, and found none—not a one—that held me. So there’s that. And then there was the book by a favorite author that was all about…harems? Really? It wasn’t in the cover blurb, but once I realized it, the book went into the give-away pile. That writer is always trying to push herself, so it didn’t put me off her work, mostly. But I will be more careful with purchases next time. Another blerg.

So maybe I did read more than it seems. But it sure felt like I dropped the ball in the last half of the month. In the front half, some truly delightful books, listed below.

March, 2022

Cole, Alyssa, A Prince On Paper, Avon, 2019. I mentioned in last month’s recommended reading (or somewhere) that I had trouble reading romance in the worst of the pandemic. I wasn’t able to suspend my disbelief that far. Noir was working for me; romance wasn’t. So I didn’t read a lot of books by favorite authors, although I continued to buy. The books stacked up.

At the beginning of March, I was perusing the TBR pile and this book leapt out at me. Apparently, my muse was ready to read romance again. Guess my mood improved or something. A Prince On Paper was a great return to general romance reading. (I kept up with writers like Mary Balogh early on, but even she dropped by the wayside by late 2021.) A Prince On Paper features a good-hearted seemingly horrible man who made sure he kept the paparazzi busy so they wouldn’t bother his half-brother, the real heir to the throne. (Lots of reasons for that, most of them revealed later in the book.)

The book’s heroine was a victim in an early book, and maybe even a partial villain, depending on what part of that book you were in. She gets a full (deserved) redemption here. These two have a lot of baggage, and it’s fun to see them work through it all. Highly recommended.

Rooney, David, About Time, Norton, 2021. This is absolutely one of the  most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It focuses on the ways humans have used clocks and time to order their civilizations. I learned about all kinds of clocks and all kinds of cultures, some I was familiar with and some I was not. This book is especially good for sf/f writers who are writing worlds that don’t really exist. It forces you to think about the ways the smallest thing might not actually something small at all. I knew that time was important as a cognitive concept. I didn’t know how important until I read this book. Read it.

St. James, Simone, The Book of Cold Cases, Berkeley, 2022. I nearly quit this book in the first few pages because…

1. St. James never lived on the Oregon Coast. I did for 23 years. I’m not even sure she visited the Oregon Coast, although she got the rain right. There are no buses on the coast except for tourists, and certainly not buses that have a regular schedule that working people can use late into the night. If you have money, you live on the ocean, not on the lake. And the towns are all so small (even Newport) that if you’ve lived there for 40 years, everyone and I do mean everyone knows who you are.

And…

2. I wondered why the heck someone would live in a house as haunted as the one in the book. I mean, that place is scary in a never-sleep-again kinda way.

Well, I’m glad I stayed. I pretended this was set in some big coastal city instead of the Oregon Coast. Someone should have edited this book so that we understood why a certain character stayed in that house much sooner than she did let us know. Once I knew, I was happy.

I remained happy. I couldn’t put this book down, and that’s one of the first times in the past two years that a book has held me as tightly as this one. It’s wonderful and scary and suspenseful and I had no idea what was going to happen next. So, pick it up. Realize you’re reading about some coastal city not in Oregon, and set aside an entire evening. Have fun.

Westlake, Donald E., The Hot Rock, Grand Central edition 2001. The Hot Rock was originally published in 1970 and some of the creaks show, but very few of them. I had assigned this for an upcoming workshop. I looooove Westlake’s Dortmunder short stories, but hadn’t read any of the novels. That’s something I’ll have to rectify.

Dortmunder, for those of you who don’t know, is a hapless thief with big dreams. He manages to start his capers just fine, but they always end sideways or badly or weirdly. Dortmunder never gets the big score for a variety of reasons. His fans know that going in. The cool part is how this particular caper will get screwed up this time.

The Hot Rock is a huge emerald that Dortmunder ends up stealing several times, involving such things as helicopters and trains. It gets more and more convoluted as the book continues, and Westlake is such a master that we go along with each. And after reading this, I finally understand why Robert Redford was cast as Dortmunder. I always saw Dortmunder as a small man, a failure, but here, he’s described as a somewhat bright man with charisma who never seems to get things right. Given the roles Redford played around 1970, um, yeah. Works. I’ll have to watch the film at some point.

Wiens, Kandi, and McKee, Annie, “Why Some People Get Burned Out And Others Don’t,” Harvard Business Review. I can’t find the publication date on this article, but it was timely for me. My Pocket Reader dished this up for me as I’ve been coping with some very strange stress in my sleep of all places. (I think I’m processing the last two years.) So the link might be a bit weird. This one is worth reading, with lots of good tips.

I should have a regular reading month in March. Unless something else derails me.

I should also let regular readers know that I canceled my Esquire subscription over their dodgy editorial content the past several months. The cover story for the issue that arrived mid-February sealed the magazine’s fate for me. I had a feeling that the magazine had become anti-women and quietly racist, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what made me feel that way. This cover took all of my doubts and made them real. The racism in the magazine went from subtle to extremely overt, and I quietly kicked myself for not trusting my own unease. So you won’t see me recommend anything from them again. I’m tossing the unread issues.

One thing I did learn this month is that when it takes me weeks to read a novel, no matter how much other reading I have to do, the novel is flawed. I was reading about 10 pages at a time, and when I finally finished the 1.3 million words, I thought, Yay! I can finish reading that novel. And that’s when I realized (about page 200) that our heroine was never going to tell the hero her secret. She spends the entire stupid book thinking about telling him and not doing it. This is a favorite author of mine, and wow, did she blow it. The confrontation that happened on page 330 of a 367 page novel should have happened on page 100, and then there should have been twists. But no…

Anyway, here are the things I liked in February that weren’t in the stack of manuscripts. (I liked quite a bit of what was in there!) Please note that I use Amazon links because I’m lazy, not because I’m endorsing anything.

February, 2019

Bernardin, Marc, “Oscar, Met T’Challa,” Entertainment Weekly, February 1-8/19. I did not expect to find a really sweet essay in the middle of my Oscar prep issue of Entertainment Weekly, but there it was on one of the best picture nominees. Marc Bernardin wrote a really personal essay on what Black Panther meant to him (and many others). He writes, for instance, that Danai Gurira’s Okoye says three simple words when she pilots the royal shuttle into Wakanda—”We are home.” When she utters those words, he was shattered.

“Because,” he writes, “‘home’ is a concept that’s difficult for the average African-American to wrap their mind around. Too few of us know where home is…the displacement that came with hundreds of years of slavery has stripped bare the memory of where I’m from.” He talks about the meaning of that, plus the way that Black Panther depicted a powerful nation untouched by the horror of history, and what it means to a part of our culture that never has seen something like this. Oh, hell. He says it so much better than I do. Read this.

Cole, Alyssa, Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, Avon, 2019. A novella in Cole’s excellent Reluctant Royals series, which focuses in part on some events that happened during the story in her first novel in the series. This novella stands alone though. It’s a delightful read.

Cole does something truly fascinating in a romance. The first chapter is from Likotsi’s POV and it’s set “now.” The second chapter is from her love interest Fabiola’s point of view, and it’s set during their very first meeting. Essentially, the novella explains the ghosting of the title, in an empathetic and powerful way. I read this after the disaster I mentioned in the introduction, and devoured the book in a single hour. Enjoy!

Mehlman, Jon, “My Wife And I Didn’t Tell Our Children She Was Dying,” The Atlantic, February 14, 2019. The Atlantic published this on Valentine’s Day. I can see why. It’s a heck of a family love story, about a remarkable woman and the choice she made for her family. Read this, and see if you don’t tear up.

Patterson, Irette Y., “On Resistance: The Chosen One,” Strange Horizons, January 28, 2019. Wonderful essay about the whole “chosen one” in sf/f. Irette takes the trope and examines it from the perspective of community. Truly insightful.

Schmidt, Preston,“Hard Truth,”, On Wisconsin, Winter 2018. The subtitle on this article is: “It’s essentially heresy to walk away from football in America.” Yeah, but Chris Borland did. He walked away from the NFL after he realized what the game was doing to his brain. The article focuses on his decision and how he and Ann McKee, the foremost researcher on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football and other contact sports, are trying to communicate the dangers of the sport to the fans of the game, maybe with the hope of changing the game somehow (or at minimum getting rid of full body tackles in grade school, middle school, high school, and maybe college). Fascinating and difficult, it’s worth reading for every football fan (and nonfan).

Spoon, Marianne English“Mind Games,”, On Wisconsin, Winter, 2018. A very short completely fascinating article on a game being developed at the University of Wisconsin Madison to help adolescents learn empathy. Read this. It’s nifty.

First, I line-edited an issue of Fiction River, Spies, which is just marvelous. I had forgotten how good those stories are. You’ll see them next year, but for now, you can read a Fiction River that I edited, Justice. The stories in that volume are very powerful.

Then I did all the reading for the Fantasy workshop. Wow, those writers came up with some unbelievably good stories. I’m hoping the writers mail the stories (without doing much more than fixing nits!!!) and editors are smart enough to buy them. Excellent, excellent work.

I also had to finish the overall reading for that workshop. We’re always working off the same books, so I managed to finish the ones I assigned a few days before the workshop started. I mentioned some of those last month. I was pretty disappointed with the latter volumes I had assigned (the ones I hadn’t read), including a highly acclaimed and exceptionally dull first in a trilogy by a writer whose work I usually love. (Only one person in the workshop even made it through that novel. Ooops. It might have the critics talking, but the actual readers [based on a small sample] loathed the book.)

Somehow I managed to read other books as well. I’ve listed the best of the best of the best below.

April, 2018

Adler, Kayla Webley, and Eric Sullivan, “Sex, Lies, and Human Resources,” Esquire, March 2018. Kudos to Esquire and Marie Claire. As the #MeToo Movement gained momentum, both editors (Jay Fielden and Anne Fulenwider) got together to do a fantastic series of short essays answering the questions that everyone has been asking. Questions from “how do men talk to women” to “why the heck haven’t men noticed this before” and so very much more.

The essays aren’t really essays in the conventional sense. They’re more like 250 long email answers, written by everyone from Gabrielle Union-Wade to Terry Crewes. There’s advice on how to report harassment, how to get help if you think you’re a harasser, and more. I’m only going to isolate one of the essays (below), but really, read this. It’s a real-time thought experiment on how our world is changing, done in a very above-board manner.

Black, Holly, “1Up” The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran, Prime 2016. Every year, I assign a year’s best in the fictional genre that I’m currently teaching. I prefer Paula Guran’s fantasy volumes, partly because they’re fantasy and not sf, but also because my tastes align with hers. I’m not recommending the entire volume this year, because some stories were too graphic for me. But the good stories are stunning.

Holly Black’s story is a gaming story about the funeral of a young man whom his friends never met in the real world. They’d only met in the world of online gaming. And he left them with a conundrum, a rather horrible one. Black combines fantasy, gaming, and mystery into a strong story that’s unforgettable.

Cole, Alyssa, A Princess in Theory, Avon Books, 2018. If you have followed this list over the years, you know I have a weakness for hidden identity stories. And this is one, which, to my surprise, didn‘t follow the usual script. Naledi Smith is in graduate school in epedimeology, and she keeps getting annoying emails telling her she’s a princess. She blocks them, until one frustrating day when she tells whoever is sending them (because they’re clearly not form letters) to Fuck. Off.

Instead, that response sets a series of events into motion. Seems she really is a princess, and betrothed to an African prince. (They had a betrothal ceremony as toddlers.) For some reason unbeknownst to her and to the royals in that made-up country, her parents sneak away in the middle of the night, never to return. Everyone in the country hates them, hates her, thinks she betrayed them…when instead, she was orphaned and put into the foster care system as a child so young she only knew her first name.

What really happened gets revealed, of course, but only after all kinds of unbelievable twists and turns which Cole makes absolutely compelling. I loved this book and blew through it in a day or so, which, considering how tired I was, is just astonishing.

Dermatis, Dayle A., Ghosted, Soul’s Road Press, 2018. I nagged Dayle to write this book for years. And I have to say, that when you’ve anticipated a book for years, sometimes that book disappoints. Ghosted did not disappoint. I loved it.

We’ve published some of Dayle’s Nikki Ashburne stories in Fiction River, and Dayle has sold a few elsewhere, but this is Nikki’s first novel. Nikki, a former celebutante, sees ghosts. Her near-death at a Hollywood party changed her life for the better in some ways. But she’s still dealing with being a minor celebrity and losing her “friends” and gaining non-corporeal friends. It’s a great set-up, and Dayle writes with a strong, powerful, fun voice. I blew through the book when I really should’ve been reading something else. Now, I want the next one…

Entertainment Weekly, The Oscar Edition, Feb 23-Mar 2, 2018. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I told you I’m behind in my reading. I read this edition mid-April. There are so many good articles here that it’s impossible to choose a few to highlight. So pick up the issue. It’s subtitle is The Greatest Untold Stories of Hollywood’s Biggest Night. Many of the stories are told, but they were told in ways that either diminished them or diminished their impact. Reading these histories together brought them to life. They also made me realize, sadly, how little has changed on the discrimination front in the past ninety years. Sigh. If you can lay your hands on this issue, do so.

Gay, Roxane, “Can I Enjoy The Art But Denounce The Artist?” , Esquire, March, 2018. This is one of the series of Esquire short essays that I mentioned above in the “Sex, Lies, and Human Resources” segment. Roxane Gay’s timely essay mostly focuses on Bill Cosby (and as I write this, he was found guilty. Yay! Although that doesn’t make up for the dozens (hundreds?) of lives he destroyed), but it does ask a very, very important question. Her answer, in the last paragraph, is deeply satisfying, and worth the time to look this up.

Grant, Adam, “Queen of the Hill,”, Esquire, March 2018. Grant interviews Olympian Lindsey Vonn. I wrote about this piece in one of my Thursday blog posts. There’s a lot to unpack in this short interview, mostly about how you continue in the face of adversity. Read this one, if you’re have a tough year.

Jacobs, Laura, “Wonder Boys,”, Vanity Fair, February, 2018. A fascinating article on the collaboration between Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. I had known that the men worked together on West Side Story, but I hadn’t realized how the collaboration worked or how deep their relationship went. If you’re an artist, you’ll want to,  read this one. If you’re a Broadway fan, you’ll want to read it. Heck, just read it.

McDermott, Kirstyn, “Mary, Mary,” The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran, Prime 2016. An amazing story about the death (and life) of Mary Wollstonecraft. Most people know her as the mother of Mary Shelley, but she was so much more. One of the most important writers of the Enlightenment, she died in childbirth, much too young. The story wraps around both women, and the man who united them, William Godwin. I suspect the story works better if you know a little about Mary Wollstonecraft, but even if you don’t, this is a strong piece.

McGuire, Seanan, “There is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold,” The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran, Prime 2016. I usually don’t like doll stories. I find dolls creepy anyway, and most people simply write their own version of Chucky. But Seanan McGuire created an entire world in this short story. The worldbuilding is phenomenal, and the story itself is heartbreaking. I loved this story, and thought it one of the most memorable stories I read this year.

Slatter, Angela, “Ripper,”  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran, Prime 2016. I cannot convey to you how annoyed I was when I started this story. Especially when I realized it was a novella. I read both mystery and fantasy, and Jack The Ripper stories are staples of both genres. And usually really, really, really, really dull.

So I saw the title, read the opening few lines, and damn near skipped to the next story. In fact, I closed the trade paper volume I was reading, saw Paula Guran’s name, and realized she’s read as many Jack The Ripper stories as I have. She thought this one wasn’t just good, but exceptional. And since I trust her taste, I went back and read.

And am I glad I did. About 1,000 words in, there is this incredible, breathtaking character shift. I won’t ruin it for you, but oh, my, that made the entire story fresh and new and scary and original, and well worth all the retail space it took in the volume. This one is worth the price of admission. I don’t easily enjoy Ripper stories, and I couldn’t put this one down.

It wasn’t that I was reading bad holiday stories. I think I just got to the point where a steady diet of ice cream grew a bit tiresome, even for the kid with the massive sweet tooth.

Then I moved on to other things. Tried to find a good bloody mystery in my stash, but I had already read them. So, I read some short stories, mostly from the magazines, and they were good, but not memorable. I drifted back to two holiday stories, loved one of them, and then, after the holiday, Alyssa Cole’s book showed up, and I devoured it. Great stuff.

So, here are the writings I liked in December, some holiday, some not.

December, 2017

Cole, Alyssa, A Hope Divided, Kensington, 2017. The final book that I finished in 2017 was Alyssa Cole’s A Hope Divided. So nice to go out of the year reading something excellent.

A Hope Divided is part of Cole’s Loyalty League historical romance series. Set in South in the Civil War, it does what it can to redress the Glorious Old South myths posited by old Civil War romances. Her heroine in this novel, Marlie Lynch, is an accepted part of the wealthy slave-owning Lynch family. She’s the child of a white Lynch and a former slave (who got her freedom when she got pregnant), but Sarah Lynch is an abolitionist, and wants the family to accept Marlie–which they mostly do.  Until…the war, the home guard, and Steven Lynch shows up with his horrid wife Melody. Then Marlie becomes a prisoner in her own house.

But she’s not the only prisoner. Ewan tried to escape a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, only to injure himself and end up hiding in the house. The house is part of the Underground Railroad, so they’re used to hiding people, but not for this long, and not someone white.

The conflicts grow, and unlike most historical romances (particularly Regencies), the conflicts are real, with life and death stakes for everyone. I couldn’t put this book down. I hope that Cole writes more in the series. I would have preordered the next one. I looooove these books.

Hainey, Michael,“The Natural,” Esquire, October, 2017. An interview with Robert Redford. The entire issue has short little “what I learned” things from a variety of people, but this article went long. I’ve been a Redford fan my whole life and didn’t know a lot of this, such as his relationship with his father (awful) and the fact that things from his past still have an impact on him. No one’s life is perfect, of course, and he’s at an age where he can see the links between what happened to him as a kid and who he has become. Really worth reading.

Kelly, Scott,“What I Learned In Space,” AARP Magazine, October/November 2017. This is an excerpt from Kelly’s book, which I should really pick up. A lot of good stuff here, but this is my favorite quote: “I’ve learned that grass smells great, and wind feels amazing and rain is a miracle. I will try to remember how magical these things are for the rest of my life.” Read this, and get a small sense of his adventure.

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.

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.

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.

Two things happened before the class, though. I got a new reading chair! The cats had trashed the other one so that it was unusable. (Long sad story, filling with cat hair and claws and…never mind.) So Dean and I bought new chairs at the start of the month—just in time, because the other thing was that my chronic illness flared less than a week later. (Not a surprise: it’s brought on by stress, sometimes, and this fall has been nothing but stressful.)

So I crawled into my new chair and read a book start to finish. Such luxury! With the proper chair, I find myself sneaking a lot more reading time, just so I can sit in it. Our remaining two cats are afraid of the chair at the moment, so it’s all miiiiiiiine.

Speaking of Fiction River, the new volume came out in time for Halloween. Feel The Fear is a strong volume, with more than just straight horror fiction. There’s some nice shivery stuff, some paranoia, and a lot that will make you think. If you want to pick it up along with some other scary things (even though Halloween is over), check out the Fear Bundle on Storybundle. You can pick up the book, along with nine others, for less than the list price of the volume. (That deal will disappear in about 5 days, so hurry.)

Tried to read a romance novel during the Master Class, but the novel didn’t hold me. I realized midway through I loathed the hero and would have had my elbow in his gut about fifteen minutes after meeting him. When the workshop ended I returned to short stories and essays, which took more brain power. I was relieved to find them.

Just started the Best American Essays at the end of the month, so have no idea if I’ll end up recommending the whole thing or not. Right now, I’m only highlighting the essays that caught my attention.

Oh, and (blush). I resubscribed to Vanity Fair. I was really, really, really going to miss it. I ended up reading on my app, and it worked okay. I figure if I get a perfumed issue, I’ll toss it and read on the app. (Some features are easier to read on the app. Who knew?)

Experienced a lot of good reading, which I hadn’t expected when the month started.

October, 2017

Arment, Jason, “Two Shallow Graves,” The Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Written by a vet about his experience in Iraq, this essay grabbed me and didn’t let go. Don’t read the introduction (by Leslie Jamison) because she spoils the ending of this piece. (And most pieces.) But wow, wow, wow, did this touch me. Superb.

Atwan, Robert, “Foreword,” The Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. I initially got impatient with Atwan’s foreword, since he was discussing an essayist from World War I whom I had never heard of and whose essays were not in the volume. And then I began to understand the point. An excellent point, in fact, and one that took my breath away by the end of it. Usually Atwan, who is the Best American Essays’ series editor, writes good and serviceable forwards, but this year, he rose above my expectations and gave me something marvelous. Which is good, since I found the actual editor’s introduction annoying once I dove into the essays and realized she had spoiled many of them by giving away the most powerful points. (I have a strong memory for sentences, and she’d often quote the “punch” of the essay in her introduction.) I suspect Atwan knew that, and wrote his essay as a curative. (I’ve been known to do that as series editor.) Atwan made me want to find that long-dead essayist, and he gave me a lot to think about. A great start to the volume.

Cohen, Rich, “The Bestest Generation,” Vanity Fair, September 2017. Cohen writes about Generation X, calling it the bridge generation between Millennials and Baby Boomers. The last generation to grow up with an “old-time” childhood, which is true. I have been thinking a lot about generational differences of late, and this article simply added to those thoughts. Hadn’t given Generation X much thought in the past decade or two, so this was a nice refresher.

Cole, Alyssa, An Extraordinary Union, Kensington, 2017. Amazon recommendations work. Also-boughts led me to this book. (People who bought the book you just finished also bought this book…) I had read one of Alyssa Cole’s shorter works, and while I liked it, I didn’t like it enough to seek out her novels. Then I saw this one.

It has a subtitle— A Novel of The Civil War—and some book club questions at the end. Plus it was published in trade, not mass market, so Kensington hopes this goes wide in book clubs, which it probably will. But have no doubt: this is a romance novel, and a risky one at that. One false step and it would have been so wrong in so many ways.

But Cole didn’t make any false steps here. Her heroine is a true hero. Elle Burns is a spy for the Union. She has an eidetic memory (or perhaps something even more powerful than that), and she uses that skill to listen in on conversations. She has gone to Richmond, where she voluntarily becomes a slave in a high-ranking Confederate’s household so she can spy on him.

There she runs into Malcolm McCall, a Pinkerton Detective, who happens to be white. He’s also Scottish, with his own history of governmental mistreatment, so he has compassion as well. He’s undercover, just like she is, and they fall for each other as they stumble on a plot that could ruin the Union effort in this early part of the war.

Cole has done her research, and she echoes a lot of the real events that happened at the time. She based Elle on Mary Bowser who was in Jefferson Davis’s household during the war. I recognized another of her characters—Robert Grand, who was based on riverboat pilot, Robert Smalls.

The research never feels intrusive here. It all serves the story. And the tension is great, not because the two characters refuse to talk to each other or misunderstand each other or some other stupid romance plot. Because it’s illegal for them to marry, and dangerous for both of them to be together. Really well done. I immediately ordered the next book in the series and can’t wait to read it.

This is the kind of book I have longed for for years. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were a lot of historical novels about the Civil War that looked at the real history (not that horrid Lost Cause crap, mourning the Confederacy). And then those books vanished. They were sagas, mostly, not romances, but nonetheless, I loved them and I have really missed them. It’s nice to see this book. I hope it leads to many more.

DuBois, Brendan, “The Man From Away,” The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sanford, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Long-time readers of my Recommended Reading lists know I love Brendan DuBois’s work. It surprises as it builds a world with great characters. This story is the same. A man whose bitchy wife suffers a terrible accidental death deals with that death in the only way he knows how. Stated like that, the story sounds simple. It’s not. One of Brendan’s best.

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.

Krueger, William Kent, “The Painted Smile,” The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sanford, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. I read the story, liked it a great deal, and then went looking for it in the table of contents a day or so later. Couldn’t remember what it was about, based on the title. I had to look at the opening sentence, and then I knew. Terrible title. Great story.

A ten-year-old believes that he’s Sherlock Holmes, even though he clearly knows that Holmes is a literary character. The ten-year-old might be delusional or he might be on to something. Or both. One of the best stories in the book.

McGee, K., “Dot Rat,” The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sanford, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. No, this is not a computer story which is what I thought from the title. (Again, a terrible title.) But the story is strong. An older woman deals with a young intruder in her house, thinks maybe the kid is homeless, and…if I say much more, I spoil the story for you. Nice look at preconceptions, for everyone, including the dog.

Morgan, Sarah, Holiday in the Hamptons, Harlequin 2017. This novel is part of Morgan’s From Manhattan With Love series. I like most of the books (although I couldn’t finish one, for reasons I still don’t understand). However, this book is mostly set in the Hamptons. Fliss married Seth when she was still a teenager, but the marriage didn’t work out, and they haven’t seen each other for ten years. She has a thriving dog-walking business in Manhattan (with her twin sister) and he is a vet, who has just showed up at the local clinic. She runs away to the Hamptons to escape him, and…oh, all the usual (or unusual) romancy things happen. The novel veers toward the stupid once or twice and veers away so fast that I was relieved every time. An added bonus? A great grandmother, some poker playing gossipy women, and some really, really great dogs, including Lulu, the former dog TV star who loves to play dead. If you want something light and enjoyable, this will be just right.

Murphy, Cullen, “Cartoon County, USA,” Vanity Fair, September 2017. You learn something new every day. When I started working at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it was based in Connecticut. At that time, the magazine’s publisher was worth a few million, and he called himself one of the poorest people in the area. I wondered how the magazine ended up there. This article answered that.

Apparently, in the 1940s, Connecticut was a cheap place to live, and it was a train ride away from New York City. So artists, writers, and editors could live in Connecticut and commute to where the action was. That led to F&SF’s home in Connecticut. It also led to a group of famous cartoonists for the various magazines and newspaper syndicates living in the same county. One of the cartoonists even drew a map of cartoonists, but he stopped keeping it up in the 1980s as the cartoonists started dying out.

Written by the son of one of the cartoonists, this article feels like a bit of lost lore to me. I hadn’t been aware of any of this. I asked Dean if he was too, and he said he hadn’t known either. I didn’t see reference to a book, so I’m not sure if anyone else has written about this. For the record, the cartoonists behind Prince Valiant, Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, and almost everything else you saw in the newspaper lived within a few miles of each other. Fascinating reading, this.

Nolan, Ali, “Lost and Found,” Runner’s World, September, 2017. Usually, when someone writes a personal essay about their high school running experiences for Runner’s World, the writer waxes nostalgic for times gone by. The great coach, the camaraderie, the thrill of victory and the agony of de-feet. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) But Nolan got sent to reform school in high school, and her championship track team was mostly about punishment, not about joy. Although she learned some joy there. She writes about that experience, ties it to music and running, and recovering something good about yourself in the midst of pain. Don’t miss this one.

Popkes, Steven,  “The Sweet Warm Earth,” The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sanford, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. This story first appeared in the magazine I used to edit, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (Note to copyeditor for HMH, the title of the magazine has an ampersand, not “and”). There is a slight fantastic element, but there’s a clear reason why this story is suited for the best mysteries as well. I loved the piece, and found it more remarkable for being in this volume than I might’ve found it in F&SF. The best thing about the story, though, is the uncompromising narrator. There’s no happy touchy-feely life changing crap here. The man is who he is, even though he saw something that disturbed him. Love that.

Sanford, John, editor, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. This is a good volume. I read through it in just a few nights. Apparently Sanford and I agree that mystery/crime stories should have plots. Although there are a few stories that are too damn arty for my tastes (including one by a favorite author), the good stories are really good and the great stories are stellar. If you want a good sampling of mystery, pick this one up.

Tur, Katy, Unbelievable, Dey St., 2017. Katy Tur, reporter for NBC and MSNBC, was not very well-known in 2015. In fact, she got the assignment to report on Trump’s campaign for president because she was one of the few people in the offices the afternoon he was going to make his presidential announcement. No one, including Tur (who lived in London at the time), expected Trump to make it to the primaries, let alone the presidency.

I love books by reporters about their experience covering things. There are a lot of classics in this genre, including The Boys on the Bus (covering the 1972 Presidential campaign), The Girls in the Van (covering the Clinton Senate Campaign in 2000), and a whole bunch of Making of the President volumes. None of them are as honest as Tur’s, some of which she wrote on her phone when she was really frustrated or tired. (One sequence, as she tries to catch a flight, was particularly relatable.)

I loved this book. It reads fast and really captures the insanity that comes with a certain kind of reporting.

Warren, James“Two Rivals, One Truth,”, Vanity Fair, September 2017. I guess things political caught my attention this month. Or at least, journalistic and political. James Warren’s article on the revival of The New York Times and The Washington Post in the wake of last year’s election fascinated me to no end. Especially in the way both papers (papers? Is that what they are?) are starting to make money again. What goes around comes around I guess.