Brian Fagan > Recent Status Updates

So far really enjoying MacBride's detective Ash Henderson. His bad temper and sarcasm remind me of Nelson DeMille's John Corey.

I've decided to devote my 2026 fiction reading to novels from the UK. It's long been an interest of mine, but let's just make it the total focus this year!

I just realized something about a difference between many men and women readers when they review a novel. Men often react in an ambiguous way to this or that character, women generally seem to place a character either in the good or evil category. Has anyone else noticed this ? What does it signify ?

My profile page says I was last active on Goodreads in October, 2024. Fascinating.

We just did our family Christmas celebration yesterday. My dear wife bought these books on my wish list for me :)
Fiction
The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy
1903 printing of Monsieur Beaucaire, Booth Tarkington
Suttree and The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy

Nonfiction
Wooden, John Wooden
The Five, Hallie Rubenhold
Capote's Women, Laurence Leamer
The Nature of Oaks, Douglas Tallamy
Pre-Columbian Art, Michael Grey

Heading out tomorrow for the annual camping trip my son takes me on to Colorado. We have a great time. We do some hiking, but he primarily goes to climb 14ers that he hasn't done yet. This year we'll be in the Sangre de Cristos range. Climbing days for him are reading days for me! The last two years I've included a Michener - 2 yrs ago Centennial and last year Mexico. Texas this yr. Plus a bio of Cochise :)

My crostic puzzle quote today:

The library deeps lay waiting here in a land bricked with paper and leather. Anything might happen here. Always did. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice lady purple-stamped your books.

Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes

I am so excited ! This book's been on my wish list for over 10 years, and my wife got it for me for Valentines Day. I'm a HUGE Leone fan who at age 53 climbed over a 6 foot private cemetery wall in Italy to lay flowers at his grave. Here we go !

I just threw a bunch of books onto the Currently Reading corner of my homepage. It looks crazy on there, since I usually read one book at a time. But I'm taking them with me on a 2-week camping trip, and there won't be any more updates until I get back. See you all then :)

Outside of school, I didn't read as much as I might have as a teenager. But man, when I did, I completely lost myself in the book. I could read for hours on end out on our little back patio in Florissant, Missouri. I read so much more now, but I miss that endurance and INTENSITY.

I prefer fiction to nonfiction, and read way more of it. However, presumably because I only read nonfiction about topics I'm hugely interested in, a lot more of my nonfiction reads end up with 5-star ratings.

Huckleberry Finn's thoughts - why don't all of us today just imagine that we're all in the same boat ? -

" .. we felt mighty good over it, because it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others."

A fun moment today at KU Med Center:
I was waiting at the front entrance for my wife. It's 6 degrees today in Kansas City. A man, his wife and their newborn baby were getting into their car. The man had on a light jacket and no hat. He had a smile from ear to ear. He was feeling no cold.

Went past a pawn shop today. It got me thinking - we associate them with those who are down and out. But I bet there are some good stories out there, in which the money saved the day. Does anyone have such a story ?

After a lot of new books the year last 2 years, I've decided to add in some re-reads of books from my past next year - one a month. Most are favorites, but I'm also going to give books like Moby Dick, which I struggled with, a second chance. These are my selections so far:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ball Four
All Creatures Great and Small
A Jane Austen
Rabbit, Run or Couples
A Chandler
East of Eden
Moby Dick

Do you listen to music during reading? My go-to playlists are film noir soundtracks, steel drum music, western soundtracks, scary classical, instrumental blues, Chopin nocturnes, Debussy, Wagner, Enescu, Prokofiev & Dvorak.

Someone posted something about reading as escapism. If we take that to its logical conclusion, introverts and extroverts might "escape" differently. Introverts might focus their reading more on novels of realism, human interaction, etc., since they see less of that in their lives, and extroverts might favor sci-fi, fantasy and the like, since their lives are more full of human interaction. What do you think?

Books are like Rorschach ink blots. Our reviews really say more about us, occasionally in negative but mostly in positive ways, than they do about any particular book.

Does anyone know what happened to Khaled Hosseini? I love his work so much. He hasn't published a novel in 8 years (Sea Prayer wasn't a novel.) Many thanks to anyone who can tell me what's going on ...

Last year 8 of the 100 books I read were nonfiction. I felt like that was a pretty typical percentage for my interests.
This year, for some reason, I've already read 9 nonfiction books in the first 30 books I've read. Nothing intentional. Not sure why ...

We lost a giant today. Larry McMurtry. He wrote dialogue better than anyone. And he was fearless in creating sassy and tough women characters.

Nice things about Goodreads:
- Discussing books
- Making friends
- Motivation to read
- Documenting books read
The BEST thing about Goodreads: Adding to the Want to Read list from a daily perusal of what friends are reading!

Has anyone else notice that the computer-generated RECOMMENDATIONS ("Because you enjoyed _________) are often completely off-the-wall? The tiniest relationship between two books causes the program to recommend a book. Animal Farm involves pigs, so it might recommend The Bible, since it contains pig references. The writer of that software program should have to spend 3 days defending it to a panel of enraged users.

Last year only 8% of the books I read were nonfiction. I felt like that was about par for my reading interests. So far this year one-third have been non-fiction! Pretty sure it's an aberration, not a trend, and that by year's end, the percentage will be closer to last year's. We shall see.

Does anyone know what's going on with The Secret Life of Bees on Goodreads? All I can find are teachers' guides and combo packs. When I search books, I can't find the actual book to look at readers' reviews!! :(

I was going through Somerset Maugham's novels to pick out more to read. I noticed in a review that a reader dismissed his work out of hand as "colonialist garbage". I understand that reading anything to do with Britain's colonial period might be distasteful to some. But we can't dismiss an artist's work because of its associations. That would be like dismissing all American writers because racism exists here.

The Jeopardy! aired today was Alex Trebek's final appearance.
Rest In Peace, Alex.
You brought fun and learning to so many of us, and graced the show with humor and class.

"He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know. He would not think about Alejandra because he didn't know what was coming or how bad it would be and he thought she was something he'd better save. So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about."

"The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces.... Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world."

Why is it that when I read a book written by a woman that depicts a number of men as evil or worthless, I think nothing of it, but when I read a book written by a man that depicts a number of women as evil or worthless, I wonder if the author is misogynistic?