I haven’t met an Elmore Leonard character I don’t love. Within my reading purview, no other author creates fun and interesting characters in the quantity that Leonard does. I’m not just talking about the main characters either. I’m talking about secondary characters, bad guys, and bit players. This western novel carried the burden of my expectations well with a stable of awesome humans.
Category: books
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Appetite For Self-Destruction
I’m intrigued by the so-called “fall” of the music industry because it coincided with a distinct rise in my interest in music. Maybe I’m a contrarian, but I re-started listening to music and purchasing albums after a long, post-college layoff that ended with my first digital music player. I now listen with a relatively selective ear and buy considerable amounts of music because of digital. But if you listen to the record executives, they blame digital for the precipitous decline in album sales over the last 20 years.
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The Sun Also Rises
This is some classic literature, man. I need to read it every so often just to keep me grounded. It’s been a slow reading year and I really got bogged down on this. Not because of the content or anything, just because I’m kind of busy and distracted.
I’ve started to pile up Elmore Leonard paperbacks because they’re so reliable. Leonard employs this tactic of having multiple main characters. This book was an ensemble of quirky and interesting men and women, each of whom you got to know very well. Maybe one character got a little extra time, but barely.
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Read 137 Books in One Year
Gail brought this little gem to my attention and I decided to use it as a test of the Amazon Prime free book option. I’ve been a member of Amazon Prime for about two years now and have not availed myself of the their free book-borrowing service at all. What a fool I am! It was a piece of cake.
I read every Louis L’Amour western novel over the course of about five years as a kid. It took me from maybe 6th through 10th grade. Hondo was L’Amour’s first and one of the earliest ones I recall reading. I grabbed it at an Open Books member half-price sale earlier this year, and I’ll certainly be on the lookout for grabbing more that way because it was a fun read.
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And Then There Were None
This is a classic mystery novel that I picked up at a half-price sale at Open Books. I like to keep a backlog of small to mid-sized fiction novels because I’m always reading one, no matter what’s on the Kindle. But this book is not small to mid-sized in content, it’s a giant, complex, enjoyable mystery that continues to influence pop culture today.
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The Way Some People Die
This was a complicated little crime novel. I bet I get lost in about one out of ten crime novels. By lost I mean confused. I was so confused that it made the big reveal in this novel a little strange. I felt like I was being spoon fed without any clues and that makes me feel dumb. It also disappointments me because it takes away from the novel.
Wow! That was some serious stuff, man. The Bernard Samson epic is behind me and they were some great times. The ending was only okay, but that didn’t detract from the total experience. This was a masterful spy story, romance, and drama all wrapped in to one and I think any serious fan of the spy genre should undertake it if they have a few months to spend.
What an epic this is. The Bernard Samson novels number 10 if you consider Winter, the only one not in a trilogy. Hope is the second to the last one, so I’m just about done. It’s been quite a ride, comparable to Game of Thrones as far as pure enjoyment goes.