I’m racing the clock to get the rest of my opinions and reflections about 2013 books and reading posted before 2013 ends, so bullet points are the way to go:

•   I forgot to include Sisters on the Case, edited by Sara Paretsky, in the bit about Mr. K’s bookstore.  I was happy to find a clean paperback copy of this mystery  anthology on my trip to the bookstore, and started reading it as soon as I got home.  I might have read this a long time ago, but I enjoyed it anyway.
• My current hiatus book is Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, by Matthew Algeo.  Harry and Bess Truman were so strapped for cash after he left the presidency, this trip by car from Independence MO to New York and back was motivated as much by frugality as adventure.  The book started with a lot of information about Harry Truman’s background and political history that I already know, and it feels like a long slog to get to the story of the Trumans’ trip across America, meeting Americans without the protection or inhibiting effect of the Secret Service.  Truman is a favorite subject of mine, so I hope I can get back into this Kindle book and get swept into the journey with Harry and Bess.
• I have had one book on hiatus so long, I’m giving up.  I borrowed The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan, from Amazon’s Prime Kindle lending library more than a year ago, and it needs to go back.  Timothy Egan is a wonderful writer and one of my favorite NYT columnists, as well as a fellow product of the Great Pacific Northwest, and this book about the suffering endured by people during the Dust Bowl is justly famous, but I just can’t get into it.
• I can’t decide whether to give up on Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan, and pass it along or not.  I bought this used hardback because I thought it was one of the books the book group was going to read, worked halfway through it, then found out the book wasn’t on the list.  I wasn’t enjoying it, didn’t care about any of the characters in this lukewarm John Le Carre pastiche, and I haven’t tried to continue reading it since.
• When I was writing about the new mysteries series books I’ve found, and reminiscing about old favorite series, I found out that there are V.I. Warshawski books I haven’t read.  Vic is Sara Paretsky’s hardboiled Chicago private eye, first and likely greatest of the tough women detective heroines.  I have the first seven books in the series, and the collection of short stories, but there are nine more in the series.  I discovered I’ve read but do not own four of them, and recall I found them overly preachy about social issues (that concern me too!) to the detriment of the quality of the books. Subsequent books in the series fell off my radar screen, but there are four recent ones that sound pretty good.  I’d like to see if Vic has gotten her sleuthing mojo back.
• While I was trying to work out how many books Sara Paretsky has written, and in what order, I found a fantastic website called OrderOfBooks.  It’s exactly what the name says: you put in the name of a series or the name of an author, and you get a list of the books in order of publication.  Love it, also looked up the Elvis Cole series, there is a total of 15 books.
• How could I forget Sneaky Pie Brown when I was listing favorite mystery series!  Grey tiger cat Sneaky Pie Brown helped Rita Mae Brown write her series about Mary Minor ‘Harry’ Haristeen and her sleuthing pets, grey tiger cat Mrs. Murphy and corgi Tee Tucker.  I have a lot of the books in this series, but kind of went off it when the books started getting really far-fetched and seemed more of an opportunity for Rita Mae Brown to vent her libertarian politics than fun mystery stories.  Once you’ve accepted the premise of a sleuthing cat and dog, and the first books were good enough that I did, it would seem difficult to get too far-fetched down the line, but Rita Mae Brown’s editor let her get away with it.
• I loved The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly, both the book and the movie, and it looks like Mickey Haller, the Lincoln lawyer, has a series.  I look forward to reading more of his exploits.
• I won $100 in a sports bar Bingo game (yes, there is such a thing) and used part of it to buy lovely new Penguin trade paperback editions of W. Somerset Maugham’s Collected Short Stories, volumes 1, 2 and 4.  I have read my old copies to tatters, and was afraid they would fall apart in my hands if I tried to read them again.  My Volume 3 is still in good shape, those are the stories about Ashenden the spy, and I don’t like them that much.  W. Somerset Maugham wrote fabulous short stories, and I still love reading my favorites again and again.  I was delighted that Mary Anne and Will Schwalbe of The End of Your Life Book Club loved the stories too.
• Finally, my lesson learned about book blogging is that if I don’t write about a book I’ve read on Kindle in a timely fashion, I can’t look at the back cover book description or flip through the pages to remind myself of characters’ names or plot points in the story.  I can look on Amazon to glean some of this information, but then I risk picking up and repeating other readers’ opinions about the book.  Also, it’s hard to get caught up on writing about dozens of books I’ve read over a period of months in the last week of the year.  So glad I did it though, it’s been fun remembering all the great, good and fun stuff I’ve read in 2013.  My New Year’s resolution is:

Keep the blog writing on pace with the book reading!!

and lose 10 pounds.