It sort of crept up on me, sometimes I think publishing as I knew it is dead, and then I see there are all kinds of terrific books coming out and I plan to read a lot of them (and maybe write one), over the Spring and Summer. I’ll be up late a lot.

I’ve started getting up at 5 a.m. to go and sit downstairs to get through these books, When I wake up at night, I have a lot of reading to do.

I’ll summarize them briefly, in case anyone is interested.

At the moment, I’m reading American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson. This is a stunning new thriller from someone who has a real gift for it. This book, one of the first thrillers by an African-American woman that I remember reading, reminds me of Le Carre, as much as anyone else.

That is as high a compliment as I can pay.

Maria Mitchell, an FBI Intelligence Agent,  is a spy, forever navigating the white law enforcement culture, but savvy and tough enough to handle it and other dangers in surprising ways. She gets into the head of characters as great writers do, and has Le Carre’s appreciation of the moral ambivalence of the spying world.

From the perspective of a beautiful black female agent in a dull white world, it is very original.

The book also takes on some of the most enduring complexities of American life – politics, race, sexuality. But with an insightful and light touch.

This book has it all, it’s suspenseful,  funny, insightful and surprisingly deep. I’m loving it.

I do switch back and forth sometimes, between fiction and non-fiction.  Another great book I’m reading is Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A  True Story of Murder And Memory in Northern Ireland. It is a brilliant and gripping account of The Troubles that savaged Norther Ireland for decades. It is one of those non-fiction book written like fiction. It is very hard to put down.

In 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her home in Belfast by masked gunmen, her children clinging to her legs and sobbing for mercy. They never saw her again.

Her kidnapping was one of the most notorious episodes in the vicious cycle of violence that tore Northern Ireland apart, and killed so many Irish combatants as well as the British soldiers who were sent to quell the fighting but instead got swept up in it.

Keefe’ uses the McConville kidnapping as a launching point to write about the much wider, bloody and destructive conflict, The Troubles. IRA-versus-IRA, Catholics versus Protestants, the IRA versus the British. Everybody killing, bombing, imprisoning and killing everybody else.

This is a hypnotically readable story from a writer whose research is rock solid, I feel like I’m watching this struggle from a brick rowhouse in Derry.

I can only describe it as shattering and wrenching, a great accomplish to capture so complex and troubling a winding tragedy so beautifully and hauntingly.

I am reading a landmark biography – Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight. This book is more than 800 pages long, so I’m reading it two or three chapters at time. The writing is wonderful, so is the story of this amazing man, who I had heard of but am now fascinated by.

He was born a slave, escaped at twenty and went on to become the most gifted orator of the abolition movement.

Douglass met with Lincoln in the White House and rejoiced in the victory of emancipation, but was anything but grateful to the white political establishment who embraced or tolerated slavery until it was no longer politically expedient to do so.

An amazing man, a terrific book. I’m about halfway through.

I just got Small Fry, A Memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs. The daughter of artist Chrissan and Steve Jobs, her father was a remote and mythical figure, he refused for years to even acknowledge his presence. It’s a beautiful, non judgmental or dramatic memoir, an accounting of growing up with two radically different parents, and her struggle to come to terms with her often abusive and unpredictable and legendary father.

She didn’t go for a sensational tell-all, it seems, but a beautiful memoir.

One review called it “an exquisitely rendered story of family, love and identity…a  stunningly beautiful study of parenting that just happens to include the co-founder of Apple.”

Late in his life, Jobs reached out to his daughter, and struggled to be come the father he wanted to be, and almost became the father she hoped he would be. I will read almost anything about Steve Jobs, he was more important to me than my own father, and I never laid eyes on him.

But I know how disturbed he was, and this authentic book only reinforces that understanding of him.

I think Pete Davidson was correct when he said on Saturday Night Live that we need to accept that brilliant people are often crazy.

I read a couple of chapters last night, but had to put it down. I’ve got to finish American Spy.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan is the third novel by the celebrated young Canadian novelist, it’s about an eleven-year-old field slave on a brutal Barbados sugar plantation named George Washington Black. He is terrified to be bought by his master’s brother as a manservant.

But his new master is not what he expected.

The two flee Barbados after Black is suspected in a murder, and join on an extraordinary voyage of discovery that leads them up the American coastline and all the way to the arctic. Black turns out to be a fearless solo explorer, traversing the known world.

The book is about what it means to be free, – the critics compare the story to Jules Verne –  and was short-listed as a finalist for the Man Booker Price in England.

And just today, the sixth book on my list, American Summer: Love And Death In Chicago by Alex Kolowitz. This is an account of one summer of gun violence in Chicago.

Over the past twenty-years, 14,033 people have been shot to death in Chicago, more than 60,000 wounded by guns. The depth and devastation of Chicago’s gun toll is hard to even  grasp.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if this death toll had occurred in any white American city or community, the government would have turned itself upside-down to stop it. The New York Times said the book was “revelatory and stunning.” I think it will be a hard book for me to read, but I am very eager to read it.

I think this is about the soul of our country, I can’t imagine a worse disgrace for our country.

I can’t recall a recent time when I had so many good and interesting books to read – several by black writers I was not familiar with.

Times are changing. I think I need to stop buying any more books, at least until September. Maria has a pretty good stack as well, we will have some happy evenings at home.