I’ve been having a sweet reading festival since I was held up for awhile while my foot was getting fixed. As a child, I read almost all of the time, and I am thrilled to be getting back to it.

Tonight Maria is off belly dancing, and I have four or five hours to myself to read, and I will use every minute of it.

I have four books I have either just finished or am reading as I skip from one to another. As chaotic as my mind is, I’ve always been able to do that. Perhaps it is a surprise gift from my Dyslexia, which was otherwise a pain in the ass.

I’ve been sharing my reading with all of you for more than a year now, and thanks for your messages of appreciation.

I’ll keep at it. These are not all books I’ve finished, and I don’t care to say much about unfinished books. But I think highly of them or wouldn’t be reading and sharing them. I’m not shy of abandoning a book I don’t like. So far, these are all winners.

Lorrie Moore just published I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

It’s her first book in 14 years, and I would read anything she wrote; her command of the language and storytelling skills are pure genius. This is a very different combination of humor, insight, empathy, and heartbreak. I have just a few pages to go, it’s a beautiful book, not for everyone.

Original Sin is an early P.D. James, my favorite written by my favorite mystery writer (now deceased), and my favorite detective, Adam Dalgleish (the series is currently my favorite mystery series on Amazon Prime).

To me, James was the most intelligent mystery writer of modern times, and her detective was and is the most thoughtful and intelligent investigator. I found the book in a used bookstore and bought it for $5.

I would have paid ten times more.

Swamp Story by Dave Barry. Barry is a well-known and popular award-winning Florida columnist and author. He and Carl Hiassen now dominate the strange genre of crazy Florida mysteries and novels. It’s a fun read, candy for the mind in tense times.

You know the drill, Florida stories are lunatics, psychopaths, manatees,  billionaires, drunken sunbathers, hookers, man-eating sharks,  algae rivers, hurricanes, thieves, crazy governors, addicts,  crooks, alligators, pythons, crooked politicians, unhinged presidential candidates.

They are all in the book. A fiction writer had to work hard to tell a better story than Florida tells us every day, and Barry is up to it.

Our newest  Hate State is now the center of the American Confederation Of Prosperous Hate States With Low Taxes. I wouldn’t want to live there or even visit.  But I’m happy to read about it.

Barry’s take on Florida is hilarious; the book is full of colorful and inept crooks and lunatics; there are no vicious serial killers; it’s like having a delicious ice cream cone on a hot summer night. Just don’t take the plot all that seriously.

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Stacy Schiff is one of the best historians and biographers alive, and I am excited to be reading The Revolutionary Sam Adams (not John Adams, the President.) I’m 100 pages into it and learning about Samuel Adams, a central and mostly unknown figure in stirring up support in Massachusetts for the American Revolution.

Adams was a remarkable rebel, shy and self-effacing.

His history has been overlooked because he burned all his letters and never gave interviews or talked about his brave and brilliant plotting.

He was that very rare political figure in American politics, self-effacing, humble, and able to take secrets to the grave. He did as much as Thomas Jefferson to spark the revolution, but he’ll never be on a stamp or have a university named after him.

Little was known about him; little has been written about him. He was one of the main reasons Paul Revere made that midnight ride; he warned Adams that the British were just down the road and were hurrying to kill him.

He got out with minutes to spare, and had they gotten him, there might not have been an American Revolution.

Schiff is a terrific writer and gifted biographer, and I’m sailing through the book, surprised, enchanted, and learning much more about the revolution than I thought I knew. Schiff writes in easy, witty, and compelling prose.

It’s smooth and gripping reading.

I am learning something new on every page. I’m off to read. See you later.