Mr. Burke's Reading List

100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime?? This is my first blog posting about books in general. I felt like writing something, and I'm not done with my current book, so I'm writing about reading itself. I may decide to do this ever so often. I recently saw a link to Amazon's 100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime . (Normally, I shy away from free advertising on my blogs, but I've taken most of my images from Amazon, so I guess I've already established the pattern here.) It's an interesting list to be sure. In fact, it seems to be two lists. The top part of the page shows 60 book covers under the heading "100 Books ..." etc. The bottom parts shows -- I kid you not -- "1-12 of 113 results for Books : 100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime". It then goes on to list books, only some of which appear in the 60 icons above. I haven't explored beyond those 72 titles yet. There's much to mention here. For starters, I appa...

Greek - Norse - Egyptian - Mythology Trilogy , by Stephan Weaver, 2015 These three books were released as a trilogy and I picked it up when they were available for free. Worth every penny I paid, and not a penny more. You might also note that there is only one date in the title because all three books have a 2015 date. (Amazon lists them all as June to July 2015). Basically, the three books are poorly organized, somewhat repetitive, and in need of an editor to fix ridiculous inconsistencies. (Like an Egyptian god with, apparently, two right eyes.) I was reading the kindle version and got to the "bonus chapter" of the Greek book -- and immediately wondered how I'd gotten to the bonus chapter already? How short was this book? Short. All of them. You could read the trilogy in an afternoon if you wanted to. The books aren't very well researched. You could probably do better checking websites online. You'd probably find more information as well. Thankfully, ...

Great Train Robberies of the Old West , by R. Michael Wilson, 2006 I walked into Barnes & Nobles in Park Slope and stopped at the closeout books table in the vestibule. Usually, there isn't anything "must have", but this time I saw a slim book on Great Train Robberies of the Old West , which piqued my interest. I flipped through it quickly and thought, "I'll take it." It looked like A Good Read, and it was. Nothing fabulous -- given the subject, the book easily could have been twice the size. But it presented a series of train robberies, brought out the facts and gave some background on the people involved and let you know what happened to the participants after. There was an appendix with references, which weren't just websites, but also primary sources, including hundred-year-old news articles. So the author did his homework. I've read stuff like this which reads like expanded click-bait articles that you can find online. Others that make...