Mr. Burke's Reading List

N is for Noose Sue Grafton (1998) After a couple of false starts going through some "between books" books, I returned to Sue Grafton , starting the second half of the alphabet. (I'd say the end is in sight, but, of course, the last two books have yet to be written.) As always, the action takes place a few months after the previous installment, so even though the book was published in 1998, the action takes place sometime in the 80s. Specific dates aren't mentioned, but you have to keep in mind the technology. Granted, even if it were 1998, Kinsey likely would not have had a cellphone (or even a Blackberry) and pay phones would still be around. The Internet, as we know it, would be in its infancy. But that doesn't exist here. The story opens in Nevada, for a change, as Kinsey Millhone is caring for her boyfriend, Robert Dietz, who is recovering from surgery. Once he's able to get around on his own, there isn't any need for Kinsey to play the dome...

Bleed, Blister, Puke, and Purge: The Dirty Secrets Behind Early American Medicine J. Marin Younker (2016) My Summer Reading Challenge was technically over, as was summer itself, but how could I pass up a title like this one? This is definitely a case of Know our Audience. I'm sure there are pretty of kids interested in all the gruesome details when explained in such an icky way. It was a quick read, and a quick look into how America was lagging in the field of medicine from the founding right through the Revolution. In many cases, the "cure" or "treatment" was worse than the illness, and patients were likely better waiting out a disease. The colonies (and the States afterward) didn't have great medical schools, or medical training, or medical libraries, etc. Spoiler: Things got better, of course. But in the meantime.... Library catalog number: YA 610.97 Y

The Society for the Preservation of CJ Henderson Danielle Ackley-McPhail & Greg Schauer, ed (2014) Disclosure: I've met CJ Henderson. I would have to say I knew of him, more than that I knew him. He was a fixture at a science fiction convention I'd gone to almost every year for over two decades. I can't say how much I'd actually talked to him in that time, but he was a person you could talk to, whether in the Dealers Room during the day or the Con Suite in the evening. I can also add that in 2014, I was in his house with many other people, but he was only there in spirit. When CJ died in 2014, family and friends held an "Afterlife Launch Party" in his honor. The family had hoped for a large turnout, but many that he knew from the convention circuit lived anywhere in the tristate area as well as up and down the Eastern seaboard (and elsewhere, too, but those were the ones likeliest to make it). I also learned that he lived about a 15 minute wal...

Men in Black: How The Supreme Court Is Destroying America Mark Levin (2005) In my first pass on the 300s shelf, I spotted a book by Mark Levin, a brilliant legal and Constitutional scholar, who iscurrently a talk-show host and pundit, but was chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese in the Ronald Reagan administration. (Basically, he knows what he's talking about.) Anyway, it wasn't one I was interested in reading, but since it would fill a spot on my reading challenge, I placed a hold on Men in Black , which I'd heard about years ago, but never read. Men in Black has nothing to do with Will Smith or aliens or secret government agencies. Quite the opposite -- it has to do with the one branch of government that always comes from and center in the headlines every June when it delivers a boatload of decisions and opinions. Levin has read all the major ones going back over 200 years. Levin goes through many of the jurists who have sat on the bench and the inf...

M is for Malice Sue Grafton (1996) Each summer, I try to revisit the Sue Grafton series? Why just the summer? Because I don't think I could stick with a series through 26 volumes (even if only 24 are published at this time). This series is popular enough that I had over a monthlong wait for the ebook from the public library even though it's over 20 years old! I discovered the series on audiobooks when I was commuting an hour each way back in the 90s, listening to whichever volumes were available. At some point in this century, I decided I would read them in order, unabridged. There's a slightly dated feel to the books because each one takes place a few months after the prior entry even though they are written a year or two apart. On top of that, Kinsey is a little behind the times with her portable typewriter and lack of technology. Even the fact that she doesn't have a cell phone seems a little jarring, but it was the 90s. I've started to notice a turn ...

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With the Lost Photographs of David Attie, Truman Capote (2015) With an afterword by Eli Attie. The 800s shelf: Literature, which includes plays, poems and essays. I saw that it was about Brooklyn and then I flipped through and saw the pictures, and I had to check this one out. First off, I've never read anything by Truman Capote , nor was anything ever assigned to be read. I remember a copy of In Cold Blood sitting on my bookshelf when I was a kid, but I didn't pick it up. Second, the Afterword was actually the most fascinating part of the book. If you pick up this book, you might want to read it first. Or you can save it for last, and it will change your opinion of the entire book. From the Introduction, I learned when this essay was originally written and where it was published. From Attie's addendum, I discovered that this Memoir was published as a book in 2002 without the photos. The photography of David Attie, someone you'...

The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition, Mark Menjivar (2015) The 300s shelf: Social Sciences, which I already did, but I saw another book that looked interesting. In brief, the author was interested in stories about things, objects, and rituals that people believe are lucky or will bring luck. He even visited stores that had some kind of luck in the title. Many of those stories, along with pictures, are gathered in this one volume. He doesn't try to validate the stories, nor disparage them. More of a simple celebration of the things people do to make luck go their way. (Or to make bad luck just go away.) A quick little read. I saw it on the shelf, and I thought it might be interesting. It was, but not overly memorable. Nothing much to make a note of. For fun, here are some of the other options I had, which seemed to have a lot to do with Vampires and Zombies. The English Folk Tales book is one I might revisit later. There was also a book on ...

Remember the Alamo: Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About American History With All the Boring Bits Taken Out , Alison Rattle and Allison Vale(2009) My summer reading challenge took me to the 900s, which is History and Biography. I went for something short and easy to read. In fact, in researching this book to put on this blog (I already returned it to the library), I discovered another version of it with a shorter title about "Bite-Sized pieces". Rattle and Vale (who spell their first names differently, so I can't call them "the two Al(l)isons") present snapshots of American history from the Pilgrims to Watergate, all in one-page snippets. Obviously, some topics require more pages to tell the complete story, but it's easy to break things like the Revolution into separate topics and events. Likewise, one-page biographies of important people are included and inserted into the otherwise chronological narrative at the time it would most se...

The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler; or, Working for the Custom House , Francis W. Doughty (1900) Note: This novel appeared inside the collection 8 Dime Novels . Back around the turn of the 20th century, there was a series of dime novels named Secret Service about agents who do a lot more than just protect the President. This series featured an agent known as "Old King Brady" who was joined by a sidekick/apprentice who shared his surname even though they were not related. The latter became known as "Young Brady". The stories featured the byline "A New York Detective", which was Francis W. Doughty. The Bradys had a knack for solving problems when no one else could. At least that's what I figured was the reputation that they had. The novel I read was number 79 in the series. The story opens in the port of New York in lower Manhattan, an area I've been familiar with since I was a child, but that was long, long after. (Two world wars and then...

8 Dime Novels , E. F. Bleiler, editor (1974) I don't remember the circumstances that got me thinking about old "dime novels" a few months ago. It couldn't been because of seeing a roleplaying game online or something similar. I searched both the Brooklyn and New York Public Libraries for information on dime novels, and one of the hits I got was for 8 Dime Novels , edited by and with an introduction written by E. F. Bleiler. Collected in 1974, the stories are much, much older. I'm not sure when "dime novels" ended and "pulp magazines" began or if the two are somewhat synonymous. My biggest problem with this book was that it was a big book. Larger in size that a regular magazine, but hardcover. Not something that was easily portable, so I couldn't read it on the train. And not the kind of thing I want to hold onto and catch the lamp light right before bed. Basically, I had to find a comfortable place outside to read, close to h...

A Fire In My Hands , Gary Soto, 2005 image coming Another warm day, another trip of errands briefly interrupted by a stop in the air-conditioned library. Actually, I had time to spare, and I thought I could find something that I could possibly read in a half-hour. (No, that wasn't likely to happen in any case.) As I walked past the 800s shelf -- Literature -- I looked for something thin that wasn't labeled Young Adult . Yeah, I failed at that as well. But I did pick out a slim volume by Gary Soto, whom I hadn't heard of before now. Some business to take care of before I continue. As a child I was fascinated by poetry. By the rhymes and by (although I wouldn't know it at the time) the meter. There would be poems at the start of each section of a reader (or text book?) we had way back when. I have since fallen out of love with it, particularly in its modern incarnations. Specifically, I hate free verse. I hate random words on paper. I liked the rules, and w...

Dead Strange: The Bizarre Truths Behind 50 World-famous Mysteries , Matt Lamy, 2012 I went back to the 000 (General References) shelf of the library and looked through the reference books and the "How To" for different software programs. It looked like I was going to have to take a "supernatural" book. That said, I like this book. This is the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. I didn't read a lot, and part of the problem in the early grades was that there weren't books like this in my school library. It jumped from the Dr. Seuss level to 100-page novels without any in-between! (I remember discovering chapter books with my children and thinking how wonderful they were.) I remember taking out a book on magic because it interested me, but it was too dense for me to get through. Anyway, back then, I would have loved books about supernatural stuff, and this book has 50 things in it (although a couple are kind of related). And the best part is th...

Eyes & Spies: How You're Tracked and Why You Should Know , Tanya Lloyd Kyi, 2017 Art by Belle Wuthrich While walking up and down the aisles at my local library branch recently (a cooling center for a hot day), I mused that I should just grab a book from each shelf and see how many I could read this summer. It became sort of a Summer Reading Challenge , but a poorly planned one. For one thing, I originally considered the fiction shelves: grab a mystery, science fiction, historical, young adult, graphic novel/manga, etc. Then I thought about the shelves lining the walls, with numbers corresponding with the Dewey Decimal system. I could try to read on from each leading digit. Now there's the rub. First, I'm not big on non-fiction, and second, a lot of the material was reference-oriented. Also, many of the books were quite large and would likely be pretty dense reading. And there's the other thing about wanting to enjoy what I'm reading and read some of the ...

Dresden Files: Fool Moon , Jim Butcher, 2001 The first volume of the Dresden Files had vampires, but it wasn't about vampires, even though they played an important part. The problem there was wizardry, and that was a nice change from what you might expect. The second volume has werewolves, and it is definitely about them. But there's still a twist to it, and that's the ground rules. Bob, the air spirit Dresden keeps in his cellar, explains about different types of werewolves from folklore and how people become them. Hint: getting bitten by a werewolf won't turn you into one -- otherwise, the world would be overrun with werewolves. (My note: consider that any virus that could spread so easily would either become a mass epidemic or kill everyone, and itself, pretty quickly.) All the different types are encountered here, including the mysterious Tera West, who Dresden isn't too sure what she is. It's certain that she isn't as human as the others beca...

Dresden Files: Storm Front , Jim Butcher, 2000 I heard about the Dresden Files many years ago, probably as long ago as they've been around. I've been told I'd probably enjoy them. Whoever said that was probably right. I don't know what pushed me recently to request Volumes 1-6 as an ebook from the library, but I did and I had a while to wait before my name got to the top. I knew that there was no way I was going to read six books at the end of the school year in the standard loan time/ I "put down" what I was in the middle of and managed to read two volumes. I'll list them as separate entries. So Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden is an actual wizard in the modern world, and that world isn't Harry Potter's with the regular schools and such. Harry's father was a stage magician and named him for famous magicians. Unlike his father, Harry has an aptitude for actual magic. The downside is that magic and technology don't go well to...

One Piece , Volumes 1-29, Eiichiro Oda, 1997-2003 Sometime in June 2016, I heard several of my students talking about One Piece . To be honest, I don't know now if they were talking about manga or anime. I can't say for sure that I saw anyone reading One Piece in particular, but manga was popular with the students. I had an epiphany. If this is something that the students like, then maybe I should partake a little myself. And having an excuse to read the stuff was just a bonus. I had a couple of choices, but given the conversation I was listening to, I figured I'd start here. These 29 volumes were read between June 2016 and June 2017, particularly during those periods I was riding trains to different schools in the city. It helps that the Brooklyn Public Library has many of the volumes available. (By coincidence, the first volume that they didn't have was one of the few early volumes that the Barnes & Nobles a block from my new school (with different st...

Post , Brenda Copper, 2016 The story is set in the Pacific Northwest after society breaks down, but through disease and natural disasters, not war and bombs as in a typical post-apocalyptic novel. People now live in small communities, growing their own food, hidden for their survival. Walking the roads could be dangerous. Sage, the girl at the center of the story, likes to go outside. She's quick, so she can escape any travelers she encounters, but her constant outings put the Garden in jeopardy, and she's told that the next time she leaves, she won't be allowed back in. This is actually fine by her, because she wants to go. She wants to see a big city. And she has seen an airplane, so she knows that there must be something. So Sage is sent to Portland, to find what the world is like now. Sage runs into some trouble on the road and is rescued by a man from another community. She is allowed to stay the night, but in the morning, she is sent off with another girl, ...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts I & II , J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, 2016 First of all, if you don't like reading scripts, you are not going to like this. This is the script of the play, though I wonder how they staged some of it. But that's the magic of theater, isn't it? The story picks up right where Book 7 ( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ) leaves off, at the Epilogue in Kings Crossing. It even replays that scene. We learn that it isn't easy being the son of Harry Potter (and it still isn't easy being Harry Potter), nor being the son of Draco Malfoy. Albus Severus Potter meets Scorpius Malfoy, and they become friends, which is facilitated by Sorting Hat placing Potter in Slytherin. (Gasp!) Who is this Cursed Child of the title? Is it poor Scorpius, rumored to be the son of Voldemort and Astoria Greengrass, Draco's late wife, who was sent back in time to be impregnated, to carry on the Malfoy name when Draco wasn't up to...

The Happiness Handbook , Lisa T.E. Sonne, 2015 Not my usualy read. This is basically a collection of 1-2 page long affirmations, to be read daily or all at once. Listed with no apparent order or theme. No chapters to speak of, nor any appendix or list of references at the end. This book was a gift I received at an after-the-holidays birthday gathering. I didn't want to put it off because, if asked, I'd like to say, yes, I read it. I figured that I could probably get through it in a couple of mornings on the train. Instead, I found myself playing games on my iPad a little more often rather than reading. There wasn't anything too deep within the pages beyond the expected "you can be happy"/"you should be happy" vibes. Despite some interesting quotes from people, I would be hard-pressed to tell you any specific idea presented within the pages. Fluff. Worse: it turns out I never finished it. I found my bookmark just before I started writing this....

500 Sundays , Billy Crystal, 2005 Catching up on this year's readings, so far. Not that there's much of it. 500 Sundays was the name of Billy Crystal's one-man Broadway show, telling stories about growing up with his father, and life after that. The title comes from the fact that his father's one day off was Sunday, which he spent with his kids. Unfortunately, he died when Billy was only 14, which meant that they only had about 500 Sundays together. He doesn't go into every one of these. In fact, there's plenty that happens on weekdays at the Commodore Music Store in Manhattan. I saw Crystal's show, so reading this was almost like reading a transcript of the show. I remembered quite a few of the stories, in particular, the fact that the first time he was in a movie theater, he was sitting on Billie Holiday's lap. Dad was in the music biz, particularly around Jazz. Billy Crystal grew up in that show-biz environment. A lot of heart-warming stori...