Mr. Burke's Reading List

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