I drive a lot. And I like to read. When I listen to audiobooks while I drive, I kill two birds with one stone. Unless I swear off of cliches. In that case, I listen to audiobooks while I drive. Let me know which one you like better. But I digress. Miles are getting driven and books are getting consumed. Which ones? Read on. As always, there is something here for almost everyone.

I am known in my circle as a lover of noir-ish mystery novels. One of my kids suggested this one – “Devil In A Blue Dress”, Walter Mosley’s first novel (1990).  Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins is a veteran home from the war and working in an aviation plant in 1946 Los Angeles. What makes this book deviate from a thousand others of its genre, era and location is that Rawlins in in the middle of a growing black community that stretches from his mortgage in Southern California back to a former way of life in the south. After Rawlins finds himself jobless, a neighborhood bartender with his fingers in a little of everything steers a little something Easy’s way. Along the way, Rawlins discovers that he has an aptitude for investigating. As you might expect, things get complicated.

I found the plot nicely done, with all the twists and turns this kind of book demands. What I found more interesting was the way this first-person narration takes us inside the old racial rules of the immediate postwar years. This one spawned a 1995 movie of the same title that starred Denzel Washington. Mosley has written several subsequent Rawlins yarns and I intend to come back to his tales in the future.

I love old cars, and realized that I had never read a Stephen King novel. So what better choice than “Christine” (1983)? I think everyone knows the basic story (probably from the 1980’s movie) – In the summer of 1978, Arnie Cunningham is the school nerd. He falls madly in love with a broken down 1958 Plymouth Fury. But somehow the car comes to own Arnie as much as Arnie owns the car. And to the car (which is named Christine), their relationship is “till death do us part.”

This book spoke to me in a way it will not to most of you. This book takes place in the late 1970s – a period when I fell madly in love with a 1959 Plymouth Fury. So I smelled the smells, heard the sounds and felt the same surfaces that Arnie Cunningham got to experience. The only differences in my experience was that my ’59 model was woefully deficient in its abilities to regenerate itself, and I was able to find a new owner for the car with no unusual drama.

As we might expect, the story in the novel is more involved than that of the book. We get more of a backstory on the car and its former owner, who seems to retain his ownership of Christine even after his death. I will confess that there were some irritating factual errors for a guy who knows these cars (like references to the gear shift in a car whose automatic transmission was controlled by pushbuttons) but those were obscure enough that they would not bother most readers. Christine is a great read, and for those of my general age, a nostalgic trip back to a simpler time.

I struck out trying to find an audio version of the collection of Shakespeare’s plays that is found on the bookshelf of classics I am trying to work thorugh, so I have decided to throw one play at a time into the rotation. This time it was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1595 or 96).  It is a story of young people with relationship problems who run off into an enchanted wood, and all kinds of weird stuff happens. But it all works out in the end.

I have concluded that Shakespeare’s plays are probably better read from paper pages or watched as a play than consumed via audiobook because it would probably be easier to keep the characters straight. But I got the hang of it after awhile and can now check another box in the cultural enrichments I should probably experience.

Another source of inspriration for things to read is a list of 100 books that one particular guy thinks I should read before I die. Number 4 on that list was my next selection – “The Alchemist” by the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho (1988). This book was a cultural phenomenon some years back, a strange combination of fable, inspirational text and travel adventure. 

An Andalusian shepherd has a dream of finding a treasure. He sells his sheep and goes on the quest, learning along the way that the universe supports those who go off in search of a “personal legend”. Along the way, the shepherd boy meets a biblical figure (Melchizidek, King of Salem), and becomes immersed in Moorish/Arabian culture.   The only plot spoiler I will offer is that the lad does, indeed come under the wing of an Alchemist, who encourages the boy’s mystical powers. Although “The Alchemist” was probably more to Oprah Winfrey’s tastes than to mine, the story held my interest.

I continued on my own personal quest to read a bio of each of our American Presidents. This time it was “James Madison”, by Ralph Ketcham (1970).  I knew going in that this was going to be a slog. Research indicated that there are newer, more readable Madison bios, but that this one remains the cornerstone on its subject. Madison, our 4th President (1809-1817) is best known as the primary author of the U. S. Constitution of 1787, and taking the lead in getting it ratified by the various States.

Madison was the first President (though certainly not the last) whose lifelong career was politics. And it was an interesting arc – from promoting a cause that the country needed a strong executive when pushing for the Constitution to joining Jefferson in railing against executive power during the Adams administration, to exercising plenty of executive power when he needed it in his own term. He was very much allied with Jefferson at the beginnings of partisan politics in America, where their Republicans (1) were pitted against the Federalists.

I could argue that Madison was our first failed president – policies like trade blockades created deep divisions among the States, and it was his lack of leadership in military affairs that led to the British burning the White House in the War of 1812  But it is also true that by the end of his term he had healed many of those divisions and became seen as one of the last of the generation who saw us through the Revolution.

A last point I found interesting is how the northern and southern states were at odds almost from the beginning of the Union, and not all of those differences involved the slavery issue. Madison was another of the southern aristocrats who argued the wrongfulness of slavery as an institution, but who seems to have been unable to muster the courage to do anything about it in his own personal affairs.

After the long trek through the life and times of James Madison (nearly a 40 hour commitment) I was ready for something light. I returned to the Slough House series of British spy stories by Mick Herron . Next up was an appetizer – a 2-hour novella called “The List” (2015). In it, a lazy handler of retired “assets” is in hot water when he learns that one of his newly deceased responsibilities may have been a double agent. It was a brisk read (listen?) that left me wanting more. So, on to . . .

. . . the next Herron full-length entry, called “Real Tigers” (2016). This book took us back to Slough House, the place where London’s spy agency assigns its screw-ups who are, for whatever reason, “inconvenient” to fire. This has become one of my favorite literary series, and Herron’s writing never fails to entertain. Here, one of the sidelined agents (called “slow horses”) is kidnapped and another is caught trying to access official records.  Plot twists and unexpected alliances are the order of the day as the slow horses of the agency prove to be better at the spy game than those on the inside of MI-5’s headquarters at Regency Park.

A blogger I follow who writes about classic films recently wrote about the 1945 movie “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.” I have never seen it, but quickly learned that the 1943 book on which it was based was hugely popular, and decided that I would read the book first. This book, a semi autobiographical coming of age story by author Betty Smith, is a deep look into what life was like for kids in Brooklyn, New York during the first two decades of twentieth century.

I am a sucker for immersion experiences into a world that ceased to exist long before my time. For that matter, the world from this book was gone by the time my own parents were born. It was a world of the working poor in the big city. Family was everything then, even when the family was a mess. But even though the story comes from a world of gas lights and children who collect bits of junk all week to sell to the junkman for a few pennies on Saturday morning, these characters are very much like the people you and I know today.

The book follows Francie Nolan and her younger brother Neelie as they navigate life. Their father, Johnnie, is a lovable Irishman whose drinking gets further and further out of control. Their mother, Katie, is a practical woman with the grit to do what has to be done, even when it involves being a scrubwoman for three tenement houses so that she can live in one of the units rent-free. It was a tight-knit community with more social problems than you can shake a stick at, but one in which the bookish young Francie can thrive and get the education her mother will do anything to promote. Have you ever read a story that makes you wish had run longer than it did just because you love the world where it takes you? This was one of those for me.

This marks the cut-off on my reading for now. Maybe I have identified someone’s beach read for this summer? Although I can guess right now that it will not be that hefty Madison bio.

(1) Biographies of these early Nineteenth Century political figures uniformly refer to Jefferson and his political followers as “Republicans”. These Republicans broke from Washington and John Adams (who came under the label of “Federalists”) and tended to support France over England and be against anything that gave off the faintest whiff of monarchy. This party (sometimes called the Democratic-Republican Party) splintered and disappeared as a political force around 1825. The Republican Party of Jefferson’s and Madison’s day is wholly unrelated to the Republican Party founded as an anti-slavery party in 1852 and which backed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. It is Lincoln’s Republican Party that can trace a line to its modern descendant of the same name.