I was never a fan of superheroes, not even as a child. My heroes had to be credible, human, acceptably flawed yet redeemable by a personal moral code that ultimately defined their actions. The heroes in my favorite books are of this ilk, determined to pursue the right thing, regardless of how life challenges them. It speaks to how I’ve tried to live my life–and still do.
Winter in present day Nebraska. Sheriff Wat Haggard, finishing a routine patrol in a brewing snowstorm, intercepts a Ford Super Duty after spotting a woman’s leg protruding from a camper-shell door. He discovers an indigenous woman shackled inside. To her desperate entreaties, he promises he will help her. In an ensuing confrontation with her four kidnappers, Haggard is wounded and left for dead.
Wat Haggard is almost sixty, overweight, and verging on retirement. His rescuers, a ranching family, urge that, in his condition, he allow state police to assume the case. But Haggard promised the woman and thus, he re-enters the storm. A promise has to be kept.
When I read that homicide detective, Harry Bosch’s motto, “Everyone counts or no one counts,” I was hooked on the character, the book, the entire series.
What I love about Bosch is that physically he is not imposing, his strength emanating from his powerfully focused mind and his mongoose dedication to any case he inherits.
I love his quiet rectitude as he tries to render the permanently wronged justice. In its pursuit, he will unflinchingly bring any means necessary to the job, even at the risk of his life.
I love the idea of Bosch as much as I like the character. I need to believe he is out there.
An LAPD homicide detective must choose between justice and vengeance as he teams up with the FBI in this "thrilling" novel filled with mystery and adventure (New York Times Book Review). For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal . . . because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys…
Not necessarily a fan of Westerns, I loved this original story.
Set in post-Civil War, eastern Texas, an unlikely hero, Jefferson Kyle Kidd is enjoined to return a young white girl, rescued from Indians, to living relatives. Initially reluctant, Kidd commits himself to his mission regardless of challenge.
I love it when I find myself there in a story. I found myself swallowed by the challenges they faced, my attention (and tension) rising with each one. I also love it when I find myself rooting for the characters as I did with this believable story.
Though there is action, I loved that it was Kidd’s quick-witted intelligence (and that of the girl) that set the story apart.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his…
An atypical Western, I loved its unusual, yet believable plot.
A drifter, George Briggs, is hired to bring four women, maddened by the bleakness of the Nebraska plains, east to civilizational care.
Briggs fulfills his contract, guiding them through the threat of Indian attacks and other challenges to safety. A feeling pervaded the story that Briggs had been given one shot at elevating himself above an otherwise unremarkable life and he came through. This is a feature that I love in almost any story–the idea of redemption.
I love to believe that potential exists within me.
The Homesman opens in the 1850s, when early pioneers are doing anything they can to survive dreadful conditions. Women especially struggle with broken hearts and minds as they face bitter hardships: One nineteen-year-old mother loses her three children to diphtheria in three days; another woman left alone for two nights is forced to shoot wolves to protect herself. The situation calls for a "homesman"-a person charged with taking these women, driven mad by the conditions of rural life, to asylums in the East. Not exactly a job people are lining up for, it falls to Mary Bee Cuddy, an ex-teacher…
What I loved (and appreciated) about this more typical Western and what elevated it in my mind was how the author dealt with the looming specter of racial bigotry toward indigenous people.
Ben Zachary, a physically strong character, is enhanced by his ethical convictions. This is something that draws me to a protagonist, the idea of what he (or she) stands for and will do to live up to it.
Ben risks everything to protect Rachel, his adopted “sister,” who is Kiowa. Abandoned by hate-blinded, white neighbors, Ben proves steadfast in living his moral code.
Always a winner for me, it touched into how I try to live.
In this epic American novel, which served as the basis for the classic film directed by John Huston, a family is torn apart when an old enemy starts a vicious rumor that sets the range aflame.
A deceptively simple story with subtle social commentary, I loved how the author offered a coming-of-age story about a rural Scot eventually exposed to a wider world and its temptations.
Self-conscious of his puniness as a child, Geordie develops into a behemoth through strength training, his strength carrying him to the Olympics. I loved how Geordie ultimately parried worldly temptations, guided by his moral strength and sense of what was most important in life.
I was also enamored of the story as it struck close to home in terms of my own sense of childhood powerlessness and what I did to combat it.
A series of graded readers covering a wide range of styles and kinds of English, both fiction and non-fiction, with comprehension exercises, questions and crosswords. Level 5 has a vocabulary of 2000 words.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and history that laid tracks for the North America of today.
Leaving behind ancestral Chinese homelands and their family, brothers Yang and Lee face harrowing challenges as they join countless immigrants seeking a better life in the 1860s.
This story follows their remarkable journey across the ocean to San Francisco, then into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where they'll labor to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Surrounded by California's new marvels, and carrying their cultural traditions in their hearts, Yang and Lee find themselves in precarious situations. Their passions, struggles, dreams, and…
