Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in October 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

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Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments (2023) by Joe Posnanski may not be the most important book you’ll read this year, but if you care at all about the game this will be the book you’ll cherish. This is a love letter of the best kind, bringing together the long history of the game with the uniqueness of the moment, all told with Posnanski’s “trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations.” These forever moments are magical: “beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.” Unlike basketball and football, baseball is a game of perspective. It moves at a leisurely pace. Players, umpires, and fans have time to talk, get to know each other, and tell stories. Nobody tells a better baseball story than Joe Posnanski.

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Your City is Sick (2023) by Jeff Siegler is a deep dive into how the various causes of community malaise — poor planning decisions, neglect, disregard for current residents, and more — have led to the dysfunction we see today. Cities are like people, Siegler argues, and when humans forget all we’ve learned about health care, skip the vegetables that sustain us, eat a diet of attractive desserts, and stop exercising we get sick. Cities face the same challenges. But like a blunt yet perceptive doctor, Siegler first helps us understand the disease and then — in straightforward, no-holds-barred language — he prescribes treatments to push his readers to transform their cities through relentless, incremental improvements.

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How to Resist Amazon and Why (2022) by Danny Caine makes the case for resisting what at times seems to be the takeover of the world by this corporate behemoth. Caine — who co-owns the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas — has provided a wealth of strongly sourced information about how “big tech monopolies, especially Amazon, are bad for communities, small businesses, the planet, consumers, and workers.” In seven detailed chapters, Caine gives example after example of Amazon’s devastating impact on the book industry, small business in general, the labor force and workers’ rights, competition, privacy, the environment, and every level of government. He then explores ten things you can do to resist Amazon. The loss of personal connections and community-oriented support is at the heart of Amazon’s destruction of America, but there are ways you can fight back.

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The Young Man (2022) by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) is the account of her love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. This is not a salacious memoir; rather, Ernaux uses the backdrop of this brief romance to explore themes of the movement back and forth between youth and age, of memory and time, of misogyny and class, of life’s pitfalls and pleasures. Though trim and stark, The Young Man — in the hands the 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — turns into an unexpected study of life.

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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017) by David Grann is a well-known and highly praised work, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards for Nonfiction. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma, whose land sat above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. “To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties . . . In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.” And in 1921, one of the Osage, Anna Brown, was brutally murdered. Grann’s story begins with that killing and in a tightly woven tale he takes the reader through an evil crime spree arising from white settlers’ attempted dispossession of an Osage family’s Oklahoma lands, exposing once again the dark and odious underbelly of race in America.

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What’s on the nightstand for November (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

• Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson
• Blue Iris: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver
• The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
• The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-year-old Man by David Von Drehle
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in September of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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This special Friday edition of the Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Photograph of the Carnegie Library in Stillwater, MN, from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.