I finished Larry McMurty’s “Sin Killer” and reviewed it for Blogcritics. I have picked up the next novel in that series, but I haven’t started it. I haven’t finished “The Lives of the Saints”. I went to the River Heights Branch of the library to look for one or two books by Earl Emerson and came away with some other books in the display bins, which I read and reviewed first.

Mystery fiction, read and reviewed at Blogcritics in the last two weeks: “The Dead Horse Paint Company” by Earl Emerson, “Ghost Riders” by Sharyn McCrumb, “Blood Hollow” by William Kent Krueger, “Havana” by Stephen Hunter. Earl Emerson is a firefighter and that book had a quote from Norman Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire” which inspired me to go back and find some mailing list posts I had done on that book and James Keelaghan’s song “Cold Missouri Waters”. I have posted that in my own blog, and I also posted a review of the book at Blogcritics. Kent Krueger is a Minnesota writer and his writing made me curious about Louise Erdich, so I picked up “Antelope Woman” and I’ll see what I think about her work.
That’s probably enough fiction or mystery fiction for now. There are are no clear lines between entertainment, education and enlightenment. Fiction, at least fact-based fiction, can be educational and almost anything can set off a chain of investigation, analysis and enlightenment. I have been entertained and I learned a few things. I will concentrate my reading in different areas for the next little while. Apart from the more serious non-genre books above, I have picked up some Ideas books – “The Dignity of Difference” by Jonathon Sacks, “Fundamentalist World” by Stuart Sim, and I have some other stuff on the shelf, theology, nature, philosophy, politics. Stuff.