Hello, there, Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in Lithia, Florida on Monday, January 3, 2022. It’s a chilly winter – or what passes for winter in the Sunshine State – day. Currently, the temperature is 62˚F (17˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 76% and the wind blowing from the west-northwest at 12 MPH (24 KM/H), the wind chill factor is 62˚F (17˚C). Today’s forecast: We can expect mostly sunny skies and a high of 66˚F (19˚C). Tonight, skies will be clear. The low will be 49˚F (9˚C).
If you’re a regular visitor to A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that reading is one of my passions – writing, movies, music, and collecting Star Wars figures and other memorabilia are others. I learned how to read at an early age; family lore has it that my maternal grandmother (“Tata”) taught me with ABC blocks and newspapers before I was four years old. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say. I do know that I was reading ahead of my age group by the time I was in school (at Colegio El Nogal in Bogota) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so there’s truth in that story.
In any case, I love reading, and even though I try to keep my spending on books on a manageable level, I have to admit that I still buy between 10 to 12 new books a year. And despite the scarcity of shelf-space in my room, I must admit that I still prefer printed books to digital ones. Thus, when I speak of a “To Be Read” or “TBR” pile of books, in my case it’s not a figure of speech; it’s a literal stack of hardcovers and paperbacks.
And, of course, the TBR stack neither vanishes nor shrinks. It either remains stable or (egads!) grows.
Currently, my TBR is – as always – a mix of books I’ve been reading in dribs and drabs or recently added to my library.
On Monday, January 3, 2022, these are the titles I’m reading (and one that I’m expecting tomorrow is included in the graphic below):
- The Battle of Leyte Gulf: 23-26 October 1944, Thomas J. Cutler, 2014, Bluejacket Books
- The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, James D. Hornfischer, Doug Murray, Steven Sanders, 2021, Dead Reckoning
- The Odyssey of Star Wars: An Epic Poem, Jack Mitchell, 2021, Harry N. Abrams
- MacTrump: A Shakespearean Tragicomedy of the Trump Administration, Part I, Ian Doescher and Jacopo della Quercia, 2019, Quirk Books
Some of these books have been on my TBR pile for a few months; I rarely sit down to read huge chunks of a book in a leisurely fashion here in my new hometown of Lithia. Sometimes I’ll pick up a particular book and make a serious effort to read it from cover to cover, but not at the pace I used to when I lived in Miami.
And to complicate matters more, I buy new books before I finish the ones on my extant TBR stack. Tomorrow, for instance, I am expecting – along with the Blu-ray of director Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys (1972) – a copy of The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, a new book about Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the Presidency from President-elect Joe Biden after the November 3, 2020, election. Written by Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo) and Matthew Teague (January 4, 2022, Atlantic Monthly Press).
As you can see, Dear Reader, my TBR stack….it keeps growing!
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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