{"id":9451,"date":"2022-01-18T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9451"},"modified":"2022-01-17T19:11:20","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T00:11:20","slug":"successful-reading-experiments-2021-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9451","title":{"rendered":"Successful Reading Experiments: 2021 Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I read a lot.  Forty to fifty just-published books a year that I review for the U.K. website CrimeFictionLover.com<\/a>, Audiobooks of prize-nominees and winners. And books that have been out a while picked by my mystery readers book club. And a few books that have nothing to do with crime or espionage or the Dark Side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are a half-dozen authors, debutantes and established, that I \u201cdiscovered\u201d last year. Maybe you would enjoy them too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two New Jersey writers who not only write with style and precision, they offer a nice dose of humor are Bill Baer<\/strong>, who has two books in his New Jersey Noir<\/a> series, and experienced writer but new-to-novels Fabian Nicieza<\/strong>, with Suburban Dick<\/em>s<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unlikely team of characters in Chris Brookmyre<\/strong>\u2019s The Cut<\/em><\/a>\u2014an elderly woman who spent her career devising grisly stage makeup for horror films and a young Black guy who\u2019s the consummate horror fan\u2014were a delight to chase around Europe with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you asked, I\u2019d say I\u2019m not a horror fan, but Stephen Graham Jones<\/strong>\u2019s The Only Good Indians<\/em><\/a> presented horror in a way that made it work for me. One of the best books I read last year. (If you can, listen to the audio version, narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Genius.) Jones has a number of others, including My Heart is a Chainsaw<\/em>, which NPR picked as a best book of 2021. Will have to get to that!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liz Moore<\/strong>\u2019s Long Bright River<\/em><\/a>, nominated for a number of prizes, is the painful story of two sisters\u2014one a cop, the other a drug addict\u2014and the corners they\u2019re forced into. She has more where that came from too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

About once a year, I scrub sentimentality out of my brain with the caustic prose of authors like Cormac McCarthy. The book that accomplished that job this year was Australian author Paul Howarth<\/strong>\u2019s Dust Off the Bones<\/em><\/a>. This year, maybe his Only Killers and Thieves<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you find a favorite new author last year?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a lot.  Forty to fifty just-published books a year that I review for the U.K. website CrimeFictionLover.com, Audiobooks of prize-nominees and winners. And books that have been out a while picked by my mystery readers book club. And … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Favorite new (to me) authors discovered in 2021. Six keepers.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,122,52,40,1160,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-book","category-crime","category-fiction","category-horror","category-reading-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2sr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9454,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451\/revisions\/9454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}