Sunday Book Thread

I've got a bunch of books in my backlog waiting to be read, but most of them are dense nonfiction things. I found myself in the mood for some escapism in the last week, so I started re-reading F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack" series. I just finished The Tomb and am now starting Legacies.

I really enjoy Wilson's "Repairman Jack" books because, unlike many other series heroes, Jack is a fully fleshed-out character. He's not a combination of Superman, Batman, and James Bond. He gets hurt, he makes mistakes, he has feelings and personal problems. He has a sense of humor. I also like the mix of high adventure and supernatural mystery that Wilson weaves into the books -- he's pretty good at keeping you invested in the story no matter how outlandish it gets.

The only real problem with the "Repairman Jack" books (if you can call it a problem) is that the further you go in, the more necessary it is to have read the previous books. The books aren't exactly a series -- each one is a pretty self-contained adventure -- but they all happen in a single overarching timeline and mythos, and later books depend on knowledge of what happened in the earlier ones. Wilson works in a single mythos not unlike the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft, and all his stories drive towards a single point of culmination.

Don't let the supernatural angle of the "Repairman Jack" books drive you away if you're not into that kind of thing. The books are also just good adventure yarns, rather like Lee Child's "Reacher" books or John D. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" books. They're not art, but they're well-written and fun.

Another series I follow is Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs' "Pendergast" books, and I just picked up Cold Vengeance. Agent Pendergast is one of my favorite fictional detectives -- a combination of Sherlock Holmes, David Niven, and Fox Mulder from "The X Files".

What's everyone else reading?

posted by Monty at 08:56 AM

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