Do I Miss My TeeVee?

Fired the television earlier this year; shoulda been done long ago.  And no, I do not miss it one bit.  Look at the reading stack I've gone through for the year:

That's all 21 of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, Samuel Findlay's Breakfast With the Dirt Cult, Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree, Watch For Me on the Mountain, Gone to Texas, and The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, and Robert Gore's The Golden Pinnacle (which I am currently through to chapter 18).  I actually read two of the Travis McGee books twice, also: The Lonely Silver Rain (because I ordered it first, by itself, from Amazon, who inverted the chronology thanks a lot) and Darker Than Amber which was made into a movie in 1970 starring Rod Taylor.

My favorite JDM book was probably The Green Ripper.  There's a chapter in (I think) A Deadly Shade of Gold that Mr. Findlay should read.

My favorite of the whole stack has to be the Josey Wales twofer from Carter.  As great as the movie was (and it's the one movie that every American man should have seen at least a hundred times), these two books are even better.  Where the supporting characters in the movie are a bit one-dimensional, the book gives them much more depth.  Which is as it should be.

Every teenage boy should read The Education of Little Tree.

My Enemies Foreign & Domestic business card has weathered the whole stack as a bookmark, and is still going strong for next year's list.  Which should probably include many more items from John D. MacDonald (the greatest American author you don't yet know).  High on that list will be The Executioners which was twice made into the movie Cape Fear.  Speaking of Travis McGee movies, Christian Bale stubbed his toe before making The Deep Blue Good-By and that project is shelved (again).  I don't think he'd make a good Travis McGee, anyway.

Not pictured (because it's in the Kindle reader) is Francis Poretto's Which Art In Hope and the PDF version of Gary North's Conspiracy In Philadelphia.

Top that, boob-tube suckas.