What is the best time of year to read?

My average reading pace is about a novel a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. As you can tell from my handle I like to spend a lot of time outside. Most of the time this cuts into my reading time. Let's face it. In the winter, when the sun sets at 5 pm I'm a lot more likely to sit down earlier in the evening and start reading. However, in the summer when the sun doesn't set until 9pm; I start reading much later in the evening.

Since I'm kind of a dork I keep track of everything I have read during a given year on a spreadsheet. I have this spreadsheet broke into different months. Looking at my tally's so far this year there is distict decrease in reading when the weather warms up. In May of this year I only read two novels.

But given this theory why did I put away 6 novels in the month of July. Granted some of them were only 250 pages; thank you Clive Cussler. But I also read "To the Last Man" which is 650 pages of small print. As I thought about my reading habits I realized it's not so much what the weather is doing, it's how much time I have to read. During July I went on vacation, had an entire weekend without kids, and of course the Fourth of July Holiday.

It also doesn't hurt that I have been reading some book that are hard to put down; including The Appeal by John Grisham, and The Ezekiel Option by Joel Rosenberg.

I also read The Last Patriot by Brad Thor. TLP is my favorite book so far this year, and I beleive it's Mr Thor's best novel so far. The best way to describe it to you is imagine Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne, and Dan Brown's Robert Langdon in the same novel working toward the same goal. I had a hard time putting this book down and with everything going on in my life, wife, kids, job I knocked it out in 48 hours.

I need to bounce I just started my first James Patterson book, Along came a Spider.

WWI is finally over...

I just got back from vacation where I had a little more time to read. During that time I finally finished Jeff Shaara's take on WWI: To The Last Man.

I'll start out by saying I have read all of Shaara's previous novels about the Civil, Revolution, and Spanish-American Wars. All of these books were good page turning reads.

Just like WWI got bogged down into a stalemate of trench warfare until the American's arrived, so did this novel. Shaara's previous novels contain lots of battlefield prose. In this novel, like the war, there was lots of political wrangling to discuss. While informative not the most entertaining read. Once the American's started shooting the novel picked up it's pace.

Not that I didn't enjoy reading the novel, it just wasn't as good as his other efforts. I beleive WWI is often; and rightly so, over shadowed by WWII. I think Shaara wrote To The Last Man to set up his WWII trilogy which is only two thirds complete. I look forward to reading those later on this fall.

I have the first six novels in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt Series on loan to me and I need to get those knocked out before I read anymore Shaara.

However, I am in the last 100 pages of Brad Thor's The Last Patriot. It is by far Thor's best novel and I'm not done with, but I will be by the end of the evening.

Welcome to The Last 100 Pages

I am a compulsive reader. I have thought about starting a group called Over-Readers Anonymous, but that would have taken too much time from my reading. So I decided to start this blog instead.

The Last 100 Pages.

When reading a novel the last 100 pages are usually what determines weather you'll finish the book and run to the computer to locate the author's next book, (if you don't have it already) or slam the book down and go "WTF was that?"

In this blog I plan to review novels that I've read. I read mostly popular fiction, westerns and historical fiction. Occasionally I'll mix in a non-fiction. What I won't be doing is discussing off the wall, out of the way, artsy stuff acadamia gets upset isn't more widedly read. There's a reason it isn't. If you like that stuff you won't be reading here for very long. I will also write about topics that surround readers in our society. Like what a pain in the ass hardback books are compared to paperbacks, or why I keep an excel spreadsheet of everything I've read.

That's all for now, I am not yet within the last 100 pages of "To The Last Man" by Jeff Shaara.