Authors on social media were playing this game where they would post an image of twenty questions about books, and promise they would answer 1 question from the list for each time someone “liked” their post.

I’m not an author and nobody on BlueSky cares what books I like, but this looks like a fun game, and here on my blog I can write whatever I want, so here goes:

1. What’s the book I’ve re-read the most times?

There are many books in my collection I’ve read more than once, but there are only three I can think of right now that I’ve read so many times that I couldn’t possibly come up with an accurate count.

When I was just a young pup, I read “Starship Troopers” and then I obsessively re-read it over and over until I almost had it memorized. That is not an exaggeration. I must have read that book from beginning to end at least two dozen times in three or four years. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Happily, I stopped doing that, but even so, it’s going to be one of the top five books I’ve re-read the most by default, no matter how many other books I read.

I had a similar, although slightly less frenzied obsession with “The Left Hand of Darkness” when I discovered it. I read it so many times that I wore out my paperback copy. Luckily I found a hardcover copy in a used book store at about the time my little trade paperback started to fall apart, and I read that instead. I still have it. And I still re-read it every so often.

I first read “The Caine Mutiny” around about 2005 and I didn’t like it much, but something about it got its hooks into me and I read it again about a year later. Enjoyed it that time. Read it again bout a year later and enjoyed it even more. I continue to revisit favorite passages, and I read it cover to cover every two or three years. I have no idea at this point how many times I’ve read it from beginning to end; certainly more than a dozen. It’s become one of my comfort reads. I pick up from time to time when I want to read a little bit of something but I don’t know what.

2. What are my top five books of all time?

I don’t know how anyone can possibly come up with a list of their top five books of all time. It’s a zero-sum game. If I start by naming, for instance, my favorite favorite science fiction books I get, off the top of my head: “Ancillary Justice” (Ann Leckie), “The Dispossessed” (Ursula K. LeGuin), “The Forever War” (Joe Haldeman), “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (Douglas Adams), “Network Effect” (Martha Wells), “Neuromancer” (William Gibson), and “Old Man’s War” (John Scalzi). That’s six, and I don’t want to cut any of them.

And that’s just science fiction. Other favorites, without even considering genre, still shooting from the hip: “Dispatches” (Michael Herr), “Life on the Mississippi” (Mark Twain), “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (J.D. Salinger), “The Right Stuff” (Tom Wolfe), “Slaughter-House Five” (Kurt Vonnegut), “Tehanu” (Ursula K. LeGuin), “To Say Nothing Of The Dog” (Connie Willis). I can’t cut any of those. They’re all on my bedside stand, within arm’s reach.

Then there’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (Richard Rhodes), “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (Ray Bradbury), “Pillar of Fire” (Taylor Branch), “One Summer” (Bill Bryson), “The Worst Hard Time” (Timothy Eagan), “The Lady In The Lake” (Raymond Chandler), “The 1619 Project” (Nikole Hannah-Jones), “The Painted Veil” (W. Somerset Maugham) — I mean, these are all necessary books. I don’t know how I can pick five.

3. What is my favorite genre?

If you’d asked me that question forty years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say my favorite genre is science fiction, no question. I science fiction almost exclusively when I was in my teens, and used to have an enormous collection of trade paperbacks by authors like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. My father picked them one by one out of their hiding place and read them when he was recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He traded each of them at the local library for more, so they were lost but for a good cause.

It’s been years, however, since I’ve called sci-fi my favorite genre. I still enjoy reading it (favorite authors: Douglas Adams, Octavia Butler, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ann Lecki, John Scalzi, Connie Willis), but these days I get the most satisfaction from reading non-fiction.

4. What section of a book store do I browse?

I browse book stores indiscriminately. Just wander the aisles.

5. Where do I buy books?

I prefer to visit independent bookstores, although finding them is getting harder to do these days. There were dozens of independent book stores selling new and used books in Madison when I moved here in 2005; I used to spend hours wandering the shelves of the half-dozen or so withing walking distance of capitol square. There are only a small handful in 2026.

If I want to order a new book, I always order from A Room Of One’s Own, an independent bookstore not far from my house. If I feel a need to browse used books, I often visit Half-Price Books.

6. What books have I read in the last month?

“The Battle of the Atlantic,” the first book in the series titled “History of United States Naval Operations in World War II” by Samuel Eliot Morison; “Beowulf: A New Translation” by Maria Dahvana Headley; selected short stories from “The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016,” edited by Karen Joy Fowler; “The Mere Wife” by Maria Dahvana Headley

7. Is there a series / book that got me into reading?

I guess Dr. Seuss? Those are the first books I remember checking out from the school library and reading on my own.

8. What is the first book I remember reading by myself?

So if we’re talking about the first book that was a little heavier reading than “Hop On Pop” I guess the first book I can recall reading by myself was “Follow My Leader” by James B. Garfield, about a boy who is blinded in an accident, learns how to deal with it, and gets a guide dog, named Leader.

9. When do I tend to read the most?

I’m retired, so I read all the time now. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, in bed right before I turn out the lights. I’ve collected a lot of books over the years, and I intend to read them all.

10. Do I have a “guilty fav?”

Assuming that “guilty fav” means a book I like a lot but I feel like I shouldn’t, I’m going to fall back on “Starship Troopers” again. Everybody dumps on it now, and there are solid reasons for that. The jingoism in it borders on fascism, just to name the most obvious problem, but if you skip the lectures about how great authoritarianism is, reading the battle sequences is still a lot of fun.

11. What non-fiction books do you like, if any?

Oh, quite a few. I’ve just finished reading Bruce Catton’s “Army of the Potomac” trilogy, and have started on his centennial history of the civil war. I’ve never been all that interested in reading about the civil war, but Catton’s writing is so enjoyable that I breezed through these books, and I recommend them whenever I get the chance.

12. Did I enjoy any compulsory high school readings?

I’m sorry but high school was more than forty years ago. At this remove, I don’t remember most of the books I was assigned to read in high school except “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” which I liked a lot. I think we were also assigned “The Hobbit” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” because it was just that time when everybody was reading those books. I liked both.

13. Do I have a Goodreads?

I think I set up a Goodreads account years ago but I haven’t touched it in ages.

14. Do I ever mark / dog ear books I own?

I don’t dog-ear pages. Feels wrong, like damaging the page. I like to keep the pages of my books as flat and crisp as possible. And, I have a huge collection of bookmarks that I enjoy using.

I do underline words I need to look up, and significant passages I want to find later. And I write notes in the margins sometimes.

15. Recommend and review a book.

I’m terrible at reviewing books, but I’ll try. I recently read “The Mere Wife” by Maria Dahvana Headley. It’s a novelization of the story of Beowulf, centered around Grendel’s mother, who appears briefly in the poem and has no name. Both she and her nemesis, police officer Ben Woolf, are survivors of a recent war. Their re-introduction to “normal” society has not gone well; both seem to be suffering from PTSD. She tries to protect her son Gren from the world and from Woolf, but cannot. The story is a tragedy, after all.

Headley also translated the poem “Beowulf” into modern English, which I’ve never read until I picked up her translation. Previous translations were too hard for me to get through, but I enjoyed hers. I would recommend either without hesitation.

16. How many books have I read this year?

Thirty-three. I listed them at the bottom of this post.

17. What are my Top Five children’s books?

I don’t know if these are my “top” five, but they are the five I can pull out of my memory right now without looking: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (Seuss), “The Little Prince” (“Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” (Virginia Lee Burton), “The Polar Express” (Chris Van Allsburg), “Where the Wild Things Are” (Maurice Sendak).

18. Do I like historical books? Which time period?

I’m going to assume this is a question about reading histories. And yes, I enjoy them very much. The time period I end up reading most about is 1939 – 1945, but I will also read any histories about the indigenous peoples of the American continents, and the colonization of what are now known as the American continents.

19. Which are my most disliked popular books?

Tom Clancy novels. Liked the movies. Can’t read the books.

20. What are things I look for in a book?

Readability. Can the author artfully communicate an idea clearly and coherently? It’s a quality as important for creative fiction as it is for historical non-fiction. Bruce Catton wrote some of the best non-fiction I’ve read.

The books I’ve read in 2026

Nonfiction

“The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom,” by Marcus Rediker./

“The Art of the Canoe with Joe Seliga” by Jerry Stelmok (author) and Deborah Sussex. A memoir of Joe Seliga, who hand-built 621 wood-framed, canvas-covered canoes in his backyard workshop in Ely, Minnesota, between 1938 and 2005.

“Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America” by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chappelle. A history of canoes, a water craft original to North America, by the rather eccentric Adney, who obsessively documented their design and construction in the 1800s.

“Bark Canoes: The Art and Obsession of Tappan Adney” by John Jennings. A photojournal of the scale model canoes built by Adney which documented the construction of bark canoes by the indigenous peoples of North America./

“The Battle of the Atlantic” by Samuel Eliot Morison. First book in the series “History of United States Naval Operations in World War Two,” a history of the use and defense of convoys which supplied the United Kingdom and Russia during the early years of the war.

“The Big E” by Edward P. Stafford. A history of the most decorated aircraft carrier of the Second World War.
“Border Country, The Northwoods Canoe Journals of Howard Greene, 1906 – 1916,” by Martha Greene Phillips. A diarized photo album of canoe trips across northern Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, and Minnesota.

“Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier” by Samuel Eliot Morison. Sixth book in the series “History of United States Naval Operations in World War Two,” this is a history of naval operations in the Bismarck islands lying just to the east of Papua New Guinea.

“Building a Maine Guide Canoe” by Jerry Stelmok. A how-to guide to hand-building wood-framed, canvas-covered canoes.

“Glory Road” by Bruce Catton. Second book of the “Army of the Potomac trilogy,” recounting the army’s history with new commanding generals, from the Battle of Fredericksburg to the Battle of Gettysburg./

“Grant” by Ron Chernow. A biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Did not finish yet — it’s almost 1,000 pages! Fun fact: Grant’s first name is Hiram, not Ulysses, and the initial letter of his middle name is U (for Ulysses), not S, which was a clerical error he tried to correct but eventually accepted.

“How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America,” by Clint Smith.

“A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear,” by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. Libertarians co-opt a New Hampshire village.

“Mr. Lincoln’s Army,” by Bruce Catton. The first book of the “Army of the Potomac trilogy,” recounting the formation of the Army of the Potomac, the command of George B. McClellan, the Peninsula Campaign, the Northern Virginia Campaign, and ending with the Battle of Antietam.

“One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” by Omar El Akkad. An Egyptian-born journalist examines genocide in the modern era.

“The Pine Barrens” by John McPhee. A memoir of the people and history of the New Jersey pine barrens.

“The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History” by Ned Blackhawk. A history of the United States from the perspective of the indigenous population.

“Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood” by Chantal Norrgard. A history of how indigenous peoples learned to survive under the governance of European-Americans.

“The Survival of the Bark Canoe” by John McPhee. A memoir of Henri Vaillancourt, who taught himself to build birch-bark canoes using methods adopted from indigenous peoples of the northwest.

“The Wood & Canvas Canoe : A Complete Guide to its History, Construction, Restoration, and Maintenance” by Jerry Stelmok. A history (and how-to) of wood-framed, canvas-covered canoes, which Europeans derived from birch-bark canoes in the 1800s.

“The Wood and Canvas Canoe: A Complete Guide to its History, Construction, Restoration, and Maintenance” by Jerry Stelmok and Rollin Thurlow

Fiction

“Bea Wolf” written by Zack Weinersmith and illustrated by Boulet (Gilles Roussel). A children’s story derived from the classic poem.

“Beowulf: A New Translation” by Maria Dahvana Headley. The classic poem set to modern English.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr. A classic of the science fiction genre. Survivors of nuclear war preserve the relics of Saint Leibowitz, which include the sacred writings, “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home for Emma.” Fun Fact: The first two chapters were written as short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955 and 1956.

“The Good Shepherd” by C.S. Forester. A fictional dramatization of the sleepless 52 hour escort duty the captain of an American destroyer experiences as he attempts to keep a convoy safe from the relentless attacks of German submarines.

“James: A Novel” by Percival Everett. The story of Huck Finn as told from the point of view of Jim, the slave who travels downriver with Huck.

“Kaiju Preservation Society,” by John Scalzi. An unemployed door-dasher is recruited into the Kaiju Preservation Society, a secret organization which shepherds kaiji to keep them in in their own world and out of ours. But the villain of the story has other ideas. I read this when it was published in 2022 but it’s so much fun that it’s become one of my comfort reads.

“The Mathematician’s Shiva” by Stuart Rojstaczer — read up to page 128, didn’t feel like finishing it, not my cup of tea.

“The Mere Wife” by Maria Dahvana Headley. The story of Beowulf, told from the point of view of Grendel’s mother, who appears only briefly, and is nameless in the original poem.

“The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Humanity deals with the consequences of climate change. A ponderously over-large book. Read up to p 269, didn’t finish.

“Platform Decay” by Martha Wells. An artificial person built by a corporation to be a weapon, which calls itself Murderbot, navigates the worlds known as the Corporate Rim, trying to save the lives of two children.

“Provenance” by Ann Leckie. Intrigue and mystery on an alien world.

“Solaris” by Stanislaw Lem. A gelatinous goo covering the surface of the planet Solaris is apparently a colossal alien being which can read the minds of the people studying it. They are terrorized when it attempts to communicate with them by physically manifesting their memories. A classic of the sci-fi genre and one of my favorites.