Tag / William Lashner

by jim

2014: The Year In Books

2014books

With another year coming to an end, it is time to take a look back at the 23 books I read over the past year, an increase of 5 from last year. Of those 23, 7 were non-fiction and, of the 16 novels, 8 were TV show tie-ins. Only 5 of the books came from the “to-read” drawer, and 8 were e-books.  I read a grand total of 9000 pages, the most in 1 year since 1992.

A majority of the books I read this year were by authors I’ve never read before. The 14 authors that I read for the first this year were:
Amy Poehler
James VanOsdol
John Passarella
Mary Karr
Thomas E. Sniegoski
William Lashner
Teresa Strasser
Adam Carolla
Bryan Bishop
John Green
Rob Thomas
Jennifer Graham
Brian Jay Jones
Gord Rollo

The ghost writer(s) for Richard Castle and David Mack were the only authors I read multiple times in 2014.

The six books that I read this year that were released this year were Richard Castle’s Wild Storm, Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, Greg Rucka’s Bravo, William Lashner’s The Barkeep, Adam Carolla’s President Me, and The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham.

Finally, the breakdown by month.  Vacations in April and December certainly helped pad their totals a tad bit.
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by admin

Book 12 (of 52) – The Barkeep

William Lashner - The Barkeep

William Lashner – The Barkeep

One of the perks of Amazon Prime is getting a free Kindle book every month.  Earlier this year, I ended up selecting The Barkeep, by William Lashner, mostly because it looked like the most interesting of the options.  I had never heard of Lashner before, but an interesting cover drew me in.  I started reading this back in April when I was in Los Angeles.

Nearly 4 months later, I have finally finished it.  Which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy it, which isn’t necessarily true.  It was a slow burn and it did take a while to pull me in, but eventually it did.  As the title suggests, this is the tale of a bartender who, years before, found his mother’s dead body and helped put his father in prison.  Now, when an old man shows up at his bar suggesting that his father is innocent and that he, in fact, was hired to kill the bartender’s mother, he starts to question everything in his life.

Like I said, it took a long while for this book to draw me in.  Eventually, all of the threads started to come together and drew me in to the story.  Still, it was a bit of a chore and I don’t know if I would be up to taking in another of Lashner’s works any time soon.