And more books, some good, some mediocre, some junk novels. But who cares?

Lee Childs, another Jack Reacher novel, "The Midnight Line."  Years ago one of my favorite SF Chronicle columnists, Jon Carroll, mentioned this series in one of his columns.  I got one out of the library and that was that. I was hooked on this character.  Jack Reacher has no residence, no drivers license, no luggage, not much money. He owns a toothbrush and a passport. He wears the same clothes for a few days and then buys new ones and tosses the old ones in the trash. Jack Reacher manages to get in at least one nasty fight in the first 30 pages of every book and no matter if he faces 3 or 5 or 7 men, he always wins.

Realistic?  HA! No way, but that is one of the charms of this series. Reacher is a huge guy (not like the wimpy dwarf Tom Cruise who has portrayed Reacher badly in two movies) but more like Liam Neeson, big and attractive but not pretty and very, very sexy in a rough-guy-wearing-jeans kind of way.

So, "The Midnight Line" is the most recent book, got it out of the library (you do not need to EVER buy these books unless you see one used for under $4 and you plan to read it on an airplane or on a beach and leave it behind) and it was better than the previous one.  This one had some secrets, some hidden agendas and a few surprises.  A day read and it was satisfying if a bit (!) contrived but enjoyable in the way a really good (aka bad) burger can be.  Filling, tasty and yet you feel a little bad that you ate the whole thing.

Richard Rothstein: "The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" is a treatise on how the government has systematically segregated this country racially, especially in the area of housing. Allowing places like Levittown to be for whites only and even here in Northern California letting almost all housing developments to forbid anyone except whites from buying in. It's an important historical perspective on the inequality of race for one of the most important of needs: housing.

Along that same line, Thomas Mullen continues to write about the same subject, segregation. In "Lightning Men" he takes on Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950's and focuses on the police department in a small area of the city.  There are a few black cops that are barely tolerated by the white police and the tension is always at a breaking point. It's a really good novel, dense, serious, very clear on how the division between blacks and whites fractures everything.  I would definitely recommend this novel, get it out of the library.

There have been other books I have read in the last couple of weeks but these are the ones worth reading.  Go find them.

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