Robert Breen 📚 -

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

August 6, 2026 / Reading, Science

A sobering look at the inevitable and merciless certainty of our mortality. No matter how much we exercise or how carefully we eat, death is unavoidable. Further, the process of getting old is not for the faint of heart. A quote from Philip Roth starkly clarifies our predicament: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

The point of Being Mortal is not to frighten, but instead to invite us to open our minds about a topic most of us would rather ignore. Alongside his talents as a writer, Gawande is foremost a practicing surgeon. He uses his personal medical experience to help us think ahead about our eventual demise. His advice runs contrary to the medical establishment. Doctors are good at fixing specific ailments, he says, but often do more harm than good with a dying patient.

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Firestarter by Stephen King

July 26, 2026 / Horror, Reading

I set a goal a few years ago to read every Stephen King novel. I had already read many of his books, as I consider him our generation’s master storyteller. Since then, I’ve made good progress. I’ve read 25 of his books in the last three years, with just a handful to go. As I reviewed which book to read next, I kept passing over Firestarter. I saw the movie many years ago, which was pretty awful. I wasn’t keen on reading an entire novel centered on a tweener child with pyrotechnic powers.

I finally read it, and like almost all Stephen King novels, it had unexpected dimensions to the story and characters that elevated it from typical horror to something greater. The suspense begins on page one as we are thrust into a frantic escape scene in medias res. Through flashbacks, we learn the origin story of how this young girl came to possess her powers. A corrupt government agency illegally tested experimental drugs on a group of unwitting college students. Many died, but two developed mental powers, got married, and had a child. Ultimately, it’s the bond of family love that fuels the story. What would you not do to save your child, even one who could incinerate you in a crying fit?

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Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

July 16, 2026 / Fantasy, Reading

This novel had all the ingredients for a terrific story: a strong, conflicted female protagonist, a menacing Nazi villain, Narnia-like magic, time travel, all set in wartime Britain. Yet, the execution missed the mark for me. Too many inconsistencies with the main character to be believable; a weak time travel mechanism, and an unsatisfying ending. The prose often felt overwritten and indulgent. I’m fine with sex in novels, but I didn’t enjoy how this male author described the sexual obsessions of the leading female character. It felt wrong to me. It was a slog to finish.

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson

July 3, 2026 / History, Reading

I read this gem on the eve of the 250th birthday of the United States. It’s far and away the shortest book by Walter Isaacson that I’ve ever read. It’s just 80 pages, which include the full text of the Declaration of Independence and related historical writings from Rousseau, Locke and others. Here, Isaacson parses every word of this famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In short, vivid chapters, he explores the Founding Fathers’ debate and intentions for the formation of this country. In a time when our country is so politically divided, Isaacson encourages all of us to look for ways to find common ground in our positions. There’s a lot to think about here.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

June 30, 2026 / ★★★★★, Reading, Science Fiction

I was slow to pick up this classic dystopian novel, but now I’m glad I waited. Had I read this five years ago, it would have struck me as merely imaginative. But the current political environment, coupled with a recent study of history, particularly the rise of Nazi Germany, made the premise of this book seem all too plausible. In fact, there’s very little here that isn’t drawn from some dark period in our human history, which adds to the novel’s prophetic feel.

I had forgotten what a gifted writer and storyteller Margaret Atwell is. Her lush descriptions of Offred’s world feel cinematic, as if her obscured eyesight transforms her vision into a panning camera.

Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.

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Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

June 27, 2026 / Psychology, Reading

Hidden Potential is about the importance of character, persistence, and passion in how we learn, Hidden Potential is about the importance of character, persistence, and passion in how we learn, grow, and ultimately reach our goals. The book is a self-help guide masquerading as business science, using a predictable format. A framework is introduced in a self-contained chapter, then elements of that framework are covered in detail with stories that mostly support the thesis, research studies are cited, and a conclusion is reached before moving on to the next chapter. I keep expecting more innovation from how these books are written, but almost every one I’ve read follows this same blueprint. I wouldn’t complain if the advice in this one weren’t so basic and uninspired. Examples:

Make learning fun by turning study and practice into a game.
Take breaks from work so you don’t burn out.
You can improve if you have the passion for it.
etc.

In 240 pages, I don’t think I picked up a single new idea. I kept wondering why this wasn’t a ten-minute TED Talk. Still, the book is well-written, almost breezy, and Grant weaves in his own success story along the way, which was interesting. Maybe this would be more useful for someone just starting out. I’m jaded from having read so many books like this over my career. This one was a miss for me.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

June 22, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

This classic novel from Graham Greene explores the fine line between love and hate in post-war London. Short chapters and crisp writing make this book feel like a tight suspense novel, but one that surprises with its probing, deeply human themes: fate vs. individual responsibility, the problems with either atheism or blind faith, the angst of romantic longing, and the corrosiveness of jealousy.

I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

This is one that raised questions that will stick with me for a long while.

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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

June 14, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

On the surface, this is a story about Ruth and Lucille, two young girls who are raised by a succession of relatives in an impoverished lakeside village in Idaho. The girls face a series of abandonments that create a tension throughout the book of when they might find themselves adrift and alone again.

Yet there are layers within layers in this one. This is a novel, yes, but also a ruminative memoir on grief, on loneliness, and on the power of memory to rekindle these losses again and again over time. I’ll be reading along and following the story, and in the middle of a paragraph, slip through a rift to find myself on a whole different level in the novel with deeply symbolic references, many of them Biblical, and all of them a lifetime away from Ruth’s first-person narrative. I might read a passage three or four times and not suss it at all. I understand the words, but not the meaning, at least on the intellectual level. But, at the same time, I do understand on a subconscious level. Like the best kind of poetry.

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My Ántonia by Willa Cather

June 6, 2026 / Literature, Reading

A literary classic set in rural Nebraska during the late 19th century. The book is narrated by Jim, an orphaned youth who comes to live with his grandparents just as a family of immigrants arrives to stake their claim to this new land of plenty. Cather’s descriptions of the Nebraska countryside are so rich and atmospheric, I felt a longing for a place I’ve never seen.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

We follow the lives of these two families as they endure bitterly cold winters and lush summers. The American settlers are stoic, self-reliant, and often miserly. The immigrants are full of life, completely unprepared, and generous to a fault. The contrast between these two groups is a key theme that runs throughout the novel.

The story unfolds in episodic adventures, which felt a bit like something out of Little House on the Prairie. Most of the book centers on Jim’s relationship with Ántonia, four years his senior, and on whom the book is titled. In one way, this is a traditional coming-of-age story of friendship, romance, and small-town values. Yet, what made the novel special for me was its use of place and memory as anchors for happiness.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

It’s hard to share more about the story without spoiling it. Ultimately, this is a love letter to a place and time that now exist only in memory — and in classic novels like this one.

A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst

June 1, 2026 / Reading, Travel

I thought I was getting a modern-day account of a shipwreck at sea. But instead, the author rehashes a fairly well-known account from the 1960s of a couple enduring the sinking of their sailboat after colliding with a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The book focuses on the marriage between this English couple as they struggled to survive at sea and later under the pressure of media interest in their story. The husband is an introverted pessimist with asshole tendencies. The wife believes things happen for a reason and everything will work out if only they keep a positive attitude.

It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.

Elmhirst circles back so often to this idea that the couple’s ultimate survival hinged on a positive attitude, that I guess that’s the main point of the book. I’m sorry, but these sailors made so many errors in seamanship that it’s shocking they survived at all. The author admits in the afterward that she’s never stepped foot on a sailboat. She doesn’t know port from starboard, stem from stern. Who writes a survival at sea story without having sailed?

I am clearly not the target audience for this one.