Moor or less: Can you help me out of my reading rut?

I’m looking for a few good books.

Seriously, I need to get out of my rut of reading about rogue or retired CIA agents in war-torn countries or some sheriff, game warden or dedicated but disrespected cop saving the day.

Yet when I go to the library, I’m just plain lazy about searching for a good book. If a novel by Michael Connelly, Stephen King, C. J. Box, John Grisham or Lee Child is on display on the Bestsellers’ table, I scoop it up. If I don’t see anything there, I wander over to the Large Print area and quickly find a recognizable author there.

I’m checked out and toting my books to the car in five minutes. No new authors, no searching the shelves

Like I said, I’m in a reading rut.

Bill Moor displays some favorite authors and one not-so-favored.

I miss the late John LeCarre and Larry McMurtry and when John Irving was going great guns. And is Jo Nesbo ever going to give us another story about his Norwegian detective Harry Hole, maybe the most flawed and brilliant protagonist I’ve ever encountered?  (He’s even better than the other Harry — Connelly’s Harry Bosch.)

I guess I could give the really great literature another go. But I’m not going to crack open a book by James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald at this point in my life. Maybe Ernest Hemingway to admire his style if not his stories. Somerset Maugham? Just his name intimidates the heck out of me.

My tastes are pretty simple. I’m just not going to sink as low as James Patterson and his puzzling popular tales. He lost me during the first book I ever read by him when his plot involved two guys kidnapping women around a college campus and holding them in underground cells. Seriously?

I need some suggestions, dear readers.

I am mainly a fan of fiction. I think that being a journalist for most of my life and always dealing with facts and true happenings made me want to escape into someone else’s brilliant imagination.

Biographies? I pick up one of those 1,000-page tomes and I can hardly carry it home. Just too much information.

Of course, you know what is missing among the authors I have named above. Sure you do. No women writers. Pretty embarrassing.

I did read some Louise Penny recently, but my familiarity with outstanding female writers is woefully lacking. What makes this even more astonishing is that maybe my all-time favorite book, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is by a woman, Harper Lee.

Help me out here.

Now that you sort of know what I like, how about suggesting some books that you think I would enjoy and why you liked them. Then maybe I’ll get another column out of this. Yeah, lazy reader, lazy writer.

I’m looking for a little adventure, a little mystery, maybe just a little romance. And if it has anything to do with dragons or sorcerers, count me in. Ha, ha, just kidding about that last part.

I just want to read something entertaining. As John Milton once wrote, “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.”

I totally agree  with Milton — I think. Just don’t suggest that I pick up his “Paradise Lost.”

That one “lost” me a long time ago.

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