Writing book reviews always seemed like a dream job to me—just read books and write about them, what could be easier! I’ve been writing book reviews for years and I have to say it is a dream job, though it has never been easy for me to distill the essence of a book into a three-minute spoken review.

All of my book reviews are archived at ncpr.org, over one hundred of them, but I thought it would be fun to make a few lists of my “top three” in several categories. My deal with the radio station is that I find interesting books by authors who live in our listening area—the top half of New York State, northern Vermont and southern Ontario and Quebec. Fortunately we have some fine writers in this part of the world. Sometimes I also review books on topics that I think will be intriguing for NCPR listeners or award-winning books that shout out to be read.