This is a Good Book Thursday: Poetry and Decency Edition

I’m still working my way through my Michael Gilbert mysteries (Smallbone Deceased, The Body of a Girl, The End House, anything with Calder and Behrens or Patrick Petrella). I think the thing that’s drawing me to him right now is that he was such a decent man and that pervades his stories. Some of his mysteries are violent with horrible people in them, but his spies and detectives are all such good, hardworking people, there’s such a core of basic moral decency, not judgment or priggishness, just a firm conviction of how good people behave, how good people treat each other, not because of money or fame or power, but because the foundation of human life is that we’re decent to each other. It’s a very Second Coming time right now, with the worst full of passionate intensity, so to have Gilbert telling story after story about every day people doing every day good is an incredible comfort.

Also a comfort: A book on reading poetry turned up on BookBub this week, and it led me into two other books on looking at words and feeling them, and that was absolutely lovely.

What did you read this week?