Wendy Walker

Wendy Walker is the author of the psychological suspense novels All Is Not Forgotten, Emma in the Night, The Night Before, Don’t Look for Me, What Remains, and the Audible Originals Hold Your Breath, American Girl, Mad Love, and The Room Next Door. Her work has been translated into twenty-three languages, topping bestseller lists both in the United States and abroad, and featured by the Today show, the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, and the Book of the Month Club. Six of her titles have also been optioned for television and film.

Walker holds degrees from Brown University and Georgetown University Law School. Prior to her writing career, Wendy trained for competitive figure skating, worked as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, and practiced both corporate and family law. She resides in Connecticut, where she raised her three sons.

Her new novel is Blade.

Recently I asked Walker about what she was reading. Her reply:

I love reading outside the thriller genre whenever I can. While I adore suspense and psychological thrillers, reading within my own genre can sometimes feel like work I’m always analyzing structure, pacing, and technique. Reading outside of it, by contrast, is pure pleasure.

Right now, I’m listening to the audiobook of Wreck by Catherine Newman, the follow-up to her runaway bestseller Sandwich. Wreck follows a family as they navigate a series of quiet and not-so-quiet crises, told through the voice of a fifty-something wife and mother confronting middle age, empty nesting, and a recent family loss. The writing is witty and sharp, yet deeply emotional - almost every sentence makes me smile yet lands with meaning. I also adore the narrator, Helen Laser, who also performed The Wedding People by Alison Espach - another novel I couldn’t stop listening to. I highly recommend Wreck, Sandwich, and The Wedding People for anyone who wants an immersive, emotionally resonant read about the everyday joys and heartbreaks of life.

Visit Wendy Walker's website.

The Page 69 Test: Four Wives.

The Page 99 Test: Social Lives.

The Page 69 Test: Don't Look for Me.

Q&A with Wendy Walker.

--Marshal Zeringue

S.J. Rozan

SJ Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of twenty novels and eight dozen short stories. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story. She’s also the recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and has received Life Achievement Awards from both the Private Eye Writers of America and the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

Rozan's new novel, First Do No Harm, is the latest title in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Rozan's reply:

I've just finished one book and am starting another. Both are non-fiction, which I read a lot.

The first is Kate Fox's Watching the English. Fox, a British anthropologist, decided to turn the participant-observer techniques she uses on foreign societies back onto her own people, to see if she could find the essential nature of "Englishness." It's sharply observed and in places very funny. I'm writing a new series set in London so I thought I'd try to increase my understanding of my characters and their milieu. I did, too.

The book I've just started is Steven Blier's From Ear to Ear. Blier's a pianist, co-founder of the New York Festival of Song, and this is his memoir of his life in music. It's remarkably well-written, by turns gossipy and profound. I'm a music lover but also an ignoramus, and in this book I never feel talked down to or dismissed. As I read I'm comprehending some elements of music-making that I wasn't able to follow before this.

Both books highly recommended!

Visit S.J. Rozan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Paper Son.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Violence.

Q&A with S. J. Rozan.

Writers Read: S.J. Rozan (February 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Family Business.

Writers Read: S. J. Rozan (November 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Mayors of New York.

The Page 69 Test: First Do No Harm.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Williams

Mara Williams drafted her first novel in third grade on a spiral notebook—a love story about a golden retriever and the stray dog who admired her from beyond the picket fence. Now she writes about strong, messy women finding their way in the world. Williams is the author of The Truth Is in the Detours and The Epicenter of Forever. When not writing or reading, she can be found enjoying California’s beaches, redwoods, and trails with her husband, three kids, and disobedient dog.

Recenty I asked Williams about what she was reading. Her reply:

Most Eligible by Isabelle Engel.

The Bachelor meets Miss Congeniality in this hilarious romcom about a reporter who goes undercover as a contestant on a dating show and finds out the host is her one-night-stand from a year ago, and whoops…she might be falling for the wrong person. The hijinks and shenanigans in this one are unmatched. I caught myself laughing out loud and swooning in equal measure. It’s perfect for fans of reality television and classic romcoms, and for anyone looking for an infusion of joy in their fiction.

The Best Worst Thing by Lauren Okie.

This romance tackles divorce, infidelity, and infertility, and does so with unparalleled wit and warmth. It has a deep emotional range and prose so beautiful it will win over even the most hardened romance skeptic. At one point, I couldn’t read the page through my tears, and at another, my family asked me why I was laughing so hard. It breaks the writing rules in all the best ways to produce a book that’s both startlingly fresh and comfortingly familiar.

Wreck by Catherine Newman.

I was so excited when Catherine Newman released this follow-up to Sandwich, one of my all-time favorites. We join the anxious, big-hearted protagonist Rocky again—this time back home—and follow her as she navigates aging, grief, and the complexities of accepting all the imperfect versions of her loved ones and herself.

How About Now by Kate Baer.

I read this book of poetry in one sitting, with tears in my eyes and warmth in my heart. The slim volume grapples with the demands of motherhood, womanhood, and midlife in poems that are often sharp and always tender. Her poems depict struggles that are both timeless and uniquely of the moment: the unequal division of labor in modern marriage, the ephemerality of watching our children grow, and the vulnerability of being human.

August Lane by Regina Black.

This is a perfectly crafted second-chance, multi-point-of-view, dual timeline romance where each plot point and perspective is critical to the hard-won happily ever after. It’s set within the high-stakes world of country music and follows three Black country western musicians trying to break in or hang on to transient success in an industry that has forcibly excluded them. It’s heart-wrenching and soul-healing.

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

Writers Read: Mara Williams (August 2025).

My Book, The Movie: The Epicenter of Forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Carney

A writer and magazine copy editor in New York, Laura Carney has been published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Hill, Runner’s World, Good Housekeeping, The Fix, Upworthy, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and other places. She has worked as a copy editor in national magazines—primarily women’s—for twenty years, including Vanity Fair, GQ, People, and Good Housekeeping.

Carney's memoir is My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I hoard books, and it doesn't help that I picked up books for free when I worked full-time at a women's magazine (I also now own enough anti-aging cream to look 47 forever). But since publishing My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, in June 2023, I've discovered yet another reason to own too many books—publishing a successful one makes lots of people want you to blurb theirs. Or pass theirs along to your agent. I'm happy to do so, and I'm also happy to pre-order every new book a new author friend publishes. The result: I currently have about 60 books in my to-be-read pile, next to my nightstand, which probably scared my in-laws when they house-sat. Or at least tripped them.

Of the 60 or so I'm currently reading, here are the ones I'm most excited about (and keep in mind I bought about 15 more when I was on vacation after my One City, One Book award in Greensboro, NC):

Gratitude and Trust: Six Affirmations That Will Change Your Life: I bought this book before I interviewed one of my heroes, the composer Paul Williams, and I highly recommend it. Oprah liked it too. I've learned a lot from my conversations with Paul, but mainly to "view every no as a gift," one of his mottos, and to view every turn in my life as a direction from "the big amigo." The insights in this book, based on the 12-step program, are wonderful.

Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell: I've read just about every book in Joseph Campbell's catalogue, but this one has to be my favorite. It was a big influence when I wrote My Father's List. Sometimes if there's a central idea in a book that I've built a life philosophy around, I'll scour that book again just to find it. So I'm rereading this.

In one of the chapters (which are based on his lectures), but I'm not sure which one yet, Campbell posits that the Garden of Eden was never a real place, and man was never locked out of it, that we aren't meant to look at God as a big man in the sky. He also theorizes that we aren't meant to believe that we must live our lives separated from Him until we die. Campbell explores the theory instead that the Biblical garden is a metaphor for one's heart, and so is the birth of Christ. He talks about how man's goal should be to live in accordance with his own beliefs, with the Christ figure in his heart—that when he does so, he'll be back in the garden, not cast out, and united with God while living.

I've always loved this idea of Campbell's, or at least this interpretation, though it's one put forth by lots of great thinkers, like Dr. Joseph Murphy and Florence Scovel Shinn—it's this idea that our life mirrors back to us what we radiate out, and if we radiate out wholeness, integrity, consistency and love, this is what we'll get back (or at least what we will see in our everyday experiences). "A vital person vitalizes," Campbell often said. He also said that if heaven is eternal, that means it's a place with no time, not infinite time...and it's possible, through following one's bliss, to have that experience right now. What I learned while completing my dad's bucket list (the premise of my book) was the art of being present—the list items were wholly engaging and typically meant learning new things. This is the main reason I was able to reconnect with my father, in spirit—where he is, time is eternal, and I was living in an eternal space now too.

Gratitude by Oliver Sacks: This book was given to me by John Jordan, who's in charge of public relations at my father's old high school, Archmere Academy in Delaware. I keep it next to my gratitude journal on my nightstand as a reminder. PS: I also keep five journals at once—so I guess I'm a journal hoarder, too!

After by Bruce Greyson, M.D.: My work has happily brought me in touch with a handful of psychic mediums and one near-death experiencer, Jacob Cooper, who turned me on to this book. Jacob calls me a "journalist to the dead," which I think means that in My Father's List, I only ever provided indisputable examples of communication with my father, patterns that came to me rather than my looking for them...I just thought to jot them down. It often felt like my dad was pulling strings for me, helping me along as I went. This book helps explain, scientifically, why people have those kinds of experiences. Bruce Greyson is a "scientist to the dead," I suppose.

Conversations With God (Book One) by Neale Donald Walsch: My friend Erin recommended this one, and I've only just gotten started. But I listened to an interview with the author on my friend Karen Noé's podcast, and I loved the idea he shared, that God told him what every human being wants in life is to be used to their fullest potential. My prayer most often is "use me." Or "show me." So this book will likely resonate.

The Way of the Wild Goose: Three Pilgrimages Following Geese, Stars and Hunches on the Camino de Santiago by Beebe Bahrami: I only recently bought this, and I'm excited to read it not only because I plan on finishing my own bucket list with a hike on the Camino—500 miles when I turn 50—but because this is a feminist take on the hike, one I hope to write about too. I have a theory that the pilgrimages of Europe were placed on top of ancient Druid ley lines, and that if I hike the Camino, I'll find sheela-na-gigs in ruins of churches as proof. Either way, I'm excited to explore the life of a female pilgrim (which I suppose is how I feel as a writer as it is)."

Visit Laura Carney's website.

The Page 99 Test: My Father's List.

My Book, The Movie: My Father's List.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie Classon

Carrie Classon is a performer and a nationally syndicated columnist with Andrews McMeel Universal. Born in Minnesota, she had a fourteen-year career in theater, performing in dozens of shows from Oregon to Maine. After founding and running a professional Equity theater for seven years, Classon earned her MBA and began working in international business. She also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has written a memoir and over six hundred columns.

In her 600-word weekly column, The Postscript, Classon writes about the transformative power of optimism and how to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. She champions the idea that it's never too late to reinvent our lives in unexpected and fulfilling ways. She performs a live show based on her writing—with lots of sequins. With her husband, Peter, and former street cat Felix, Classon splits her time between St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Her debut novel is Loon Point.

Recently I asked Classon about what she was reading. Her reply:

At this moment, I don’t dare start to read another thing because I am smack dab in the middle of Abraham Verghese’s latest astonishing yarn, The Covenant of Water. I will have the privilege of hearing him speak at the writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende in February, and I’ve had this book sitting on the shelf for a while because I’ve read all his previous books and he is one of my favorite writers. So why, you may well wonder, has it taken me until 2026 to read this book that came out in 2023?

The answer is simple: 715 pages! There, I’ve said it. I am a writer who hesitates before starting books this long. I’m not sure at what page count my internal hesitation kicks in, but is before 715, I know that.

And, of course, this book is utterly worth the investment of time (and the possibility my legs may fall asleep from having it rest in my lap). This truly epic novel brings us from the year 1900 and tells of the southern Indian “Thomasian” Christians living there through three tumultuous and defining generations. There are no minor characters in Verghese. Every encounter is, at the very least, a masterly sketch of an unforgettable person who could easily walk off with the story for a few pages—and frequently does. It is a book to savor, with almost unbearable moments of loss because Verghese does not spare us the pain of watching good people suffer and make mistakes.

Every book of his has left me feeling richer and humbled—and convinced I will never attempt to write 715 pages.

Visit Carrie Classon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Loon Point.

--Marshal Zeringue

Madeleine Dunnigan

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Dunnigan's new novel is Jean.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern

I'm ashamed to say I had read none of McGahern's work until I picked up his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun. Set in County Leitrim, Ireland, it tells the story of Joe and Kate Ruttledge who have moved from busy London to this rural idyll, giving up their literary lives in order to run a farm. This novel unfurls with slow, quiet precision; days are measured by the change in seasons; lives are rituals of repetition; relationships demarcated by patterns of conversation. It has some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature I have ever read, it is also extremely funny. Nothing happens and everything happens: birth, death, love, change.

Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano

I am a huge fan of all of Modiano's works. Most are set in post-Occupation steeped Paris and present themselves like detective novels, yet refuse to resolve the central mystery. Such Fine Boys is set in and around Valvert, a boarding school just outside of Paris, and shares many themes with Modiano's other works. Characters seem tethered to the world by frail strings, often these snap and they float away. Shady figures loom at the periphery; people disappear; others go mad. The novel is structured around vignettes that tell the stories of the school's pupils. At the novel's centre the school remains a halcyon place; a memory of a better time when the boys were safe and protected from the strange and hostile world.

From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant

I adore Mavis Gallant's short stories. There is something so expansive about them. In one story the reader can travel decades; and yet her iron-fisted hold on the narrative retains an emotional tension that sustains to the very end. This collection of short stories is set in a faded post-war Europe with figures who are all slightly disaffected and separate from society. We meet a hotelier on the French Riviera, an English family waiting for a father to die, a Jewish refugee who makes a living playing German soldiers in films. Rich, lustrous and textured, each story feels like a novel in itself.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Every year for Christmas my sister buys me a new Janice Hallett novel. This is my holiday treat. I have always loved detective fiction of any kind, and Janice Hallett's innovative books – written not in straightforward prose but presented as a 'dossier' of text messages, emails, posters and signs, clues which the reader herself can piece together – are such fun. This year's novel, The Killer Question, is a murder set around a pub quiz team in rural England. It's juicy and silly and sinister, all in one!

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

The Page 69 Test: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome:

Visiting Berlin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain found himself in a restaurant in which everyone seemed to go mad. Dozens of university students, raising their sabres, suddenly shot to their feet. “There was an excited whisper at our table,” Twain reported. Everyone stomped and clapped and banged their beer mugs. A little man with long hair and an “Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”

Theodor Mommsen, the historian of the Roman Republic, was not just famous; he was considered a very great man. It was generally agreed, among the literate public on both sides of the Atlantic, that, as one prominent scholar put it, “There is probably no other instance in the history of scholarship in which one man has established so complete an ascendancy in a great department of learning.” And this when learning, serious learning, was more respected than it had been before or would be again. Born in 1817, Mommsen had studied Roman law and antiquities as a university student and then, in 1843, received a grant from the Danish government for a journey to Italy that would prove decisive for his later career. He studied Roman inscriptions - the words and phrases, the language, on Roman medals and Roman buildings - and became the leading authority in the field. In 1848, a professor of civil law at Leipzig, he supported the monarchy over the Republicans in the attempted revolution of that year, and then, when the reaction came, opposed the measures taken against those who had been involved in the revolt. Dismissed from his position, he found asylum in Switzerland where from 1854 to 1856 he wrote his monumental History of Rome.

Because Mommsen was not only German but a German professor, the first thought of an American reader is that his History of Rome must be dull as dust, largely unintelligible, and full of unimportant facts and endless arguments about matters no one cared about at the time and no one wants to hear about now, the kind of dreary monologue that makes you wonder if you will ever find the patience to get through even half of it’s nearly twenty-five hundred pages. And then you open the first volume and before you have finished reading the first page you realize what a fool you have been to have waited this long to read what in every sense is a classic. and that there is every possibility that whatever you thought you knew about Roman history, the history before Rome became an empire and freedom vanished from the world, is quite probably wrong. Cicero, who you thought a deeply intelligent public servant who tried to warn Rome about the danger of ambitious men, is for Mommsen little more than a journalist who only wrote what he thought others wanted to hear; Julius Caesar, who you thought wanted absolute power, is for Mommsen a perfect human being.

Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Mommsen wrote what should have been entitled The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic. He traces, and tries to explain, the movement of Rome from a single city to the sovereignty of all of Italy, and from there to the sovereignty of all the countries of the Mediterranean. These were not two successive parts of a single development, the gradual unfolding of an imperial ambition: “The Romans achieved the sovereignty of Italy, because they strove for it; the hegemony - and the sovereignty which grew out of it - over the territories of the Mediterranean was to a certain extent thrown into the hands of the Romans by the force of circumstances without intention on their part to acquire it.”

The question of course is why? Why did the Romans strive for the sovereignty of Italy? What drove them to rule more than themselves in their own city, the way the Athenians or the Spartans had done in Greece? Mommsen insists it was the difference in character, the difference in what the Romans and the Greeks thought important, or, more precisely, how the Romans and the Greeks thought about themselves. The Romans did not think about themselves at all: they were Romans and nothing more. There was a “total want of individuality in the Italian and especially the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism.” We “nowhere encounter a distinct individual figure.” It was “not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy propagated from generation to generation in the senate….” The Romans were forced into a single type, a uniform identity. Under “the rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon, and of the inward freedom on Hellenic life.”

After a series of war that reinforced belief in the martial virtues, Rome obtained control of all of Italy, but instead of acting as an occupying power, the Roman senate understood “that the only means of giving permanence to despotism is moderation on the part of the despots.” The dependent communities were given Roman citizenship or were allowed to enjoy their own communal constitutions, and with “a clear-sightedness and magnanimity unparalleled in history, waived the most dangerous of all the rights of government, the right of taxing its subjects.”

It is seldom noted how the simple facts of geography can change the history of the world. Sicily lies less than a mile from the mainland of Italy. When Carthage, which had become a great power, invaded the island, Rome understood that it would have to fight a war which must ultimately end either in its own destruction or the annihilation of Carthage. The size of the forces involved was at times staggering. In the spring of 258 B.C., the Romans with 330 ships containing 100,000 men in crews and a landing party of 40,000 met off the coast of Libya a Carthaginian fleet of 350 vessels with approximately the same number of men. Three hundred thousand sailors and soldiers were brought into action. The Carthaginians lost four times as many ships as the Romans, but the war was only beginning and each side would suffer far greater losses before it was over.

The losses were far greater on land. At the Battle of Cannae in which Hannibal secured a victory which threatened the very existence of Rome, it was slaughter. “Never, perhaps, has an army of such size been annihilated on the field of battle so completely, and with so little loss to its antagonist, as was the Roman army at Cannae.” While Hannibal lost 6,000 men, only 6,000 of the 76,000 Romans who took to the field survived. The rules of war were different then. A city under siege by the Romans held out until “almost all who were capable of bearing arms had fallen in the struggle before the walls; a large portion of the inhabitants fell by their own hand after the capitulation - the mercy of the victor consisted in allowing the Abydenes the term of three days to die voluntarily.” Publius Scipio, who led the fight, and eventually won the war against Hannibal, compelled a town to surrender and turn over the 400 young men who had led the resistance. By his order their hands were cut off.

Hannibal and Scipio died the same year. When Hannibal was born, “Rome was contending with doubtful success for the possession of Sicily; when he died Rome was ‘mistress of the world.’” Publius Scipio, who more than anyone else brought this about, died bitter at the way he had been treated. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa and Asia. “His proud spirit, his belief that he was different from and better than, other man, gave offense to many, and not without reason.”

After Carthage was defeated, after Rome was everywhere triumphant, Cato, who understood how much depended on the continued maintenance of Roman discipline, wondered what “would happen to Rome when she should no longer have any state to fear?” The answer was not long in coming. There was now an empire to govern, and playing “the part of governors demoralized the Roman ruling class with fearful rapidity.” Few governors returned with “clean hands: and veterans came home “wealthy men.” War became a “traffic in plunder.” Everything was now about money, and the division between rich and poor grew greater and became dangerous. “The often used and often abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applied nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic….” Rome was the center of an empire, and the most important city in the world. Everyone who wanted to be known, known and admired, wanted to live there and be part of it. As residence became more desirable, Rome became more and more expensive. Money, “and nothing but money, became the watchword for high and low.” The constant, and increasing, quest for wealth changed the Roman character. The patriotic ardor which at one point in the Carthaginian war led some of Rome’s citizens to provide on their own two hundred ships and sixty thousand sailors, an action Mommsen thought unprecedented in history, had all but vanished.

The rich had all the advantages, but the poor still had the vote. The rich wanted power; the poor wanted to be entertained. The ability to supply that entertainment became “practically a qualification for holding the highest offices in the state.” As was almost inevitable, the size and splendor of the entertainment offered “became gradually the standard by which the electorate measured the fitness of the candidates for the consulship.” Politics became the prerogative of the wealthy, and entertainment the opiate of the masses, which like any addiction became constantly a greater need. In l86 B.C., gladiatorial games gained admission to Rome. Twenty years later, in the Triumphal Games, the first Greek flute players gave a performance. It failed to please, and the musicians were ordered to fight - to box - with each other “instead of playing, upon which the delight knew no bounds.”

The populace - the ‘People of Rome’ - “was a great lord and desired as such to receive attention.” They crowded in to watch first wild animals, then human beings, forced to fight to the death, and did it in such numbers that the sale of programs listing the names and specialities of the participants became a lucrative business. And then, finally, the gladiatorial games “which revealed, at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization of the ancient world,” took the last step, the “horrible innovation,” by which the crowd, the Roman citizenry that had once been more than willing, eager, to sacrifice themselves for the safety and glory of Rome, decided whether those vanquished in the arena should live or die.

The Roman citizen, once trained to the military discipline of the camp, had now become little more than an urban mob, depending on the state for what it needed to live, and drawn to any demagogue who promised more of what it wanted. Gladiators gave them the vicarious pleasure of violence, blood, and death; actors and dancing girls, which had become two of the highest paid professions in Rome, gave them other ways to amuse themselves without any effort of their own. This corruption, this loss of ancient discipline and order, had, however, one advantage: It made possible the emergence of an individual who might, through his own extraordinary gifts, attract the support of the poor and with that support end the dominance of the privileged rich. The corruption of the Roman republic brought Julius Caesar to power and in the guise of democracy gave Rome an emperor.

Mommsen has nothing but praise for what Caesar was and for what Caesar did. He was, not only in politics, but “in the department of language also the greatest master of his time.” In his treatise on the Gallic war, “there is diffused a bright serenity, a simple charm, which are no less unique in literature than Caesar is in history.” Something similar could be said about Theodor Mommsen. He has written a history that teaches as much about the present as it does about the past, the way in which a republic becomes first a nation then an empire, and how, what was a commonwealth of common effort and shared sacrifice becomes one “composed of millionaires and beggars,” ready to fall under the spell of anyone who promises to give them more of what they think they want. Mommsen’s History of Rome tells us how all of this might be avoided.

Anyone fortune enough to read this great work will understand what Mark Twain felt that evening, long ago, in Berlin: “I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Hagstrom

Amy Hagstrom is the author of The Wild Between Us and Smoke Season. She is a writer and editor with two decades of experience in the travel and outdoor industry, recognized as an O Magazine Insider and previous columnist and feature writer at Travel Oregon, US News, and Huff Post. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Whitworth University. A lifelong outdoors enthusiast, she served as a volunteer EMT with her local county search and rescue unit before launching her travel writing career.

After raising three children in the Pacific Northwest, Hagstrom traded the Cascade, Siskiyou, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges for The Berkshires, making her home in Western Massachusetts with her wife.

Hagstrom's new novel is Now That I Know You by Heart.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am, like many writers, a voracious reader, and my choices in reading material seem to reflect my writing style…in that I write—and read—a variety of genres. I stick with fiction, primarily, and I lean toward upmarket, book club-type fiction, character-driven suspense, and mystery. My only ‘must’: I have to truly like and be ready to root for the protagonist.

Currently, I’m tackling my ‘meatiest’ writing project yet, and it would appear that my current reading list reflects this. I just finished Wally Lamb’s The River is Waiting, which I found to be a phenomenal character study of human nature at its best and worst (set primarily in the men’s prison system in the U.S.). I also tackled Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which I believe is arguably the best book of fiction in the 21st century so far. Timely, relevant, heart-wrenching, and redeeming (ultimately, though Kingsolver certainly makes you wait for it).

I work on my property and walk my dog a lot, so I find myself listening to a lot of books as well. I am currently listening to The Wedding People by Alison Espach, which holds me captivated with its infusion of humor, relatability, and charm. I am also a sucker for a good cozy mystery, and have been listening to the full body of work by Louise Penny. The Black Wolf did not disappoint.

Visit Amy Hagstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wild Between Us.

Q&A with Amy Hagstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina McConigley

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.

McConigley's new novel is How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not the rest of the world.

I also just reread Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. I am so curious about how characters get past the colonial past of their homeland with life in the United States. Can that ever happen? I also love first-person point- of-view books narrated by young women.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Born in Chicago and now a resident of Vancouver Island, Canada, Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year. Her next four novels, The Detour, Behave (an Amazon Book of the Month), Plum Rains (winner of the Sunburst Award), and Annie and the Wolves (a Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction Book of the Year) reflect her diverse interest in the arts, history, science, and technology, as well as her love of travel and her time spent living abroad. Starting with The Deepest Lake (a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Book of the Month) and continuing with her new novel, What Boys Learn, Romano-Lax has swerved into the world of suspense fiction, although she continues to write historical and speculative fiction as well.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

On my nightstand are two novels that defy easy genre categorization, as many of my favorites do. New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt is a slow burn alternate history that takes us into a world where no one won World War II and where sickly orphans are being kept in group homes and isolated from the public for reasons we don’t understand at first. I love Chidgey’s ethically nuanced fiction, empathetic characterization, and unique angles on historical events. She pulls me back toward historical fiction, a genre I love most when authors take risks, avoid sentimentality, and play with what we think we know about the world.

Gilly Macmillan’s The Burning Library. Inspired by an ancient manuscript that intrigued the author, this smart new thriller melds cryptography, conspiracies, dark academia, and a race against time in a novel that pits one fictional women’s sect against another. A departure for Macmillan, whose suspense novels usually follow clever but more expected plotlines, this unexpected page-turner somehow manages to be both stark—throats are slit with abandon—and at the same time, oddly cozy. Maybe it’s the UK setting? I’m finding it just escapist enough for light holiday reading.

Visit Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue