What's on your nightstand

  What’s on My Nightstand August 2025

Which book has moved or engaged you? Please share it with other CCW members. We accept all genres. Tell us what the book is about (without giving away any spoilers), your reaction to it and why. Please send book reviews to Barbara.siebeneick@gmail.com. (Please note that all book reviews are the opinion of the writer and not the Central Coast Writers.) This month’s review is from Matt Tracy.

Three Great Books that Start with This One

Run with The Horsemen by Ferrol Sams, Penguin Books, Inc. 1982

We don’t know that his name is Porter Osborne Junior until about sixty pages in. Until

then, he’s just the boy. That’s on purpose. 

He’s bright and precocious and full of mischief and much too small to measure up to the

greatness that is his father, Porter Osborne, Senior. But he tries.

The first book in the series, Run with the Horsemen, takes us through his school years

with wonderful stories of southern life before the Second World War.

Among his hijinks and his successes and failures we see the growth of this young man

as his eyes open to the beauty and the ugliness of the society he lives in.

His view of his father changes too as his maturity allows him to realize that this man

who he worships is flawed like any man. We see him wrestle with what that means for

his own way of being and come out the other side more sure of himself and more at

peace with his relationship with his father.

All this happens while we’re entertained by the characters that inhabit his world and his

always unexpected interactions with them.

Entertaining and deep at the same time. Such a wonderful combination.