One-time Texan reads a lot so you can read very little

There are some people who love nothing better than to curl up with a good book -- then there are others who'll curl up with dozens of books, regardless of whether or not they're good, and even if there's no love involved, because sometimes you need to have sex with a lot of books. Welcome to the literarily promiscuous world of My Dad Reads Too Many Books.

MDRTMB is a disturbingly prolific blog concisely recapping every single page-turner read by a guy who worked as a stock analyst at Houston investment firm Fayez in the '70s and '80s; now retired, he spends all his time playing golf, recording Barcelona soccer matches, and consuming tomes at a seeming one-per-day pace -- prowess that should motivate you to at least finish reading this story. The three-part blurbs break down like this:

Rating: The driest prong, these can range from the withering "3 mildly inscrutable shrugs" (for Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X) to the effusive "3 1/2 Ambivalent Shrugs with an extra partial shrug for some very witty dialogue" for Bruce DeSilva's apparently ReDeemable Rogue Island.

Synopsis: Generic plots are quickly dispatched with ("A brutal murder forces a Finnish detective to confront his past, deal with the present and plan for the future"), while better reads -- like the Edgar-nominated mystery The Serialist -- might merit as many as...69 words, thereby clearing up any mystery as to whether this sentence will end with a reference to mutual oral satisfaction.

Comment: Again, some can stretch on interminably for, like, three sentences, but the best are lightning-quick, a la the neat summation of T. Jefferson Parker's The Border Lords, "Beware of priests bearing bats!"

Possibly not ironically, MDRTMB's reviewer doesn't actually know how to blog, so he just "sends his son the info hoping he'll post it", which he invariably does despite being preoccupied with e-publishing the hyper-specific college-hoops roundup The Kingsbury Factor -- suggesting that there is love involved, but also that, like his dad with books, he has sex with a lot of blogs.