Since I wrote the book, I'm not gonna rate it. That I'll leave to someone else. But here is the back jacket copy, along with a few early blurbs the book has garnered. I hope other LT'ers will check it out soon. Thanks. - Tim Bazzett

As a member of perhaps the last generation of truly devoted readers, Tim Bazzett uses a lifelong love affair with books as a springboard to recalling an eventful life marked by unexpected twists and turns that took him and his family from Michigan to California to Europe and back, during his various stints as student, teacher, and recycled soldier. He refl ects thoughtfully too on his 21 years as a Russian linguist with the National Security Agency, noting the sacrifi ces required by a career cloaked in secrecy and the toll it can take on a marriage. In the end, however, Booklover is most of all a love story, a nakedly candid and affectionate look back by Bazzett at more than forty years of living and raising a family, all with the same brown-eyed girl he met on a Michigan college campus in 1967. If you are a booklover, you will love this book.

Reviews -

"An absolutely authentic and frank account of what it was like to have lived as an adult during the decades that followed the upheavals of the 60s ... Booklover captures the sense of that time when everything was changing and family life was, in a sense, being reinvented; the feeling of restlessness, of trying to get more out of life, of seeking adventure, of being willing to take chances. What's especially good about it, I think, is that it speaks of these things in the context of a marriage and a family, and more or less mainstream values, not in terms of some fringe situation. People in their 50s and 60s will identify with the book, even though the particulars of their lives will have been different; and younger people will find it interesting for the insights it provides about their parents ... A fine and honest book by turns hilarious, poignant, and moving ..."

Donald Lystra
author of the award-winning novel, Season of Water and Ice

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"Lots of people say that they are going to write a book when they retire. Tim Bazzett has done that in spades, five books in six years. Across these titles he has told the important stories of his time, and place, and community with skill, insight, compassion, and humor. In his newest, Booklover, Tim shares his reflections on a year’s worth of reading set against the memories of a lifetime with books. And once again he gives us an entertaining and thoughtful read."

Aaron Stander
author of the Ray Elkins mystery-thrillers, and host/producer of "Michigan Writers on the Air" at Interlochen Public Radio

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"Many writers present the reader with a particular 'voice.' Tim Bazzett takes it farther, putting his whole irrepressible self on every page, attending to what interests him and making it interest you. It's all here - confidence, humor and good will."

Curtis Harnack
former president of Yaddo Arts Colony, and author of the classic memoirs, We Have All Gone Away and The Attic