Forgive me for plugging a few of my favorite people.

My friend Liesl Schillinger reviews the novel Spooner, by Pete Dexter, who is not a friend of mine but I wish were because I admire him a lot.

And it’s almost as if she read my weeks-ago blog post on Spooner, because her lede is pretty much my post! (Full disclosure: She didn’t. And she does a lot more with it.)

In a note to readers in the advance edition of “Spooner,” Dexter explains that he turned in his novel more than three years late not because he was stymied about what to write but because he was bedeviled by the question of what to leave out. He simply couldn’t stem the flood of story that poured forth as he chronicled the misadventures of Warren Spooner….

Spooner is a really interesting book and a change of pace for Dexter, whose milieu is usually much darker, more violent, less comic. Check it out. (Liesl liked it a lot too.)

And my friend Peter Maass’ book, Crude World, about oil, is reviewed in the NYTBR today.

Maass is less interested in crunching oil-supply numbers….than in exposing the cruelty and soullessness of human kind’s lust for this “violence- inducing intoxicant,” as he calls it. His book teaches us an old lesson anew: that the true wealth of nations is not discovered in the ground, but created by the ingenuity and sweat of citizens. It’s the same lesson the Spanish learned centuries ago when they discovered gold, the oil of their time, in the New World. They piled up bullion but squandered it on imperial fantasies and failed to build enduring prosperity, while destroying the civilizations from which they seized it.

Peter is not only a lovely guy, he’s one of our finest journalists, and he is an amazing reporter—he goes to places and exposes himself to dangers I wouldn’t dream of, and as a result, he fills topics that might otherwise seem not your cup of tea with vivid life. His first book, Love Thy Neighbor, about the war in Bosnia, broke my heart.

Crude World sounds terrific.