Year-end Notes on Reading and Blogging

 Who still blogs in the era of Substack? Yeah, that would be me. I started this blog in 2009 (geez!) and have thought about going in a different direction--posting reviews on Goodreads (tried it, didn't like it), Instagram (I do use it as a supplement to the blog), or TikTok (I find the so-called BookTok so shallow, over emotive, and repetitive, I can't bear it). Nowadays, Substack seems to be the thing, but I'm unsure what the advantages would be. So I still end up back here--changing my approach from time to time (from writing about every book in the beginning to writing about my favorites every season) but still persisting. I'm currently thinking about changing my approach again--if you have suggestions, let me know in the Comments. 

Since I changed to posting just my favorites every season and thus only write about the books I really liked, I haven't done a "best of" list. However, I would say that this year, the book I talked about most was Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Along with Elon Musk's savaging of the executive branch despite having no concept of what that branch does (and a few other questionable acts by the ultra-rich), this book made me truly despise the billionaire class, to which I had previously been largely indifferent. 

On a more positive note, in December, I got my TBR into an electronic file--yippee! Previously, it existed in handwritten lists in two different notebooks plus five or six printed out lists of recommendations. I feel organized and virtuous. The downside is that I realize the chances of my reading everything on the 12-page two-column document (which, of course, will be regularly added to) are so small as to be nonexistent (I'm 75!). Ergo, I ought to prioritize, but I'm fairly sure that is not going to happen.

The online book group I belong to asks members if they are setting a goal for how many books they are going to read in the new year. At this point in my life, I don't worry about not reading enough; I'm more worried about reading too many books unthoughtfully. In fact, one of the reasons I keep doing this blog is that I think it forces me to slow down and think about what I'm reading, at least a bit. But every year I resolve to do better--maybe in 2026 I'll even read 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley, which I've started multiple times and never gotten past page 50 or so.  I'm moving it from my "unread and may never be read" bookcase to my nightstand right now. 

BTW: About midway through the year I got on the bandwagon for reading a book set in every state. I managed to complete the challenge, though I did re-read a Louise Erdrich book (The Beet Queen) to get check-off for North Dakota. Not sure what I think about challenges like this--it did lead me to read some things I wouldn't have picked up otherwise, but I'm not convinced I am better for it. If you have thoughts on reading challenges, drop them below. 

Favorite Covers of 2025

Every year I'm awed by some of the beautiful covers created for books. I am not a visually creative person, so seeing the creativity is marvelous. I like to think I don't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes I might! This year there were a lot of covers I really loved among the books that I read (not all published in 2025). Did you have a favorite cover this year? 

To me the best covers are visually arresting while also conveying something about the content of the book--although you may not get the connection right away. These three are, I think, representative of that idea:

Color has a lot to do with why I like particular covers. Sometimes it's bright primary colors, other times it's a more muted palette. Either can be beautiful and inviting. 

Bright examples:

 

Muted examples:

    

Simplicity and/or high contrast can also be really appealing, as evidenced in these covers:

 

 

From all the above  examples, it seems that being blue is also attractive to me!

I've commented before how challenging I think it must be to design covers for a series. This is a Tess Gerritsen series I discovered this year--I like the fact that there's some coherence across the covers with the horizontal lines, while each represents the title's particular setting. 

I have also commented before on the cover photos selected for biographies or memoirs. This year I only saved one such cover, and I think the photo chosen is pretty much perfect. Do you agree?  This is one example where the author's name being larger than the title makes sense--generally, I like the title to be the most prominent text on a cover, but when the author's name sells on its own . . .

Yet a third topic I have commented on before is how interesting it is to compare covers of different editions of the same book. Here are two I noticed this year that are quite different although both are striking (and both include the promo for the Will Trent TV series--not so keen on that). . 

And here's an interesting article about that topic, focusing on YA books, both different contemporaneous editions and re-issues: https://bookriot.com/cover-makeovers-what-ya-book-wore-it-best 

So Much Poetry (and a Few Novels): The Second Half of Fall

 I just recently read Geraldine Brooks's memoir about her husband's death, Memorial Days, and it occurred to me I have read a lot of books about the experience of widowhood, despite the fact that I am long divorced and unlikely to be a widow. So I am contemplating what draws me to these books--perhaps pondering the experience of grief, which I certainly have experienced. I also realized I hadn't read (or at least couldn't remember) any memoirs written by men grieving their wives. When I did some minimal Googling, I found mostly books where men were giving advice to other widowers, rather than deeply exploring the grieving experience (although I haven't read the books so perhaps I am unfairly characterizing them); this doesn't really surprise me given, well, you know. BTW: Brooks does give some tips for other women grieving their husbands at the end of her book, which I thought was a good idea. However, if you're looking for a memoir in this genre, I would recommend Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World. Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup is a somewhat different book, being comprised of essays and vignettes, but is also very good. The Brooks book is okay but not my favorite. Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story and Kay Redfield Jamison's Nothing Was the Same would both have been better as essays/articles (in fact, Oates did write a very good article prior to publishing the book).

On a different note (but also on gender relations), I read a YA book recently that included adults telling a tween girl that if a boy picks on/harasses you, it's because he likes you. I know adults do, unfortunately, say that, but I don't think such statements should stand without pushback in a book published in the 21st century (it was published in 2015). Even if the statement is true, that kind of treatment is not acceptable and should have negative consequences. Come on, people, do better!

On to more pleasant things.

Fiction

I usually add books I like to my draft posts as soon as I finish them, but I finished What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown a week ago and am, for a variety of reasons, just now getting to writing about it. In part the delay is just due to life, but the farther I got from finishing the book, the more unbelievable some of the plot points seemed (example: a home-schooled teenager with no college education gets hired on sight--no resume, no background check--by a high-tech company during the tech boom of the 1990s). However, I had enjoyed the book while reading it and continued to think it would be a great book club selection--lots to discuss. So here's a super-short description: Jane lives with her father in a remote cabin in Montana. She is home schooled and he produces a 'zine for Luddites and hatches plans for escaping when "the feds come for him." Her father often disappears for days at a time, leaving Jane at home. When he announces he will be going to Seattle, she begs to go with him, and he agrees, drawing her into his plans, which involve a deadly crime. From there, things get really complicated, as Jane tries to figure out who she really is, whether her mother is really dead, and what to do about her father's crimes. The story is framed as her remembering the time after a reporter finds her and asks to interview her about her father's fame 20 years later. It's entertaining and thought-provoking if sometimes far-fetched. Or maybe I'm naive. 

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami could be described as a prison novel, except the imprisoned people have not been convicted or even accused of a crime. Rather, they are being held in a retention center because an algorithm using 200 data points--including dreams--determined they are likely to commit a crime. Following a televised mass shooting during the half-time show at the Super Bowl, the United States passed a crime prevention bill allowing "retention" of people deemed to be potential criminals. Sara Hussein, a historian returning to the US from a conference in the UK, is deemed likely to kill her husband and is retained for the standard 21 days. But very few people actually are released after 21 days, instead having their terms extended repeatedly due to minor infractions. Of course, the retention centers, the algorithm, and the technology that allows dreams to be read are all run by private companies who operate on a profit motive. The narrative describing Sara's experience is interspersed with emails and documents related to these companies, which provide additional context. The Dream Hotel feels all-too-possible; indeed, one can find similarities to actual events in 2025. Worth a read. 

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, is sometimes classified as a thriller, but I think it's much more than that. The story is told from multiple perspectives, with the three primary voices being those of a Maine ranger, a lost hiker, and an elderly woman who has been living her life primarily online. The book is thrilling in its depiction of the search for the lost hiker. But it's also deeply reflective. The ranger, Bev, is single, aging, and has immersed herself in her work at the cost of her family relationships. The hiker, Valerie, is a nurse trying to find "the missing pieces of her heart" after the trauma of the COVID pandemic. And Lena, the elderly woman, is gradually being drawn back into the world by a man at her assisted living and by the search for Valerie. A tense but ultimately life-affirming read for the end of a tough year. 

Mysteries

No mysteries that really grabbed me in the second part of fall--that makes me sad. 😞

Nonfiction

Although I am not myself fashionable, I am interested in fashion--I subscribed to In Style for years and have seen every season (even the terrible most recent one) of Project Runway. Also, I'm a Democrat. So it's probably no surprise that I enjoyed The Look, by Michelle Obama with her stylist Meredith Koop. This does not mean I have loved all of her looks, past or present--I haven't (in particular, I never cared for the wide belts over cardigans). However, I appreciated learning about how she and her team thought about fashion as one vehicle for conveying a message of inclusion, opportunity, and feminine power, as well as for normalizing a Black First Family. She has taken some criticism for her discussion of feeling the need to wear her hair straight while in the White House, but IMO those critiques are based on ignorance if not outright racism--a certain former Fox host's unhinged rant makes that clear. The book is expensive (it's essentially a coffee table book with a lot of text), so most people will want to get it from the library. BTW: Both Jill Biden and Melania Trump have had stylists as well, and it's interesting to think what factors in addition to personal taste might have influenced their choices. 

Poetry

I just finished two poetry collections, both focusing on how life changes over time, but one from the perspective of a woman in her 40s, the other from a woman nearing 90 when the book was published. How About Now is Kate Baer's fourth collection; she continues to write about the joys and challenges of being a mother and being married, but also looks at how getting older and potentially less healthy affects her and makes friends ever more important. Several poems also address technology's impact on modern life. Her work often has an edge--I love that the poem "Interview with a Male Moderator at a Decorated Literary Event" was written in response to the moderator asking "Do you ever feel that men might feel alienated from your work?" While this is not my favorite among her books, I enjoyed many of the poems. Here are a couple of examples--one about kids growing up and the other about technology.

One Day

One day your baby sits
in a bright red stroller
making wild mammalian sounds,
and the next they're saying
they never liked Dog Man and
no one their age takes bubble baths.
Christmas without a Santa.
Tooth Fairies without a tiny baby tooth.
Now they want this sort of haircut,
to take them to the mall
with other post-pubescent children.
It's not so bad--
but if you're waiting for a hug
or gentle conversation,
I suggest not looking very desperate.
Lie on the floor, get out your book.
Eventually they come. 

Meanwhile

At the concert we show our phones our favorite musician.
On vacation we show them the waves, the children playing
in the sand. We say, look phone! And turn it on ourselves.
Look at my face! I'm so old and ratty, we say to our phones.
Now look at the sunset. A four-car pileup. A dog in khaki
pants. You must remember this, we say to our phones.
Have it when we want it. (We will never want it) A gray
heron sails across the sky. Look! we say, pulling our phones
from our back pockets. You don't want to miss this, phone!
It would be a shame if you missed all this.

The second book was Nearing 90 [And other Comedies of Late Life] by Judith Viorst. I've been enjoying Viorst's "decade" books since she started writing them in her 30s (in 1968, I gave her Love Poems for the Very Married as a wedding shower gift for a college friend who got married shockingly young). Viorst's best poems find the humor in life but she can also be sentimental about the very same topics, like her husband Milton (I am sad that she is experiencing much of her 90s without him, as he died in 2022). She's technically not the greatest poet, but she's such an astute observer of life at any age that her poems still touch me. As someone who has spent some time saying which of my mother's behaviors I will never do, I particularly enjoyed this one. 

Trading Places

You can't read the menu if you don't bring your glasses.
Nor will your hearing aid work with a dead battery.
I once had these conversations with my mother.
Now my kids are having them with me.

You only should come if you want to come--no pressure.
You've got your own life to live. Go live it! Have fun!
That's how my mother used to get me to visit.
I can't believe that's what I just said to my son.

And then there's the lovely little book Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief, which features a single poem by Joy Harjo and is beautifully illustrated by Dana Tiger. The poem begins "I never got to wash my mother's body when she died./I  return to take care of her in memory." Harjo goes on to describe the ritual of washing her mother's body while remembering their lives together and reflecting on her mother's beauty and strength. It sounds somewhat macabre, but it definitely is not. And the illustrations are exquisite. 

Finally, I completed (a few days early) two poem-a-day collections, one generally serious, one generally humorous: 365 Poems for Life, compiled by Allie Esiri, and Days Like These, by Brian Bilston. Most readers, like me, will find many poems that move or amuse and others that miss the mark. I'll include one that appears in both books:

Serenity Prayer

by Brian Bilston

Send me a slow news day,
a quiet, subdued day,
in which nothing much happens of note,
just the passing of time,
the consumption of wine,
and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote.

Grant me a no news day,
a spare-my-your-views day,
in which nothing much happens at all--
a few hours together,
some regional weather,
a day we can barely recall.

The Correspondent Tops Early Fall Reading

Well, I finally read The Women, by Kristen Hannah. Sorry, but it's a freaking soap opera--everything that could happen to someone who served in Viet Nam does happen to the protagonist, plus two of her wartime lovers return from the dead. It's ludicrous. I really don't understand why people love it so much. 

Even though I had mixed feelings about Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I wish the readers who adore The Women would read it to see what good writing actually is. Adichie is an immensely talented writer (see Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah) and many of the topics she explores in the book (mother-daughter relationships, the diverse experiences of African immigrants in the United States, sexual violence and pornography, female circumcision) are interesting, but there's just too much worrying about finding a man and/or having children for this old lady! 

I just finished the latest collab by James Patterson and Bill Clinton, The First Gentleman. From Bill's point of view, I suspect the mystery (which is okay) is just an excuse for the speech given by the fictional president, Madeline Wright, in which he presents his ideas for solving the U.S.'s long-term economic problems. Somehow I doubt that mystery readers are suddenly going to start lobbying for his proposals!

I know I have cited an article about endings not being that important before, but I recently read a book that the ending entirely ruined for me. In Honor, Thrity Umrigar makes us feel the horror of honor killings in India and then tacks on a romance novel ending. Did she think that readers just couldn't handle the sadness? Did not work for me--but maybe others liked it. 

Seems like I've had quite a few DNFs recently but I don't write them down so not sure if it was really more than usual. Two of note: my online Univ. of Illinois alumni book group's most recent choice, White Mulberry, by Rosa Kwon Easton (writing style was so turgid I couldn't hack it) and the much vaunted All Fours, by Miranda July (it wasn't the graphic sex--I just found the protagonist's midlife crisis boring). As a friend recently said, I've got less time left in my life to read, don't want to waste it on stuff I don't enjoy. And, side note, if you want to read about people who endured Korean/Japanese conflict, stay away from White Mulberry and try Pachinko by Min Jin Lee or Flashlight by Susan Choi, which I just finished and thought about including in the below list of favorites. 

Fiction

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid had been on my TBR for years but I finally picked it up and found it thought-provoking. The narrator is Changez, a Pakistani man who happens upon an American in Lahore and invites him to dine while Changez tells his story of living in the United States but returning to Pakistan after becoming disillusioned with aspects of American life and business. Why he chooses to tell his story to a stranger is not clear (at least to me), and the book's ominous ending makes that question even more puzzling. Changez came to the U.S. to attend Princeton and stayed on to work as a financial analyst and pursue a young woman named Erica. But then 9/11 happened and his perspective on  the United States began to change. After he was fired from his job (he brings this on himself ) and Erica disappeared, he returned to Lahore, where he became a teacher and protest leader. But is he a fundamentalist (religion is not part of his story) or simply someone with concerns about the United States? That is the question! 

I was surprised to enjoy Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, as I had actively hated his earlier book Cleanness. His favorite unnamed poet-protagonist now lives in Iowa City with his poet partner L. The pandemic is raging. One day he suddenly has an intense, crippling pain in his abdomen; he resists going to the ER, but after several days, L convinces him he must seek help. Soon he's in the ICU with hospital staff flocking to his room because of his unusual condition--a tear in the internal wall of his aorta. The book takes place in the protagonist's head--his worries, his experiences of illness, memories of his family and romantic life, and even thoughts on poems he has taught high school students. Although it has little of what you'd consider a plot, it's a fascinating look into the experience of illness. Also, as a result of reading the book, I've developed a corollary to my hypothesis that one cannot attend the Iowa Writers Workshop without writing a book about the horror; the corollary--no small American town serves as the setting for recent novels than Iowa City. Am I right?

I absolutely loved The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Perhaps it was inevitable--it's an epistolary novel, a form I enjoy when done well, and the protagonist was a woman in her 70s, Sybil Van Antwerp. Since her retirement as the chief clerk in her long-time colleague's court, Sybil's main method of interacting with the world has been through letters (she emails too)--letters to her best friend (and former sister-in-law); her two surviving children; her brother, who lives in Paris with his partner; authors; the chair of the English department at University of Maryland College Park, who won't let Sybil audit courses; to the son of someone she and the judge sent to prison unjustly; to a young boy who is bullied at school but finds some solace in writing to Sybil. Though she thinks she is settled into her quiet life, in fact she is about to go a rethinking of her past and present. It sounds intense but it's also highly entertaining. Might be my favorite book of the year so far.

Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart is told from the perspective of ten-year-old Vera, an extremely bright (she keeps a list of Things I Still Need to Know in her diary), neurodivergent (she cannot stop herself from spewing facts to her classmates) Russian-Korean-American girl. Her Russian emigre dad regards himself as a literary pundit but is anxious to sell his struggling magazine to an African billionaire. A great dad he is not. Her stepmother, "Anne Mom," is a WASP-y sort at least trying to be a good mother to Vera and her son Dylan while advocating for liberal causes. Her biological Korean American mom allegedly left the family because Vera was a "difficult child."  There's family drama, dystopic political issues (in a classroom assignment Vera is tasked with defending a constitutional amendment to give the votes of the Christian right more weight, cars with women are stopped at state lines to check on their menses, etc.), AI devices (a thinking chessboard and a self-driving and conversational car), and middle school friend drama. Although the book generally received lukewarm reviews, I enjoyed Vera's combination of knowingness and naivete. 

Mystery

I recently discovered and enjoyed an older Tess Monaghan mystery I had missed--Butchers Hill, by Laura Lippman. Tess has just gone out on her own as a PI. It's early days and her finances are problematic, but she quickly gains two clients, both seeking to find young people who were adopted or in the foster care system. Of course, both cases have unexpected layers that uncover facts about a notorious neighborhood crime and about Tess's own family. It reminded me why Lippman was one of my favorites (before her last couple books!). 

I did follow-up and read the second book in Tess Gerritsen's Martini Club series, The Summer Guests, and I enjoyed it although, as with its predecessor, I found the CIA-related parts of it somewhat far fetched. Once again, retired CIA agent Maggie Bird and her cohort of four other ex-CIA folks take on the job of helping Acting Police Chief of Purity, Maine, Jo Thibodeau, this time to find the missing teenage daughter of a wealthy summer family and figure out who the dead body in the pond is (it's not the teenager). Of course, they also get on her nerves when they pay no attention to what she forbids them to do. There's spy stuff, family stuff, annoying state cop stuff, summer people vs. locals stuff--and it's entertaining. 

In my opinion, Anne Hillerman isn't the writer her dad was, but I still have enjoyed her books continuing the careers of Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito and the retirement of the venerable Joe Leaphorn, although he barely makes an appearance in Shadow of the Solstice. Chee and Manuelito are dealing with several situations here--a dead man discovered by a teenager, an addiction treatment scam targeting indigenous people, and the impending visit to the region by the Secretary of the Interior, which has brought a fringe environmental group to Shiprock. What I particularly appreciated was the focus on a real Medicaid scam, which was uncovered in 2023. As is the case generally with Medicaid scams, it is providers, not beneficiaries, who are committing fraud. They, not recipients, are the folks who should be punished (okay, hard not to get political these days). 

Is there a better villain than a serial killer? In The Girl from Devil's Lake, the latest entry in J.A. Jance's Joanna Brady series, we get the story of a serial killer from his earliest murder to the present, interspersed with the Cochise County sheriff's efforts to solve that present murder, the death of a young Mexican boy found across the border in Arizona. SPOILER ALERT: One of the most interesting things about the book is that a long-term antagonist of Joanna's ends up dead, making me wonder how Jance might replace that irritant/tension in future Brady books. 

Short Stories

Many reviewers seem to have disagreed with me, but I really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld's second collection of short stories, Show Don't Tell (I enjoyed her first collection as well). The stories feature women, many in mid-life, others younger, dealing with events or issues that somehow bring up moments from the past. In "Lost But Not Forgotten," for example, Lee (the protagonist of Sittenfeld's novel Prep) is attending her 30th class reunion, unsure why she keeps subjecting herself to a group of people among whom she always felt somewhat uncomfortable--and her life as the founder and executive director of a nonprofit that serves incarcerated people is far from her classmates' careers in finance, banking, or "managing their family's wealth." In "White Women LOL," Jill is shunned by the other elementary school moms because she "Karen'ed" a table of African Americans in a restaurant and video of the incident went viral; she tries to redeem herself by finding the lost dog of the most prominent black mom in the neighborhood. "Creative Differences" is the story of a young artist (and preschool teacher) in Kansas who realizes that the famous director who wants her to appear in his "documentary" is really using her as part of a commercial and refuses to participate. And, by the way, there is a story clearly set in Iowa City (although it's not directly identified), adding to my hypothesis about the Iowa Writers Workshop. 

Non-Fiction

Abigail Leonard followed Four Mothers as they approached motherhood and made their way through the first year of their children's lives. Because the four mothers were from four different countries--Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the U.S.--she was able to explore not only different cultural views on motherhood but also public policies toward motherhood, child care, and health care and how those policies evolved over time. Despite bringing unique backgrounds, professions, and relationships with their children's fathers to the story, many of the challenges the women face were similar in type but different in scope. One was external support available. Another was the fathers' inability or choice not to share equally in child care. The father of Chelsea's child was married and, although he at first wanted to be involved, gradually disappeared completely, leaving her without support. Anna and her partner were from different cultures and disagreed on child-raising, ending up separating rather acrimoniously when their child was an infant. Tsukasa's husband wanted to be involved, but his career and the attitudes toward work in Japan often made him unavailable. Sarah seemed to have the situation most likely to result in help from her husband--she was married and had the more lucrative job--but her husband was polyamorous and had other relationships outside the marriage, which took up time. It's all interesting and kind of sad, in that, despite a lot of rhetoric about how great parents are, we aren't doing much to help them. 

Favorite Passages

Her grandmother's euphemisms had a way of cutting deeper than anyone else's insults. Needle, needle, needle. It was like going to a bad acupuncturist.

    --Laura Lippman, Butchers Hill  (to clarify--my grandma didn't needle, but the description fits others I have known)

Authors and Issues: Kindred, Dream State, Terrace Story, and More

I already did a whole post of random notes, but here's one more--I just finished The Spy Coast, by Tess Gerritsen, which features a cluster of retired CIA agents. This leads me to ask: What started the current spate of books about older crime solvers (or perpetrators)? I suspect it was Richard Osman--there were older heroes before, but the popularity of his series seems likely to be the impetus. Although The Spy Coast seemed far-fetched to  me (of course, I know nothing about international intrigue/spycraft), I did appreciate that Gerritsen did not in any way make the retirees seem laughable as some of the other books in this vein do. I will give the second book in The Martini Club series a try. (And of course I'll be watching The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix when I have the chance.) 

This post is feeling very long, making me think maybe I should go back to monthly posts. Don't know if I'll actually do that, but I am posting this before summer is officially over (Labor Day always seems like the end, right?). 

Fiction

I debated whether to include Liars by Sarah Manguso on my "favorites." I didn't exactly enjoy it but that was because Manguso did such a masterful job of conveying what it is like for a woman (Jane)  married to an irresponsible, gaslighting, emotionally abusive, cheating man (John). She is a writer, with several books published; she is also in demand as a writing teacher. He is an artist and serially unsuccessful entrepreneur who constantly belittles her career, asking her to make more money while doing nothing to help at home (they have a son) and demanding they move pretty much annually for his work. The book is written in the first person, in short accounts of daily activities in their family; the fact that she refers to their son as "the child," never naming him, somehow adds to the claustrophobic feeling of reading this book. One of the blurbs on the cover described Liars as a "crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage." So, not upbeat--but really well done. 

Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh, opens with a young American woman being the victim of a hit-and-run in Shanghai. When her divorced parents, Claire and Aaron Litvak, are notified, they are shocked to learn that rather teaching in Beijing, as they thought she was doing, Lindsey is actually living in Shanghai. Her apartment looks like it belongs to another woman--they have no idea why she is in Shanghai, why her closet is filled with clothes she would never wear, how she is paying her bills. They rush to Shanghai where there is little they can do. As Lindsey languishes in a coma, they reflect on their failed relationship and their daughters (their younger daughter Grace, who was adopted from China, is miserable at camp). We learn why Lindsey was in Shanghai and what she was doing there, as well as why she didn't tell her parents. There's a lot to reflect on about how our experience of love as a young person shapes us and future relationships, good and bad. My only quibble with the book is that, after we come to what feels like the climax of Lindsey, Claire, and Aaron's stories, there's a whole additional section about Grace, which feels like it was meant to be revelatory and uplifting but somehow just feels unnecessary. Despite that, I enjoyed the book. 

I don't really think Octavia Butler's Kindred is science fiction (the genre she is known for), but it does have a time travel element, so maybe. Dana, an African American woman living in 1976, time travels to a plantation in 1815. She fairly quickly figures out that the people of the plantation--white and black--are her ancestors and she must save Rufus, who is a young (white) boy in 1815 in order to ensure her own birth. When she returns to her own time, only a short period of time has past, even though her subsequent trips (each involving saving Rufus from something and each involving her more deeply in the life of the plantation) keep her longer in the past. Her white husband accompanies her on one trip and ends up trapped in the past for months when she returns. The novel explores interracial relationships in the 1970s as well as the brutality of slavery and its hideous effects on all involved. It's a complex and sometimes difficult read but thought-provoking in a variety of ways.

There's a lot going on in Dream State by Eric Puchner. Some of it didn't really work for me--namely, the author's attempt to weave climate change into the story, ending with Montana in a near-post-apocalyptic state. However, the main narrative of the book, which a NYT reviewer called a "coming-of-old-age" story, is engaging. Charlie and Garrett are best friends from college; while Charlie has become a successful anesthesiologist in California, Garrett has struggled since the death of another friend in a skiing accident for which he feels responsible. Then CeCe, Charlie's fiancee, comes to Montana to get ready for their wedding, and Charlie asks Garrett to befriend her. What happens next causes a rift that lasts for years while children are born and marriages go through the ups and downs of long relationships. Eventually, the friendship is mended, and the friends help each other through a child's addiction and CeCe's Alzheimer's. Perhaps because I'm old and have been through some "stuff," this all resonated with me. BTW: Dream State is a good multi-meaning title!

Weirdly, Culpability by Bruce Holsinger has some similarities to Dream State. It's a book about relationships, particularly family relationships, that also carries a current events theme, in this case AI and its effects. The book opens with a terrible car accident, in which two elderly people are killed while the Cassidy-Shaws all survive though it seems likely they (or their self-driving car) caused the accident. Each family member has some responsibility--17-year-old Charlie was driving, dad Noah was supposed to be the responsible adult but was on his laptop, mom Lorelei (an expert in AI) was similarly absorbed in work, and the sisters Izzy and Alice--well, I'll leave you to discover their involvement. The family gets away to the shore to heal, but the trip reveals further rifts. To be honest, I didn't love this book--near the end of the book Holsinger goes on way too much (in my opinion) about AI and I found Noah and Lorelei deeply annoying--but people with an interest in AI might enjoy it--and read back to back with Dream State, the "serious theme" similarity was so odd, I wanted to comment on it. It is probably not coincidental that both books were recent Oprah Book Club picks--Oprah does love an issue! BTW: Culpability is way too obvious a title.

And then came the third book in a row with an issue-based theme (again, climate change/planet destruction) behind the human story of friendship, loneliness, alienation, etc. Plus, Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter, has a metaverse aspect to it. To me, the book read like interlinked short stories, although it clearly says "A Novel" on the cover, so guess I'm wrong. Anyway, the book opens with young couple Annie, Edward, and their infant daughter Rose living in a tiny apartment, until Annie's coworker Stephanie comes over and their closet mysteriously turns into a lovely terrace. They soon discover it only appears when Stephanie is visiting, so they invite her over more and more often, entertaining her with "terrace stories," untrue accounts of their lives that Edward somehow sees as appropriate to the magical setting of the terrace. Annie begins to wonder if Stephanie and Edward are getting too close and then . . . don't want to spoil it. The next section is a slice of Annie's childhood; this is followed by a section on Stephanie from childhood up to and after her friendship with Edward and Annie (it's also the section when the metaverse element appears). The final section follows the climate apocalypse when Rose is interviewing people to become residents of "Suburbs," idealized space communities. As with Dream State and Culpability, the planetary destruction theme seems tacked on to the exploration of human relationships. I'm not sure what it all means, but it's weird and entertaining. 

Author Kate Fagan (Colorado alum and former Buff basketball player) uses an interesting structure for her first novel, The Three Lives of Cate Kay--a memoir of the author Cate Kay, presented as something of an oral history with other people who are part of her story providing their perspectives. Cate began life as Annie, a girl growing up in upstate New York with her best friend Amanda. The two are "drama kids," who dream of going to LA and becoming stars. On the eve of their departure, Amanda is hurt in an accident and Annie runs away, changing her name to Cass. Through deception by a lover, Cass believes Amanda is dead and she pours her grief into a post-apocalypse novel that becomes a sensation. Cass writes under the name Cate Kay and safely guards her identity, only revealing her identity to the actress Ryan who is going to star in the movie version of the novel . . . and they fall in love. Lots happens and there's a happy ending that felt a bit contrived. Still, the story and the exploration of friendship, grief, fame, and coming out kept me interested.  

Short Stories

I have seen Highway Thirteen, by Fiona McFarlane, classified as a mystery or thriller, but I don't see it that way, despite the fact that it's about a serial killer. It's not directly about the murders or about the hunt to find the killer. Rather it's a series of short stories about people whose lives were touched in some way by the killer and his crimes, from the podcasters who crow about new evidence to the couple who helped a young traveler later murdered by the killer, the actor who portrayed him in a film, one of the police officers who tracked him down, a politician with the same last name as the killer, a man whose feelings about his murdered sister are triggered by a young girl trick-or-treating alone. Of course, some stories resonate more than others, but taken together they paint a sad picture of how a horrendous crime can echo across time and space.

Mystery/Thriller

Summer was two-thirds over before I encountered a mystery I really liked--cause for consternation! Anyway, that mystery was the latest book from Karin Slaughter, We Are All Guilty Here, which is the first in the new North Falls series. Set in a small town in Georgia, the book introduces Emmy Clinton, a deputy in Clinton County, where her father is the sheriff--yeah, the Clintons are an influential and complicated family, a fact that provides a lot of backstory. Two teenage girls disappear during the town's Fourth of July celebration; eventually, a local man is convicted of kidnapping them. But 12 years later, he is released due to new evidence uncovered by a podcaster, and Emmy, her dad, and her son--who is now also a deputy--must decide what to do about that case, while looking for another young girl who has disappeared. In many ways, We Are All Guilty Here is a fairly typical mystery with some interesting twists, but the fact that Slaughter is a better writer than many who write in the genre sets it above everything else I've read so far this summer!

And then along came The Author's Guide to Murder, by Beatriz Williams, Laura Willig, and Karen White. It's a satire about three authors writing a book together, written by three authors. The three authors in the book write in different genres--fantasy romance, historical biography, and cozy mystery--and have distinctly different quirks (which many reviewers on Goodreads found very annoying). They travel to a writer's retreat at a castle in Scotland, all harboring justified rage toward the "host" of the retreat, who--surprise, surprise--ends up dead. Romance and mystery tropes all come in for satirical treatment, and it's quite silly . . . but fun. 

I  haven't loved every title in Cara Hunter's DI Adam Frawley series (I haven't read all of them yet), but I did like Hope to Die. The case at hand involves a young unidentified man killed in the home of an elderly couple who thought the dead fellow was an intruder. But was he? And did they know why he was really there? Things get more complicated when Frawley and company uncover the fact that the couple are the parents of a woman who was convicted in a notorious baby-killing case--and that's just the first of many twists. As she often does, Hunter includes manufactured "documents" that provide back story and insight into how the public sees the case. A fun read. 

Nonfiction

I am not a big nature person--I enjoy being outdoors but I don't approach it as a naturalist would. Thus, I am not the obvious audience for The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl--but I loved it. I listened to the audio book, read by the author in a gentle Southern accent that sometimes was a little too calming (i.e., I dozed off, not because the book was boring but because it created a sense of peace). However, I missed the illustrations by the author's brother so have ordered a print copy. The book is a series of short essays, each introduced by an evocative quote, that trace the changing seasons of the natural world and, through the author's memories, of human life. Many of the essays are titled "Praise Song for (the Coming Bud Burst, Mole Hands in the Coyote Scat, a Spring I Was Not Alive to See, etc.)," which is an indicator of Renkl's love of the natural world. Renkl doesn't shy away from the ways humans are affecting nature's cycles in deleterious ways, through climate change and habitat destruction. Despite this--and the inevitable "red in tooth and claw" moments--the book is somehow joyful. Fun fact: Margaret Renkl was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams is not joyful. In fact, it's right up there with Empire of Pain in the not joyful category. The author worked at Facebook for seven years in the mid-2010s, working directly with top management, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams had believed so strongly that Facebook could have a positive impact globally that she had spent more than a year trying to get a job at FB working on policy and relations with other countries. However, when she actually got hired, it did not take long for her to recognize that the concern at the company, specifically of Mark Zuckerberg, was not its stated mission of connecting people but growth of the business. She recounts numerous stories of utter lack of concern for the common good, whether that might involve the mental health of teenage girls targeted by advertisers for beauty products when their posts indicated they were feeling sad or depressed or the literal safety of tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar who were targeted by hate speech that Facebook content monitors were leaving up even when confronted about their clear violation of Facebook policies or the integrity of U.S. elections (FB embedded staff in the Trump 2016 campaign to teach them how to use disinformation and incendiary posts to increase engagement; they offered the same service to the Clinton campaign, which turned them down). Executives lie repeatedly to the public, to policymakers, to everyone. The entire effort to get Facebook into China is a mass of deception, illegal activity, and disregard for the wellbeing of Chinese people, the security of all Facebook users' personal data, and democratic principles. Zuckerberg comes across as an immature narcissist who is so upset over President Obama confronted him about Facebook's role in the election that he plans visits to all of the early presidential primary states in what certainly appears to reflect some interest in running for president (thankfully that run hasn't happened . . . yet). There is also a strong thread of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the company. Some critics have charged that Wynn-Williams is just a disgruntled fired employee. Fine, but colleagues have spoken up to support her claims, and I suspect that her picture of the company is accurate. Definitely worth reading.

In 2019, on a trip to Sierra Leone, John Green met Henry, a teenaged tuberculosis patient. Already somewhat obsessed with microbes as a symptom of his OCD, Green began a deep dive into the history, treatment, and current status of tuberculosis. The result is the informative Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. If you don't know much about TB--those of us in wealthy countries generally have the privilege of ignorance--you are likely to find much in the book, particularly the number of annual TB deaths worldwide, shocking (note: TB is readily curable).  A theme of the book is "The disease is where the cure is not. The cure is where the disease is not." Why? Because the system (i.e., us) does not care sufficiently to stop stigmatizing TB patients in poor and marginalized communities/countries and provide them with respectful, effective treatment, a lack of care that is exacerbated by concern for profit/cost-effectiveness. It is, as Green says, a "disease of injustice." I highly recommend this book--you will learn a lot about TB and some about John Green, which, if you are already a fan of his work, will only make you like him better. 

Favorite Passages

I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.

    --Sarah Manguso, Liars (I could pull out a lot of other quotes but it would be really depressing)

We live at the intersection of causality and chance.

     --Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon

Absorbed by the grace of his undulating flight, I never thought to reach for my camera. This will make me sound like the worst sort of crank, but here is the truth: the only reason I carry a cell phone is to have a camera in my pocket, ready to record something extraordinary. I can't see the point of taking selfies. This pronouncement is surely an irony coming from an essayist, someone who keeps her finger on her own pulse for a living. As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I'm at ease with this particular irony. The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself? On the other hand, what good is having a camera in your pocket if you don't take it out in the presence of something wild and beautiful and rare. I stood that morning motionless while the most primeval of all the woodland birds disappeared into the forest. I walked out of the woods with not  a single image to commemorate the encounter. I was angry with myself trudging back toward the cabin, but it wasn't long before I began to reconsider. Even when it is pointed in the right direction, a camera has a way of stunting sight. How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether? 

     --Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows

Now I'm consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it's an astonishngly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It's an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes . . . 

    --Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People

We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. 

We must also be the cure. 

     --John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

I didn't like coffee. I liked cream and I liked sugar. Coffee was the vessel.

I'm always noticing the little ways society protects us from the menace of silence, like with Muzak in elevators. Humans; we built the Pyramids and made all the world's information instantly accessible, but apparently if we stand together quietly, we'll short-circuit and melt.

    --Kate Fagan, The Three Lives of Cate Kay

     --

Midsummer Thoughts

It's not actually quite the midpoint of summer yet (Google Gemini says that's August 7), but I found the random notes for my summer summary getting kind of long, so I decided to devote a post to thoughts/rants/whatever. So here they are:

• Apropos my yearly comments on trends in cover design, the NY Times Book Review recently had a good article about one particular trend that I had not noticed.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/books/review/book-cover-trends.html. I think you have to be fairly familiar with art to recognize this trend, but it makes me want to look more closely at books to see if I can find any notes on the cover designs/art. 
• Early summer saw new books by authors whose work I have loved in the past, but some were disappointing--not bad, just not as good as I hoped. These included The King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, Twist by Colum McCann, and Murder Takes a Vacation, by Laura Lippman. Actually, I'm actively annoyed with Lippman, who is in her 60s and has written a book about an overweight 60-something character who is so stereotyped she belongs in a book set in the 1950s.  
• In my last post, I talked about the spring selection of my online book group (University of Illinois alumni), Look Closer by David Ellis. As the online discussion progressed, I was astonished and somewhat terrified at the number of people who supported the revenge killings at the heart of the book. I never suspected so many people found murder a fit response to a wrong. Yikes!
• I've always been a memoir skeptic. While some are entertaining and/or insightful, many just seem unnecessary and self-promoting. In defiance of that general skepticism, I have had a fondness for culinary memoirs because I like reading about (and making and eating) food. Recently, however, I am wearying of the number of culinary memoirs that are really addiction memoirs. This ennui was furthered by reading Laurie Woolever's Care and Feeding. Although some of the stories from her time as an assistant to Mario Batali and then to Anthony Bourdain are interesting, there's more writing about drinking/getting high than about food. It's not until page 265 of a 331-page book that she stops drinking and not until page 317 that she quits weed. It's just not that interesting reading about drinking and being drunk/high. (Of course, I'm happy for her that she has now been sober for six years.)
• Finally, in mid-July I was noticing people posting on social media about "50 States" reading challenges, so I decided to go back and see how I was doing without trying. Turns out, I had read books set in more than half of the states so far this year. The thing that I found weirdest was that I had read a lot of books set in Maine! I've never actually been to Maine and it's not all that populous, but I've heard it's beautiful so that may explain why it's chosen as a setting. Worth noting that several of the Maine books were murder mysteries, which leads me to ask if Maine is also unusually creepy/crime-infested?  (Just FYI: None of the Maine books were by Stephen King.)

Comments are open for any rants/thoughts/comments your summer reading has prompted!

A Good Season for Mysteries: Blue Heaven, Famous Last Words, and More

Titles. First of all, I'm bad at titles. In picking titles for workshops, I was never the one who came up with a catchy, clever, or evocative title. So if I wrote a book that needed a title more exciting than, say, Teaching the Social Sciences and History in Secondary Schools, I would need a lot of help. But I do sometimes wonder if marketing departments are providing a little too much help. This suspicion was strengthened at an event a few years ago at the Broomfield Library. Author Cynthia Swanson was asked why she had titled her book The Bookseller when that didn't really describe the book in any meaningful way. She replied that she had titled the book something else (I don't remember what her proposed title was, but it was much more evocative of the story), but the publisher suggested the alternative title because books with bookseller, bookshop, bookstore, or library in the title were very popular. Now, I suspect the new word that is sneaking into lots of titles is river. Just Google "Titles including river" and you'll see what I mean.

This story came to mind this spring when I read The Night We Lost Him, by Laura Dave. I immediately thought that title had been chosen to remind people of her previous book, The Last Thing He Told Me, which was very successful, made into an Apple TV series, etc. But the second book was not in any way a follow-up to the previous one, the title didn't fit the book all that well, and it certainly didn't add anything to the experience of reading the book (perhaps that's asking a lot of a title but at least try!). A couple of the books I liked this spring had titles that lived up to this expectation, so I think it's possible!

Okay, on to spring's favorite reads. 

Fiction

Fully two months into spring, I was afraid the Fiction section of this post might be empty, but luckily I came upon two good novels in a row in May! First was My Friends by Fredrik Backman, an author whose work I don't always love. But I loved My Friends, which, as you might expect, is an exploration of friendship--and art and surviving one's family. Louisa is an almost-18-year-old who has recently lost her best and only friend. She has found her way to an auction house where a painting she has loved since she stole a postcard depicting it from a foster home frig; she just wants to see the painting before it is sold but ends up causing a bit of a stir at the event. She escapes to an alley where she stumbles across a man who seems to be homeless but is actually the artist who created the painting. He recognizes her as a kindred spirit, buys the painting himself, and (when he dies the next day) arranges with his friend Ted to give her the painting. She freaks out and begs Ted to take her with him in his and the artist's home town to dispose of the artist's ashes. On the very lengthy train trip, amidst a number of adventures, Ted tells her the story of their group of four childhood friends. Ted and Louisa are both quirky characters but their stories and their evolving relationship are engaging and touching.

The relationship at the heart of Rental House by Weike Wang is less touching, but it is engaging. Nate and Keru are a couple who have decided not to have children. Nate is a white guy from a lower class Southern background; Keru is the only child of perfectionistic immigrants from China. When the book opens, they are on vacation at a Cape Code beach house. They have invited their parents to visit (not at the same time) and the visits reveal generational and cultural gaps that torment the couple. Five years later, they are on a different vacation, this time at a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, where they can't escape prejudices (the European couple in the next bungalow labels them DINKs and makes various assumptions about them) or their families. Rental House presents two slices of a couple's life and it doesn't reach a neat conclusion, which kept me thinking about families and how they affect relationships after I finished the book. 

Mysteries

I recently went to a great event sponsored by the Jefferson County (CO) Library System that featured several mystery writers, including C.J. Box, who I didn't realize had written a stand-alone mystery that won the Edgar award. So I immediately picked up Blue Heaven (an evocative title with an unexpected meaning) and quite enjoyed it. Two kids, mad at their mom and her boyfriend, decide to go fishing when they have an early release day from school. They have the misfortune to see a murder and then become targets of the killers, a group of retired LA cops (not a spoiler--it's revealed in the blurbs on the back of the book). Luckily, they happen to find a hero, rancher Jess Rawlins, a wonderful character. The book ends with a bloodbath followed by a kind of mystical series of conversations, an odd juxtaposition that somehow works. Definitely glad I read it.

I also enjoyed Famous Last Words, by Gillian McAllister (also a good title with multiple meanings in the story). On her first day back at work after nine months' maternity leave, Camilla is interrupted by a visit from the police, who inform her that her husband Luke is involved in a hostage situation--as the hostage-taker. After releasing one hostage and shooting the other two unidentified victims, Luke escapes and is not heard from for seven years. But then things start happening; Cam is in the process of having Luke declared legally dead but suddenly starts to think he might be alive and begins trying to figure out what really happened. The same events prompt Niall, the hostage negotiator who felt he failed during the initial siege, also begins investigating new leads. Working separately, the two move towards a more complete understanding of why Luke acted as he did and what has happened since. I figured out who the real culprits were before the end--something that I am not particularly good at (despite having read thousands of mysteries)--but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book.

Presumed Guilty, by Scott Turow, is more of a legal thriller than a mystery, although there's certainly a whodunit aspect to the book. Here, Rusty Sabich, the falsely accused protagonist of Presumed Innocent, takes on the job of defending his fiancee's son, who is accused in the murder of his on-again/off-again girlfriend, a brilliant, beautiful, and deeply troubled young woman. Around 70 percent of the book focuses on the trial, so if you don't like reading testimony, cross-examination, etc., you'll probably be bored--but I like that sort of thing. The book has a lot of similarities to its predecessor, beyond the title, which for sure is meant to evoke that earlier bestseller, which Apple TV recently remade as a series. But the title fits the story, and the legal maneuvering and mystery of who killed Mae kept me interested. 

The Examiner, by Janice Hallett, is presented in messaging app posts between and among a cohort of art students working on their master's in multimedia art, their instructor, other staff at the college, staff at a company for whom the students are creating an installation as their final examine, and the titular examiner, who reviews all their work to be sure it is being graded fairly. At first they seem like a fairly normal group, with people vying for the teacher's attention, accusing each of other of cheating, and the like. But gradually we learn more of their back stories and begin to suspect that some are not in the class to improve their artistic skills. I don't want to include any spoilers, but I'll just say I was impressed that Hallett used the unusual format well, giving the characters depth and surprising me with plot developments. I read another of her books with a similar format, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which I did not like quite as much and made me think I don't need to read a lot more books constructed in this manner--but I still respect the author's skill in constructing character and plot in this innovative way.

My online book group (University of Illinois alumni) chose Look Closer by David Ellis for its spring into summer book. It's set in a fictional Chicago suburb and features a U of C law professor as one of its highly unreliable narrators. I don't want to say much about the plot because it's so incredibly twisty (though it takes a while to get going). I'll just say a woman is found hanged the day after Halloween. Was it suicide? Murder--by a lover (but who?), a jealous wife, an intruder? If you can figure this thing out before the end, you're way smarter than me.

Nonfiction

Over the past several years, I have come to admire Adam Kinzinger's moral compass and courage, even though we disagree on many issues. Reading his book Renegade, I especially appreciated his commitment to service and his willingness to admit his mistakes/flaws. I also felt compelled to rethink my views on some folks (e.g., John Boehner), but most of all felt real sorrow for moderate Republicans who basically lost their party to nut jobs and people who place power over principle. I recommend reading his book and checking out what Adam is doing with his group Country First.

The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time, by Jane Bertch, provides an interesting take on French culture and relationships as the author reflects on her decades living in Paris, first as a banker and then as the proprietor of a cooking school, La Cuisine. The most moving part of the book for me was her recounting of how she and her business partner dealt with the COVID pandemic, the ways in which small food businesses worked together to survive, and the joy she felt when they were able to reopen and see beloved clients again. I'm not sure what I learned from reading the book would make me a better visitor if I ever return to Paris, but maybe. And I'd definitely take a class at La Cuisine.

Space travel is not necessarily an interest of mine, but Adam Higginbotham's Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, made many best of 2024 lists, so I checked it out--and I'm glad I did. I must admit that I was an adult when the Challenger disaster occurred, and I remember it vividly, but in terms of what happened after, all I really remember is that O-rings were somehow responsible. But, of course, humans were responsible. As Higginbotham documents, people knew that  the O-rings could--and perhaps even were likely to--fail in cold temperatures and they recommended that the mission be scrubbed when temperatures at Cape Canaveral were below freezing that January in 1986. However, decision-makers did not heed the warnings and the result was disastrous. And, perhaps even worse, NASA did not seem to learn the lessons of this series of events, as there were problems that signaled what would happen to Columbia years later. As Higginbotham says, these disasters are a testament to "man's overconfidence in his own ingenuity" or as Richard Feynman wrote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."  

Poetry

Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk is a collection of poems inspired by or about the war in Ukraine. As you might expect, most are grim, either through very literal descriptions or metaphor. In fact, I found myself reading the book much more quickly than it deserved because focusing too intently was debilitating. While reading, I couldn't help thinking about the program at the Longmont Museum I went to in February, at which curator Jared Thompson shared what he had heard from Ukrainians when he visited their country: they are tired of seeing and creating art about war. Let's hope they can move on to other themes soon. Meanwhile, here are a few of Maksymchuk's poems:

Drone Footage

When a shell strikes a person
there's a scattering

 resembling a flock of birds
taking off

hands flying in the air
signaling

feet levitating
in mid-ick

their avian shapes
casting shadows

lithe and carefree
from on high

Mother's Work

The remains
buried hastily
in the yard
recently ran about

with a shaggy dog
sewed a dress for a doll
bombed at Scrabble
sang a lullaby

Duck-Rabbit

a field, dry reeds
a path of ice

like a blot of ink--
a child on the ground

bright red on white
her arms reaching out

shot dead or 
making a snow angel?

New and Collected Poems, by Marie Howe, won the Pulitzer for poetry this year. I had only ever read a few of her poems, so I definitely wanted to read this collection. It's good, very good, but it's sometimes as depressing as the Maksymchuk collection written about an ongoing war. Death is a theme in many of the poems--the death of Howe's brother, our own inevitable deaths, the death of the planet. The first poem in the collection goes through the process of accepting one's age while recognizing that one does not understand death. Later, her dying brother focuses her attention on her own mortality.

Prologue

In the middle of my life--just past the middle--
walking along the street with our little dog Jack on a leash
--OK--just past the late-middle--

in what some might call early old age,
on a street crowded with children and tourists

my father dead, my mother dead,
my young husband gone from me and grown older (a father,
a husband now to someone else),

Jason dead, John dead, Jane and Stanley and Lucy and Lucie
and Billy and Tony and now Richard dead,
I came to the edge
and I did not know the way.

The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his and said,
I'm going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don't.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you're going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

Many other poems draw on Biblical characters, stories, or themes, with an entire section inspired by Mary Magdalene, including a poem about the diversity of penises she experienced. These were not my favorites. I felt more positively about a number of poems about children and the experience of mothering and learning from children. I found this one particularly evocative:

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when t=all the errands are finally done, I say to er,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry--
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hand.

And here's one of the most fabulous lines I've read in a while, though I'm not sure I know what it means: "and the wind makes music of what water was."

Favorite Passages

Nothing weighs more than someone else's belief in you.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else's belief in them. 

He feels like telling her that the artist didn't give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn't quite know how to say that.

    --Fredrik Backman, My Friends (kind of love the contradictory truths)

Playground, The God of the Woods, and Other Favorite Winter Reads

Some notes on mysteries that weren't great but had something interesting about them . . . 

I didn't love House of Correction by Nicci French, but I was impressed by the author's ability to write a legal mystery from the standpoint of the accused, who is planning her defense from a jail cell and then acts as her own attorney in a manner that is entertaining (although certainly would not be allowed by an actual judge). It's really just another take on "ditzy girl solves the case when the dense police can't," but the ditzy girl is usually loved by everyone; here, she doesn't have a friend in the world except for her cellmate, who turns out to be an effective sleuth/lawyer. An interesting twist if not entirely successful.

I am not a huge fan of William Kent Krueger, although I know he's beloved and I do respect that he deals with important issues in his mysteries. Among the issues that underpin Spirit Crossing is violence against indigenous women and girls (and law enforcement's lack of attention to this epidemic). Somehow I wasn't as moved as I feel like I should have been by the book--but I cried at the Author's Note at the end, which was about a real woman who was trafficked, was rescued, built a life, and then was killed by a boyfriend. Reality has an impact.

Kelley Armstrong is an incredibly prolific Canadian novelist best known to me as the author of a mystery series set in a secret Yukon town where all of the residents are hiding from something, usually the law. Thus, I was interested in reading her YA novel Someone Is Always Watching to find that it had a somewhat similar underlying idea, except that it involves children. It's hard to say more without including spoilers, but it's entertaining. I'm not including it in the "favorite" section because the "surprise" is obvious fairly early to an adult reader and there are too many red herrings--but wondering about why the similar underlying theme is important to this author interested me. I might also note that I read several YA books in February, perhaps trying to escape the horror of being an adult in the current political situation. 

On to my favorite winter reads.

Fiction

I have to wonder at myself for really liking The World After Alice, by Lauren Aliza Green, because the two families at its core are so dysfunctional it should be painful. But somehow, it's not. The titular Alice committed suicide as a teenager (or at least we think she did). More than a decade later, her brother Benji and her best friend Morgan are getting married, after keeping their relationship secret from their family for years. Meanwhile, Morgan's father Peter is in love with Benji's mother Linnie, who is bringing a date to the wedding, a man who might have had an inappropriate relationship with Alice. And Benji's dad Nick has been let go from his job but hasn't told his second (younger) wife. Alice's presence hangs over the wedding like a monstrous cloud, and the conflicts are as bad as you might imagine. Yet, it's still somehow a good read. 

Long Island, by Colm Toibin, is a sequel to Brooklyn, a much-lauded book that I didn't love. However, I did really enjoy Long Island, despite the fact that, as the book progressed, the three main characters in the novel--Eilis Lacey, Jim Farrell, and Nancy (forgot her last name)--morph from sympathetic characters dealing with loneliness (among other challenges) to dishonest manipulators of their supposed friends/loved ones. Eilis, the heroine of Brooklyn, is already feeling alienated from her husband Tony's family--all of whom live on the same Long Island cul de sac--when a man shows up at her door to tell her his wife is having Tony's baby and that he will drop the baby on her doorstep when it is born. Unwilling to raise the child and unable to convince Tony and his family to have no part in raising the baby, she decides to retreat to her native Ireland for the summer. There, she reconnects with her fling from Brooklyn, Jim Farrell, who has become secretly engaged to her former best friend Nancy. The secrets the three are keeping erode their relationships and decision-making to a serious degree. The book's ending is abrupt--some readers clearly see it as a set-up for another sequel but I'm not so sure; Toibin may simply be illustrating what happens when bad decisions intersect.  

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson is a book I resisted for a long time, even though I would see it on Libby or at the library--or being read by someone in public. A book about children who burst into flames seemed dumb. And maybe it is a little dumb, but it's also really good. Upper crust Southern girl Madison and scholarship girl Lillian are roommates at a boarding school when Madison gets framed by a rival; Madison's wealthy father then pays Lillian's mother to have Lillian take the fall. Expelled, Lillian falls back into a trailer park kind of existence, but she is still in sporadic touch with Madison, who is married to an older U.S. Senator. When Madison calls and asks Lillian to serve as "governess" for her husband's children by a previous wife--a position that will pay much more than the series of hourly jobs she's been working--Lillian agrees. She then finds out the reason the children need care is that they spontaneously combust from time to time and must be kept out of the way because Madison's husband may soon be nominated for Secretary of State. Crazy set-up, right? But what develops from there is touching, funny, occasionally infuriating--just really enjoyable. I've read reviews that say the novel is about female friendship, but I think it's about learning to care and be cared for.  

Richard Powers has the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and they come together to create novels like those of no other authors. In Playground, his most recent book, the science is multifaceted--the importance and incredible diversity of the ocean ecosystem as well as AI and the threat it poses (oh, and Lewy body dementia--Powers is not averse to including odd human infirmities). The poetry emerges in the relationship between the sea and humans and in an exploration of a deep and ultimately painful friendship. The narrative goes back and forth in time and location, involves numerous characters, and can sometimes be confusing, but a twist at the end brings it together. The human/sea relationship is mostly seen through the character Evie, who is an obsessive diver, scholar, and author of an enchanting children's book about the sea (one reviewer described her husband as a Doug Emhoff-type character, which I found amusing). One of the young people enchanted by her book is Todd, a bright Evanstonian who very early sees the potential of computer games. He becomes friends with Rafi, a scholarship student at his prestigious high school. Rafi is a gifted poet and a lover of literature. The two obsessively play chess and then Go and head off to the University of Illinois together, but they have a falling out after graduation. Todd moves to San Jose to start his company, Playground, a platform something like Reddit but with a competitive element. Rafi stays in Urbana, working on his dissertation and eventually taking a job at the U of I library (one of the best in the country!). Eventually, all the main characters end up on a French Polynesian island where Todd has proposed building a modular floating city and the island's residents have been trying to figure out how to decide democratically whether to agree to the project (should children vote? how should animals' views be considered?). Despite saying a lot about the book, I haven't really captured it, so I'll just end by saying it's highly recommended.  (I feel compelled  to admit another reason that I love Powers' work is that it often involves the U of I as a setting--just reading a phrase like "north of Green" sparks memories. And the character Todd was involved with a project based on the groundbreaking Plato project, where a friend of mine was the art director for some years. How can I not love this, no matter how bad a reason it is for loving a novel?)

Mysteries

Winter started with a mystery that made a lot of "Best of 2024" lists--The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore. It opens in 1975 with camp counselor Louise discovering that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar, the only surviving child of her wealthy family, is missing from her bunk at the camp near the Van Laar's estate. Years ago, before Barbara's birth, her brother Bear disappeared. A serial killer has escaped from a prison not too far away, and the Van Laars have been hosting a huge end-of-summer party, meaning suspects--both guests and an expanded staff--are numerous. The story switches between the times around the two disappearances and between multiple perspectives. One of the most interesting is that of a young police officer, Judy Luptack, who in 1975 has become one of the first female investigators in the New York State Police, who must navigate strict gender expectations of both the rich and the working class while following her instincts and the evidence to unravel what happened to the two Van Laar children. Moore introduces a variety of serious themes, including family dysfunction and dating violence, but she also knows how to plot a mystery. Very enjoyable.

I was probably first taken by Emiko Jean's The Return of Ellie Black because it was so entirely different from her YA book I had recently read, which was basically Princess Diaries in Japan. But then I got pulled in by the story. In the opening chapter, a young woman missing for two years suddenly reappears. Police detective Chelsey Calhoun, daughter of the late police chief and sister of a girl killed as a teenager, is determined to find the man or men who took Ellie. But, as she tirelessly works the case, the reader gradually begins to learn, through chapters narrated by Ellie, key pieces of information she has not told the police. These pieces of the story lead to several surprises that actually surprise to varying extents. Complicated and entertaining.

Nonfiction

Whether you think you know a lot about how social media operates or haven't a clue why you see what you see on FB or IG, I recommend Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, by Renee DiResta. DiResta looks at how influencers, algorithms, and crowds/mobs/cults have created "bespoke realities" that challenge the public's understanding of what is true and what is a new form of propaganda. Herself the victim of online character assassination by conspiracy theorists whose false narratives about the work of her then institution, the Stanford Internet Observatory, resulted in threats to her family and a congressional subpoena, DiResta makes clear the toxic effects of the new media environment by detailing conspiracies around the COVID pandemic and the 2020 election. A must-read in our current screwed-up environment.

The Small and the Mighty, by Sharon McMahon, has a subtitle long enough to provide a good synopsis of the book: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the "unsung" are actually fairly well known--Daniel Inouye, Norm Mineta, Booker T. Washington, Katharine Lee Bates. But McMahon adds depth to the stories we know, and it's rewarding to learn of the truly unsung (at least to me). For example, Clara Brown was an enslaved woman whose family was sold away; following emancipation, she searched for her family members while building a successful business in Colorado. Virginia Randolph was an African American woman who built a system of schools for black children in Virginia in the late 19th and early 20 century. Julius Rosenwald was one of the owners of Sears, who funded vocational/technical schools for African American children across the South. I recommend listening to the audio version of the text, as it is read by the author who sounds just like your favorite opinionated high school social studies teacher--wound up in her topic and ready to convince you it matters. As someone who took black history and lit courses in the late 60s/early 70s, I have a view of Booker T. Washington that doesn't necessarily align with McMahon's, but I appreciate the argument she makes. Very enjoyable read. 

Poetry

I've got two poem-a-day books I'm trying to keep up with in 2025 but I've also been reading some other collections (yes, I might be tooting my own horn a bit). I am a big fan of Kwame Alexander, so I picked up This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, which he edited. It includes a wide range of poems--poems celebrating African American culture, political poems, poems addressing the sacred, and more. Every reader is likely to find something that resonates. Some of my favorites include a poem celebrating butter by Elizabeth Alexander, a very funny prayer for a COVID-denying family by Frank X Walker, a comparison of hanging laundry with poetry (Maritza Rivera), and a Ruth Forman poem calling for resistance. Here's the Rivera poem for your enjoyment:

Hanging Laundry
by Maritza Rivera

Of all the chores
I did as a child

the one I hated most
was hanging laundry.

Clotheslines, clothespins
a basket of wee tee shirts
towels and bed linens:
my penance,
I saw nothing wrong
with just tossing them all
into the dryer and letting them
tumble into submission

but my insistent grandmother
would just not have it.
Why waste the warmth of the sun
she knowingly asked. Smell the tropical
breeze in the sheets she proclaimed.

I would say she had a point except
for the sudden downpour that always
followed once everything was
neatly hung and almost dry.

Running to rescue
hanging laundry
from the tears of angels
seemed so useless.

Now, here I am so many years later
seeing words hang like laundry

watching them bask in the warm
of an unsuspecting page awaiting
a cloud burst of ink.

Favorite Passages

Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending.

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn't care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.

    --Richard Powers, Playground (I could pick many more passages as well--these choices may be influenced by the fact that I am writing this early in Trump's second term.)

You know, at Vanderbilt, there was a kind of boy who wore pastel shorts and boat shoes. They wore seersucker, like they were racist lawyers from the forties. I hated them. They seemed like children but they already looked like middle-aged men. I called them Mint Julep Boys, like they missed the Old South because, even if there was horrible racism, it was worth it if it meant that they could be important by default.

     --Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here (see note above re Trump's second term)

American has been just, and it has perpetuated injustice. We have been peaceful, and we have perpetrated acts of violence. We have been--and are--good. And we have done terrible things to people who didn't deserve them. It has been the land of the free while simultaneously sanctioning oppression.

     --Sharon McMahon, The Small and the Mighty (note applies yet again)