Book 40 for 2026: “Homegoing”, Yaa Gyasi

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The history of Ghana from the 18th century through the slave trade and the into what occurs to the descendants of two sisters.

Effia and Eli are two half sisters who never met. Effia is married off to a prominent Englishman in what later became Ghana during the time of the slave trade. She lives in comparative luxury at Cape Coast Castle. Meanwhile her sister, Esi, has been captured and is in the dungeon under the castle waiting to be transported. She is shipped off to the United States where her children and grandchildren will endure slavery, later work in the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, and eventually make it to Harlem.

The son of Effia and the Englishman is sent off to England for his education. Later, he and his descendants will endure the warfare between the Asante and the Fante tribes as they battle each other for power in the slave trade and resist colonization. Eventually, the Asante fight the English and lose. One of Effia’s descendants becomes a school teacher in what is now Ghana and eventually makes it to the United States where he is a professor at a community college.

This novel presents details of events in the slave trade and what happens to families through the centuries that follow. Without reading a detailed history book, this novel enables the reader to learn a lot of history through the lives of these two half sisters.

Book 39 for 2026: “Men Without Women”, Haruki Murakami

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Unlike all the other books by this author which I have read, this is a collection of seven short stories. Most of his fiction includes bars, coffee shops, jazz music, and libraries. Sometimes a library is even almost a character. None of these stories contains anything about a library which surprised me. The main characters vary from a lovesick doctor who is sure he would never love a woman but just enjoyed long affairs with them until…; a man who lives in a small apartment and cannot leave so the government has assigned a special woman, a nurse, whose job is to shop for him, acquire books he wants to read, and service his sexual needs; a bar owner who suddenly has strange snakes show up in the tree outside his bar and receives a message regarding what he must do; an actor whose wife has died and he has to hire a driver who happens to be a young woman who says very little; others are lonely men who think they are fine, but are they in reality?

While most of the stories are about men who seem to be perfectly normal men, events occur, and things are said and done which makes the reader think about what is and what is not normal? Who defines normal?

Evil

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Today I participated in something called Black Out Poetry. I had never heard this term before. In this case, everyone picked a magazine, opened it up, found an article, and were told to black out whatever did not speak to you or you thought unimportant, etc. and create a poem from what was left. The magazine I picked up was published in early 2002; all the articles focused on 9/11 and its ongoing aftermath. Articles about evil, its nature, who is and who is not, and how to react to evil dominated. This is the poem I created after blacking out almost all of one article.

The human capacity to create hell haunts our dreams.

We knew the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Middle Passage, Trail of Tears,

horrors.

Wakeup-evil deeds touch our lives. Terror spreads.

Evil is the assertion of self–

treating people like things,

forgetfulness of our better selves, of sacred creation,

of life as an ultimate value.

We live in a tragic world; But

there are creative, healing forces:

the power of Love,

the power to seek Justice,

the power to celebrate Beauty.

Book 38 for 2026: “The Removed”, Brandon Hobson

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The Ochoa family has been grieving for 15 years, grieving in their own private ways since Ray-Ray was killed in a police shooting. He was 15, riding his bike to the mall. He’s Native, Cherokee, shot even though he was not the person who had committed a crime. The officer was never charged.

Maria, the mother, worked in social services for years, helping with foster children. She now has not only to deal with her grief but also with her husband, Ernest, who has increasingly worse Alzheimers. Their adult daughter, Sonja, lives nearby, comes over to help out, and has an obsession with a local guy and his kid who is on the spectrum. Maria and Ernest are asked to briefly host a Cherokee foster child who has nowhere to go until they find another family or his grandparents. His presence affects all of them in profound ways.

Their youngest son has drug problems and moved away from home, Oklahoma, to New Mexico, in part to avoid his own family’s efforts to help him. Now he has to decide whether to go home to the family’s annual ritual which not only commemorates the death of Ray-Ray but also celebrates a Cherokee National Holiday.

This novel combines Cherokee folklore with this family’s history and life. It is told from the viewpoint of the various family members. The author is a member of the Cherokee Nation and teaches creative writing at a university in New Mexico.

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Book 37 for 2026: “Women Without Men”, Shahrnush Parsipur

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Shahrnush Parsipur, a renowned Iranian writer, died this summer at the age of 80. In Iran her fiction was considered subversive, so much so that she was imprisoned repeatedly (one time for nearly five years) by both the Shah and the Islamic Republic. This year, this novel, Women Without Men, was published for the first time in the UK and was long listed for the Booker Prize. Her prison memoir will be published in 2027.

“Women Without Men” is set in Tehran during the 1953 coup d’stat. It links the stories of five women who seek refuge from patriarchal oppression in a garden. However, before they “find” the garden, their varied lives from upper class to prostitute to rural peasant demonstrate the hypocrisy and oppression toward women in Iran. This novel, like several other Iranian novels I have read, contains elements of magical realism, e.g. mind reading and the ability to fly. Much of the novel also contains elements of satire. I found myself laughing .

With the exception of a somewhat eccentric gardener, the men in the novel are not portrayed in a very favorable light. For example, one 40 year old man insists on marrying a much younger woman because he thinks she must be a virgin and chaste and rejects an older woman who actually cares for him. The real virgin is the older woman, not the one he marries.

Although the novel focuses on Iranian society, many of the themes apply worldwide wherever there are issues of class, women’s rights, oppression of the poor, etc.

Book 36 for 2026: “Supersaurio”, Meryem El Mehdati

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Several weeks ago I wrote a post about young people and asked if the problems they are having are global. It is this novel which caused me to ask that question. The author lives in Gran Canario, the largest of the Canary Islands which is the setting of this novel. The novel is written in first person from the viewpoint of Meryem, a twenty-five year old young woman who at the beginning of the novel is still living with her parents because she cannot afford a place of her own. She has a college degree and speaks multiple languages but cannot find a good job even close to what she thought she would be doing at twenty-five when she was younger. She is unhappy and disappointed.

She acquires an internship with Supersaurio, the largest super market chain in the Canary Islands. She finds the work boring and tedious. She cannot stand her boss, a woman 20 or so years older, a woman who will not even look at Meryem when she is talking to her and who never bothers to learn to pronounce Meryem’s name correctly even though Meryem explains repeatedly. Nevertheless, Meryem endures, produces excellent work and never complains–at least not at work. However, as she informs the reader endlessly, she hates her job, feels her colleagues look down on her, and nothing is going ok. To pass time she writes fiction about her work mates, tries to find a nice guy to date, and because she needs the money, keeps working.

As the novel progresses, her life does sort of get better and she adjusts sort of, but you have to read it to find out.

I kept thinking the same thing over and over–how is her life different from that of a lot of young people in the US? Meryem seems to think it is because of where she lives at least in part and because the island is dependent on Spain and tourism, but are these the real causes?? Do a lot of young people in Europe and other places in the world feel as she does, struggle to “make it”?

Book 35 for 2026: “Warlight”, Michael Ondaatje

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Many will know this writer from his Booker Prize winning novel “The English Patient” and many have seen the movie even if they did not read the book.

“Warlight” takes place mostly just after WWII but is a totally different angle than any other WWII novel I have read. The scene is England, actually London and locales nearby. Two teenagers, a brother and sister, have their seemingly ordinary life totally upended when their parents announce they are leaving them with the man who lives in rooms at the top of their house. The two teens refer to this man as The Moth. The teens, Nathanial and Rachel, begin to think The Moth and his friends may be criminals given their strange goings and comings. They still go to school. Nathanial finds some jobs via The Moth and meets a girl at one of them. Her brother is in real estate. Nathanial and she hang out and have adventures in the empty for sale houses. The brother and sister do discover that their mother worked with The Moth during the war. Otherwise, they know little.

Eventually, their mother returns with no explaining about where she was or what she was doing. They never see their father again and have no clue what happened to him. Rachel is so angry about this that she has little to do with the mother and only sees Nathanial occasionally. Years later Nathaniel acquires a job where he is able to discover who his mother really is, what she had been doing for years, and what happened to her and others with whom she was close.

This novel reveals how little we sometimes know about others, the effects of their secrets, and how behavior good or bad leads to consequences often unexpected.

I’ve read several of the author’s novels and always find them complex and enlightening, sometimes revealing worlds about which I have little or no knowledge.

I Live in Beauty on the Rim

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A number of years ago I lived on a canyon rim in the Panhandle of Texas, a side canyon to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the country. I wrote this poem when I lived there.

The canyon edge looms out my bedroom windows,

pale adobe, stark.

Fall to death or serious injury.

I will not fall; I love living on the edge.

Rain brings a one hundred foot deluge,

roar of water, red adobe, cascading, screaming.

Someone said my house is pink; it is not pink.

Color of canyon, worldwide color,

Moroccan, Pueblo, Saudi, Mali, Navaho, Timbuktu,

desert alive and lovely.

Everywhere.

Three bucks watch me through my bedroom windows.

They see me move; they stare.

Isabella stands, rigid, watching…what?

I kneel to her level, follow her eyes.

Bobcat casually climbs the canyon wall, impervious.

He marks the juniper tree, walks a deer path,

disappears, secretive, rarely seen.

The huge hoot owl’s voice echoes down the canyon,

drifting into my dreams.

A young roadrunner calls, scratchy voice,

running across the patio–on the edge.

In spring the mocking bird sings all night,

“This is my territory.”

I sing all year, full of joy!

Book 34 for 2026: “Forgotten”, Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson

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The subtitle is “Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials”. Published in 2025, the book follows the authors’ travels from their home in Ramallah in the West Bank in search of ancient buildings, churches, grave memorials, etc. For those who find it difficult to picture the location of Israel, Gaza, West Bank, etc. there is a detailed map at the beginning of the book.

The memorials they find vary from that for three Egyptian soldiers who died in the 1967 war to buried famous poets. They discover the remains of the wall that surrounded the great Bronze Age city of Tell Balata and a sophisticated water system from a Bronze and Iron Age city. In many cases these places are hidden among modern Israeli buildings or appear to be a bunch of rubble at first. Usually, they manage to find these places with the help of older locals.They find the tombs of saints, a Greek Orthodox monastery that had to be rebuilt, the remains of a deserted mosque destroyed by Israelis–all that is left is the minaret, the ruins of many ancient Palestinian villages that over time have been destroyed by the Israelis. In some cases ruins from the BC era have been built over with malls and parks, including one that is now under the Palestine Television Tower.

One thing they noted that has nothing to do with buildings or ruins is how the Dead Sea is becoming smaller and smaller due to excessive irrigation for crops farmed by kibbutzes. The Jordan River feeds into the Dead Sea and its level has gone down for the same reason. Drought and irrigation has increased the need for water for crops. The authors question the longterm sustainability of these irrigation methods. As I read this I thought of all the irrigation in the West of the US, the low water flow of the Colorado River, and how the Western US is facing some of the same issues.