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Book 41 for 2026: “What Strange Paradise”, Omar El Akkad

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Refugee bodies wash up on the shore of an island in the Mediterranean–from just another ill equipped, overfilled boat. People of all ages from places like Syria, Ethiopia, Palestine. While on the boat they argue, debate, help each other–all the variations of human behavior when people are crammed together in a dangerous situation. Only one survives, nine year old Amir from Syria. He sees soldiers coming and runs. Rescued by Vanna, a local teenage girl whose feeling of alienation comes from dysfunctional parents, angry at their lack of success and struggles, Amir hides from the military personnel searching for him.

In alternating chapters the reader learns about Amir’s life before being washed up on shore and about the friendship between him and Vanna. They do not speak the same language, yet they establish an indelible bond as they attempt to escape the military colonel who is obsessed with finding Amir.

I found this novel and the story of these two children touching and inspiring. Although it details a lot of the worst of human behavior, it also inspires the reader with the kindness and empathy that many people can express even in dangerous and hostile situations.

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?

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 29 for 2026: “The God of Small Things”, Arundhati Roy

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The Booker Prize winner from decades ago, I decided to reread it (I read it when it was first published) after reading the author’s recent memoir. It is1969 in the southern Indian state of Kerala where a substantial proportion of the population belong to the Syrian Christian church. Does this keep them from adhering to the Indian caste system? No. Caste, wealth, social status, property–they all still matter.

The main characters are one family: Ammu and her twin children who love the wrong man according to their society, the blind grandmother who plays Handel on her violin, their uncle who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and married and then divorced an English woman, their child, and an ex-nun grandaunt who is not a nice person and cannot get over her love for a priest. And then there are their servants and the man, an Untouchable, who is the brilliant carpenter, mechanic, fixer of everything. When the half English child and her mother come to visit after her new husband’s untimely death, everything changes in a day.

Even though written decades ago, the novel is definitely worth the read. Although the details and cultural representations are true to one particular area of India and its culture, the novel’s themes ring true for all cultures and countries, themes of Love, Joy, Hate, Prejudice, Hope.

Note: I also decided to research how much the caste system has changed life in the decades since it was written. In urban areas with new laws there is more leniency regarding rights especially for work and education, but people still usually marry those from the same caste. Rural areas have not changed much to the point that many villages still have a specific area where the Dalits (Untouchables) have to live.

Book 27 for 2026: “Mother Mary Comes To Me”, Arundhati Roy

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Although Roy has written numerous books including the Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things”, this is her first memoir. While the prose is easy to read, the subject matter is often heart wrenching. Roy’s mother, a single parent (divorced) in India when this was totally unacceptable, accomplishes remarkable achievements including the founding of a very successful school while acting what often seems very cruel as a mother to her two children, Arundhati and her brother. The mother’s treatment of Arundhati is so disturbing that when she is just 18 and in her third year of architecture school in Delhi, she quits going home to Kerala to see her mother and quits communicating with her for seven years. Yet, she admits to loving her mother irrationally.

Arundhati becomes involved in documentary film making, sometimes as writer and sometimes as an actor in the films. In addition to her activities as a writer and film maker, she becomes an ardent political activist against rising Hindu nationalism. She provides details of spending time with hunted activists in the jungle, getting arrested, and even tried for writing a piece the judiciary considered insulting. This is an unusually honest and intimate memoir about her family, her mother, and life and politics in India.

Book 26 for 2026: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, Kiran Desai

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By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.

Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.

Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.

Book 24 for 2026: “Glory Be”, Danielle Arceneaux

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This is a murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana. The main character is an older Black lady who spends Sunday afternoons after church at the local coffee shop helping gamblers with their sports betting. While there, she learns that her best friend, a nun, has been found dead in her apartment. The police insist it is a suicide, but Glory knows that cannot be and sets out to find out what really occurred and who the murderer is. Her daughter, a classy NYC attorney, is visiting. She is very reluctant to join her mother’s quest but eventually agrees to help. Together they begin to investigate. After Glory is bitten by a pit bull under scary circumstances. receives a package full of bees which sting her and send her to the hospital, and other unexpected occurrences, Glory’s daughter realizes her mother may be correct about this being a murder, not a suicide. Their investigation leads them to the trailer house of a priestess, the grounds of a notorious drug dealer, etc.

Glory has grown up during segregation and is used to being overlooked and dismissed. Although she is in many ways a very traditional woman with traditional values, she is determined to do right by her friend. This leads her to places she would never n normally go and encounter people she would normally avoid.

I rarely read murder mysteries but since this is a book in a book club to which I belong, I read it anyway. It was an enjoyable read, sometimes funny, and certainly a glimpse into bayou culture about which I know little. I think there is a sequel so might look for it since I enjoyed Glory’s spunk and determination.

Book 20 for 2026: “Ransom”, David Malouf

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When I was in the eighth grade, I asked my parents for two books for Christmas, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. I am sure even then there was a more modern version but they chose Dryden’s translation which was basically 17th century British. It took me a while, but I read them both even though I often had to resort to using the dictionary to learn all the words I had never seen before. My favorite then and now is “The Iliad”, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War. Since then, I have read more books than I can count about Achilles and the war, including this one and three recently by Pat Barker, which I wrote about on this blog.

David Malouf focuses on two characters, Achilles and Priam and one singular event, Priam’s decision to disguise himself as an ordinary person, hire an ordinary man with an ordinary cart, and go to the Greek camp and beg Achilles for Hector’s body. The only other main character in the book is the cart driver who likes to talk and share. From him Priam sees another view of life and experiences some new simple things, like cooling your feet in a stream, eating ordinary food. Priam suddenly realizes he has missed much of life’s meaning since, as king, he has been shielded from the lives of most people. The book includes Priam’s thoughts, those of the cart driver, and Achilles’. This is not an action thriller novel. It is the story of three people and their thoughts and reactions to this one event.