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Book 15 for 2025: “Jack”, Marilynne Robinson

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Last year I read her novel “Gilead” which takes place in fictional, small, Iowa town in which the main character is the father of the main character in this novel, “Jack”. John Ames Boughton, Jack, is the wayward son of a Presbyterian minister. Previously, he has been wrongly imprisoned for a theft he did not commit. He loves literature, especially poetry. He lives off of odd jobs, drinks too much, smokes, and is somewhat of a lost soul who continuously philosophizes about live, religion, and societal rules. One day he sees a woman walking in the rain. When she drops her bundles on the sidewalk, he helps her. She thinks he is a preacher because of the way he is dressed and invites him in for tea. She is Della Miles, a teacher and the daughter of a Black Methodist minister. This is the story of interracial love when it was still illegal in the US, the lengths they go to resist and hide it, and the reactions of her family. Reading this, one realizes how it was not that long ago that most of the US was not only segregated, but sometimes even talking to someone on the sidewalk from another race could get a person into trouble with the police.

Book Nine for 2025: “Martyr”, Kaveh Akbar

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“She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus just needed a bigger gun”–part of the description of the main character’s rich, not dentist mom rich but oil, trust fund rich, blue-eyed, blond girlfriend. Cyrus, the main character is an Iranian American whose father immigrated to the US when Cyrus was a baby after Cyrus’ mom was killed when the US shot down an Iranian passenger plane thinking it was a bomber (July 1988). His dad acquires a job at a Midwestern chicken farm, counting eggs, but special eggs. This farm breeds chickens to grow faster to get to market faster. He works six days a week, long hours, until Cyrus, who excelled in elementary and high school, becomes a sophomore in college. Suddenly, his dad dies.

Cyrus becomes an addict using alcohol and drugs and writes poetry and eventually finishes college. He becomes obsessed with and researches martyrs throughout history–people like Hypatia of Alexandria, Bhagat Singh, Emily Wilding Davison, the Soulit Women. He gets sober and obsessed with his own past. This eventually leads him to travel to Brooklyn to talk to a famous artist whose last exhibit is herself talking to visitors as she dies of cancer. In researching this woman’s paintings, he discovers a strange painting of a young man dressed as an angel whose job as a soldier is to ride at night with a flashlight through the fields of the dead and dying Iranian soldiers consoling them during the Iran/Iraq War. Cyrus knows that his mom’s brother had this actual job during that war and wonders can there be a possible the connection.

Throughout these events the reader is lead to not only explore Cyrus’ thoughts and beliefs but also those of his father, mother, uncle, and best friend, Zee. It is rare for a novel to be both heart wrenching and funny. Akbar accomplishes this task. One moment I found myself laughing out loud and the next almost in tears. I could not stop reading even though the paperback is long. Perhaps my knowing something about Iranian culture, food, etc. helped me appreciate some of the book more than I might have otherwise. Nevertheless, this is a universal story about love, discovering oneself, relationships, parenthood, human nature. It is definitely worth taking the time to read.

Book Four for 2025: “The Shell Collector”, Anthony Doerr

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After reading his other collection of short stories, I ordered this one which is an earlier collection. Once again, he does not disappoint. One of the stories, “The Hunter’s Wife” won the O’Henry Award and has to be one of those most touching and unusual stories I have ever read. One main character, the man who makes his living guiding hunting parties in Montana, becomes obsessed with a young woman he sees in a magic show and follows her everywhere. When he first meets her, she is underage and he does nothing. Later when she is older he relentlessly pursues and marries her. After years of enduring the hardships of living in a remote cabin in the mountains, she leaves. She has always possessed the ability to feel the emotions of both other humans and animals and begins to make her living using this ability to help people. After never seeing her for twenty years, the hunter comes to one of her events. The story details the years between their first meeting and what happens when the hunter attends this event.

The title story, “The Shell Collector”, details the life of a blind expert on certain kinds of sea shells and the marine life that inhabit them, some of which are poisonous. He moves to a remote Pacific island, becomes familiar to those who live there. After a local child becomes ill and her father thinks the shell collector saves her, his peaceful life as he has known it becomes totally upended.


All the stories are notable but another one I found fascinating is “Mkondo”. The main character, Ward Beach, works for a natural history museum and goes to Tanzania to study and collect specimens. While there, he becomes fascinated with a young woman he sees rapidly running through the forest. The rest of the story details his pursuit, their life together, their separate lives, and questions the meaning of what is considered success in life.

I generally am not a short story reader but Doerr’s stories are unique, insightful, touching, and carry a sort of magic not found in many novels or stories.

Book Two for 2025: “Memory Wall Stories”, Anthony Doerr

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While wandering around in the library, I found this book. His two more recent novels, ” All the Light We Cannot See” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land” remain two of the most touching and fascinating novels I have ever read so decided to try what he started with, short stories. These stories do not disappoint.

The title of the book comes from the first of the stories. It is a combination of science fiction and paleontology. Via an operation to his head a young boy in South Africa possesses the memories of an old woman. Through her memories he learns of a her deceased husband’s interest in rocks and fossils. This allows him to make a discovery that changes lives. In the next story, due to the death of her parents, a young girl in Kansas has to move to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and makes a myth come true. The following story, “Village 113”, won the O. Henry Prize. It details what happens to one woman, a keeper of seeds for an entire village, when the Three Gorges Dam was built in China. Another story tells what happens to a couple in Wyoming when they desperately want a child but cannot conceive. The shortest of the stories, “The Demilitarized Zone”, is well about that–sort of. The final story, like several others, is about memory, in this case the memories of a Holocaust survivor, who like many who survive horrible events when others they know do not, wonders why her.

I liked these stories so much that I ordered his earlier collection of short stories, “The Shell Collector.” He has won the O. Henry Prize for short stories five times and the Pulitzer for “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in 2015. I keep wondering how he knows so much about so many places. His short stories and novels are set in countries all over the world. The research must never end.

Book One of 2025: “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store”, James McBride

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This is another great novel by one of my favorite authors. The book begins with the finding of a skeleton in a well in 1972. Since it is located near the site of an old synagogue, the police start to question a local, elderly Jewish man, Malachi, but get nowhere. Before they can come back to ask him more questions, Hurricane Agnes washes away the skeleton and many houses in the lower, wealthier part of town. When they do finally get around to hunting for him again, he has disappeared.

Then the novel goes back 47 years in this nondescript Pennsylvania town where the white people live in the lower, nicer part of town, and the Jews and black people live in or near an area called Chicken Hill, a poor area with little water and no plumbing. It is the story of a Jewish couple, Chona and Moshe. She runs the grocery store in the title, and he runs a dance theatre where he hosts dances, sometimes showcasing very famous musicians, mostly Jewish or black or Latino. It is also the story of some of their black neighbors, one of whom was Chona’s best friend in school, Jewish immigrants from Europe like Malachi, and a deaf black child, Dodo. When the state comes for Dodo because his mother has died and they think he should be institutionalized, Chona’s kindness and the courage of a local black worker, Nate Timblin, bring the black and Jewish people together to save him. While all this can be sad and serious, I also found myself frequently laughing. This novel reveals the quirks of all sorts of people, how they relate to one another, the dangers of racism, and ultimately the meaning of community, courage, and friendship and how much these things matter.

Book 47 for 2024: “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Oscar Wilde

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Here is a book that I never managed to read when I was reading all those other classics. Finally, I did it and I am so glad. What an amazing story. I know it takes place in another era with different language and customs and so on, but it is well worth the read. The plot is so ingenious, the story a lesson in how not to live, how leading a double life destroys not only the person leading it but so many others and for what? Does selling one’s soul for any reason pay off? Rarely, if ever.

Now that I am writing this, I keep thinking of several present day people who were living wealthy and successful in “polite” society but now have been caught with their depravity in full view for the world to see.

Book 45 for 2024: “How To Stop Time”, Matt Haig

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What would your life be like if you did not age like everyone else? How would others treat you, your family? Would they kill your mother because they think she is a witch? Could you love someone who grew old while you stayed young? Would you have to move all over the world to avoid detection?

These are the issue the narrator faces because unlike ordinary people, he does not age normally. At the beginning he is living in London as a forty-one year old history teacher but has been alive for centuries. He’s met Shakespeare, travelled the oceans with Captain Cook, and played piano at clubs in Paris.

One organization, the Albatross Society, hunts down and “protects” people like him. Their leader has one rule: do not fall in love. He is also convinced that certain groups want to find these non-agers and imprison them for research. What is factual, real? Does life have meaning without love?

Book 35 for 2024: “Woman of Interest: A Memoir”, Tracy O’Neill

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In 2020, the author, Korean, adopted as a child, nearly 30, decides she needs to find her biological mother before her mother dies. Finding few leads, clues, she hires a private detective who disappears. Then she takes the task of investigating on her own. This book details her investigation, her long relationship with a Serbian furniture mover, life with the parents who adopted her, and her career as a writer, plus going to South Korea to meet her biological family.

Her writing style is a bit different and somewhat rambling. However, for those who have experienced the same sort of search, this book provides details on how to go about finding “the lost”.

Book 29 for 2024: “The Covenant of Water”, Abraham Verghese

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I waited for more than a year to get this book via the library. It stayed on the best seller lists for months and months and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is the saga of one family from 1900 to 1977. The setting is the Kerala area of India (I have been to India but not this area). It is unique compared to much of India in that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus live in relative peace with each other. Unlike the more arid parts of India, this is a place dominated by water which is a major theme in the book. Several of the main characters in the book suffer from an inherited Condition, as they refer to it. In every generation, at least one person dies from drowning.

The book begins with a 12 year old girl being married off to a 40 some year old widower. She has to travel far from her family via water. He is kind and patient but unlike her, who loves the water, he will travel many extra miles to avoid even traveling by water. He is terrified of water because he has the Condition. Eventually, she becomes the family matriarch, Big Ammachi. This is her story and the story of her descendants, the Christian community in Kerala, and the fate of one British man who remained in India after independence. It is also the story of the progress of medicine (Big Ammachi’s granddaughter is determined to become a doctor and find what causes the Condition) and how one family experiences many hardships to further future generations.

The author, Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, details this fictional family’s history for several generations in 715 pages. It sounds daunting but I kept reading because I wanted to know what happens to all the people. At the same time, I found this to be one of the saddest books I have ever read. Due to the Condition and leprosy, for which there was no cure at the time, many people’s lives are horrendously affected. I did learn a lot about medicine and medical advances, how leprosy destroyed lives, Kerala and, much to my amazement, that many Christians in Kerala continued to follow the Hindu caste system.

Book 16 for 2024: “Digging to America”, Anne Tyler

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This book details the lives and relationships between two families, one native to the US and the other Iranian immigrants. When the young couple in each family adopt a Korean baby, their lives become intertwined. Every year on the anniversary of the arrival of the babies, they take turns hosting an Arrival Party. Two of the grandparents, one on each side, one male and one female, find their lives linked in unexpected ways. The book explores what it means to be an immigrant, how the native born sometimes view those from another country, and questions to what extent a person’s character is due to culture and what is simply the way that person remains regardless of culture. While a serious exploration of culture, family relationships, friendship, and cultural adaption, the book is also quite funny. I found myself sometimes laughing out loud and at other times feeling sad. I also found myself thinking more about my own personality and its development.