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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.

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.

Too Many Names

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They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,

Of Chilies and Paraguays;

I have no idea what they are saying

I know only the skin of the earth

and I know it is without a name.

Pablo Neruda

Book 30 for 2026: “A Rift in Time”, Raja Shehadeh

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Written in 2010 this nonfiction work follows the author on a journey as he attempts to reenact the journey his great-great uncle made to escape the police of the Ottoman Empire as it was disintegrating in the early 1900s. Unlike now when the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel have borders and you have to have permission to cross, then they were all part of the Ottoman Empire with no borders. The only countries at the time that were not part of the Ottoman Empire were Iran and a lot of the peninsula of what is now Saudi Arabia. The fact that all these new countries have borders made it difficult for the author to exactly follow his ancestor’s travels.

The author, a Palestinian Christian who is also a leading Palestinian lawyer, lived in the West Bank when he wrote this memoir. The uncle was a journalist in the late 1800s and died just before the existence of Israel occurred. As Shehadeh travels, he notes how the landscape has changed. Israeli authorities have destroyed most of the old Palestinian villages. Where their small farms, olive groves, etc. existed, the Israelis have created large, mechanized farms. He notes that these farms use a lot of irrigation and have caused the water table to go down and made changes to the Jordan River and Dead Sea.

While visiting the old places and people he can find that might know of his relative, he also discusses Palestinian history and the history of the creation of Israel. Britain wanted the help of Zionist Jews to help defeat the Ottoman Turks who had allied themselves with the Germans in WWI. To get their help they created the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which promised the Zionists that they would help them create a homeland of their own in what was then Palestine. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, what was Palestine and now Israel was ruled for decades by the British–the British Mandate (1920-1948). The author’s uncle predicted much of what occurred and actually wanted the Ottomans to continues ruling but differently, giving each group of people more self-governing power. Instead we now have countries many of whose borders were created by the British and French.

Book 25 for 2026: “Atlas of Borders: Walls, Migrations, and Conflicts in 70 Maps”, Delphine Papin and Bruno Tertrais

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This book is way more than the maps. It starts with Borders Throughout History going back to ancient times when borders were not clearly defined. Modern borders emerged with modern cartography. The “more detailed the map, the more accurately boundaries can be drawn.” Cultural borders based on religion, language and such rarely align with actual modern borders. Think about places you know and who lives there and the cultural and religious differences. The first maps show Borders in Six Stages delineating the changing borders before 1800 to current borders.

The next set shows Borders and Civilizations–what we often refer to as Western Civilization, Latin American, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, African, Hindu, Sinic, Buddhist, Japanese. This view started with the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). In many ways this Atlas is also a history book on how various agreements and treaties affect boundary changes. An example is the map of the results of The Sykes-Picot Agreement. It also includes the legacy of the British Empire and how this affected borders over time.

I had not thought much about how even after colonialism, Europe still has some over seas territories, mostly islands over which wars have been fought even though many have never heard of them. The book includes maps and discussion on border disputes in Latin America as well as other parts of the world. There is another section on sea borders and those disputes continue today, e.g. the Arctic which many countries try to claim. And then there is the Persian Gulf with detailed illustrations of the Strait of Hormuz and all the islands there. I had forgotten that Bahrain is an island until I read this book.

There are too many sections to detail here, but the maps of the South China Sea and the disputes involving China there are very illustrative of just how complex claims by countries can be.

When I think of walls, I think of Berlin Wall and its fall and the disputes in US over walls between US and Mexico, but there are others in the world–Morocco, the Koreas. There is a map illustrating all the places where walls exist today. There are more than 70 closed borders protected by a wall or fence. The number of barriers is rising. The book not only lists them but how high they are in meters. Then so many disputed borders still exist that the maps and lists take up two pages of lists.

There is so much interesting information in this book that I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in history and current affairs.