death

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 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 33 for 2026: “The Stationery Shop”, Marjan Kamali

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I said I was going to read all her novels. This one is the middle novel but they are not a series. The time span in this one goes from 1913 to 2013. The political events are more detailed in this novel, including how the toppling of Mossadegh by the Shah’s forces and Britain and US, the later revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War affects various characters and their families. The novel’s title comes from the stationery shop owned by Mr. Fakhri where the other two main characters in the novel meet when both are 17. They love books and fall in love via their visits to this shop. Then the events of 1953 occur, family’s histories create havoc, and people’s pasts catch up with them in unexpected ways.

This novel also goes into greater depth about how Persian traditions affect lives, how much social class matters, arranged versus love matches, modern families versus more traditional families and how all these issues affect individual lives for better or worse. As in the others, the reader learns a lot about Persian food with some details as to how to make various dishes–no recipes, just descriptions. My reaction to the events and characters in this novel were stronger than for the others. I would even call this novel a sort of tear jerker if you are inclined to react emotionally to what you read.

Note: I recommend all three of her novels. They are entertaining, well written, and an excellent way to learn a lot about the last 80 or so years of Iranian history that still affects all of us.

Book 32 for 2026: “Together Tea”, Marjan Kamali

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The previous book I read is the author’s most recent novel. This one is her first novel published in 2013. Like the Lion Women novel, this one tells the story of Iranian families. When the novel begins in 1996, an Iranian couple who have lived in NYC for decades are trying to find a man for their daughter to marry. Well, the mother is, not so much the father, who is a successful doctor. He has adapted very well to the US, is into self help books, optimistic and enthusiastic. Although she has a job she likes, she misses Iran.

Part II begins in 1978 when their children are younger–they have two older sons and a younger daughter–and the Shah’s power is crumbling but its sequence is in question. Some of their relatives suddenly become so religious that they hardly recognize them. Then the revolution occurs, their daughter’s school has become all girls with mandatory hijab. Then the Iran/Iraq war occurs and the grandmother is killed by an Iraqi bomb while out buying pomegranates. They cover their windows with aluminum foil so Iraqi pilots cannot see the lights in houses. Finally, in desperation they leave for NYC after medical colleagues the father knows in NYC help them find a place there. While studying to take the test for his US medical license the dad works in a pizza parlor making pizza.

Then back to 1996, the daughter, Mina, decides she needs to visit Iran even though her father does everything he can to dissuade her. Mother, who still misses Iran and her family there, decides it is ok if she goes too. This part of the novel relates their visit to Iran, Mina’s reconnecting to her best friend who never left, how people there manage to live double lives with parties, Western clothes, and alcohol at home, but hijab and conservative behavior in public, including avoiding the morality police.

Like her other novel, this one is a good way to learn recent Iranian history while learning about Iranian food, family, friendship, love, and every day life.

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 28 for 2026: “One Amazing Thing”, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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One afternoon nine people are in a passport and visa office in a US city–a teenager and her Chinese grandmother, an elderly white couple, an African American with a military past, a young Muslim still struggling with the aftermath of 9/11, a young Indian graduate student. Suddenly, an earthquake traps them together with two workers from this office. There is little water and little food. They argue about what is the best strategy to survive. The two young men almost come to blows. Finally, they agree on some strategies on how to share the meager supplies. After a bit they notice a water leak and that the water is slowly rising. They stack chairs on tables as the water rises higher and higher. As tensions increase, the graduate student suggests they tell one amazing thing from their lives to distract them as the water keeps rising.

The novel then relates each person’s story and the reactions of the others to the stories. Some stories are quite heart wrenching of cruel families, others endearing and joyful. The stories enable them to quit most of the bickering and work on their survival

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.