Two days ago I drove to the local library to return “The Historian” and inquire about a book an acquaintance had recommended. The library houses a used book section at its front hall entrance. I usually only glance at it because mostly it contains books in which I have zero interest. I glanced once again. There in nonfiction I saw NERUDA painted in big, bold bright colors-blue, red, green, purple–across the top half of a book cover. Just below this was a parade of flowers marching across the middle of the cover in the same bold, bright colors. Finally, at the bottom painted in bright red on a black background in capital letters it read, “MEMOIRS.” Inside the O is printed in the same red these words,”confieso que he vivido.” I snatched it up. The little sign said 25 cents. Although I’ve read Neruda poems mostly translated into English, I had no idea he had written anything about his own life. I knew I had to read this. I knew some things about his fascinating life. I wanted to know more. I dug around in my wallet, found a quarter, and deposited in the little brown box one of the librarians had indicated.
Later at home, I read the beginning, his brief introduction, explaining there are gaps here and there. He also explains, “What the memoir writer remembers is not the same as what the poet remembers.” He goes on to explain this. I will need to contemplate this more. Then in the beginning of the first chapter, “The Country Boy”, he describes “The Chilean Forest”. It starts, “Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains, among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest…” What continues is a prose poem describing this forest with intense sensory detail so clear the reader can see the details, the mystery, the lushness. He ends with this poem with the words, “Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest does not know this planet. I have come out of this landscape, that mud, that silence to roam, to go singing through the world.” Reading this beginning instantly linked me to his poetry I had read, to its sensory detail, to its lyricism.
They say we are all products of the environment in which we grew up whether we like it or not. Reading this is making me view this truism in a new light.
People tell me I have a lot of determination. If they know about it, they use this example: I just finished my 659th day of walking at least 10,000 steps per day never missing a day. My average is over 13,000 but it was higher until the rain came. It forced me to dance, jog, and run in place inside my house, not exactly a fun endeavor.
Three years ago as part of a Story Circle Network class, I read about book written by a woman who read a book per day for a year in order to help her deal with her grief over the loss of young family member who died too soon. I figured if she could read a book a day, surely I could read a book per week. First year I made it, second I fell one short, and in 2025 I read 53 and reviewed them all on my blog.
Today, I finished book one off 2026: “We Are Green and Trembling” by the Argentinian writer Gabriela Cabezon Camara. It won the National Book Award for translated literature. A sort of fantastical, historical novel, it portrays the life of a real person, Antonio de Erauso. Now identifying as a man, he writes letters to his aunt who is the prioress of a Basque convent. When a small girl, his parents placed her in the convent hoping she would someday replace the aunt as head of the convent. To flee the narrow confines of such a life, she escapes and disguises herself as a man. Through his narration and letters to his aunt, he tells of all his adventures, including working as a mule skinner, then becoming a conquistador in South America among other endeavors. At the time of the novel, he has escaped the military captain for whom he fought and rescued two native Guarini girls from enslavement along with two monkeys. The smallest girl and the monkeys were in cages and near starvation when he rescued them. Pursued by the military they escaped, they now reside deep in the jungle aided by the natives who live there.
Through this novel, the author manages to criticize colonialism, the tyranny of strict religious beliefs, the treatment of women, and the horrors inflicted on native peoples.
The daughter of a diplomat and historian explores books in her father’s library one evening and discovers an ancient book and a bunch of yellowing letters. These letters are those of one of her father’s advisors in graduate school, a man who suddenly disappeared. The center of the book contains a strange dragon drawing. This discovery leads her on a quest to find out more about her father’s past and the fate of a mother she has never known.
The letters involve the evil history of Vlad the Impaler who is the person behind the legend of Dracula. Vlad the Impaler was ruler of what is now part of Romania. In his efforts to retain power and fight off the Turks, whom he hated, his cruelty became legend. Often he impaled his enemies alive on stakes driven through their bodies and lined them up by the hundreds along the roadsides.
Combining reality and the legend of Dracula and vampires, this book’s main character, the daughter of the historian, leads the reader from London to Amsterdam to Istanbul to various parts of Romania and Bulgaria in search of the truth of her father’s past and the supposed death of her mother. Although it is a vampire story (I am not a vampire fan), it is much more; it is a fascinating trek through a part of history few know much about and about which little has been written.
Note: I doubted I would finish it by year’s end because this novel is 642 pages long. However, I found the story and history so compelling that I finished it before Christmas.
A young woman, Alexandra, travels to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a job as an English teacher in part to help her recover from the strange disappearance (and probably death) of her brother. She has barely arrived when she helps an elderly couple and the man with them. By accident she ends up with an urn of ashes in a bag when her luggage and theirs gets a bit mixed up. The ashes are inside an ornately and unusually carved box with the name Stoyan Lazarov engraved on it. She sets out to find them with the help of a young cab driver.
As they set out on this journey, they discover they are being followed but have no idea why. The cab driver whom she calls Bobby has keen observation skills which mystify her at first. They find part of the family and then unfortunate things occur to many they meet who are relatives or are connected to the man whose name is on the box. Without initially realizing it, they become involved in Bulgarian politics and political corruption as they try to unravel the story of the box and the man whose ashes it contains.
As I read this novel, which is both a lesson on the horrible Soviet occupation of Bulgaria and human determination and resilience, I became entranced with the history and culture of Bulgaria. If you want a glimpse into another culture and its history and the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape, I highly recommend this book. It is also a mystery story that keeps the reader going.
The author also wrote an earlier book called “The Historian” which is a novel about the history of Vlad the Impaler who is the real person behind the Dracula stories. I plan to read that novel as well.
Three books but since one was tiny, “The Strange Library” by Haruki Murakami, and two might not count since I did not read all of them?? At first I thought the Murakami book might be a children’s book until I arrived at the end; it definitely is not a children’s book. This young boy goes to the library to check out books like he usually does and finds a different woman at the circulation desk. She gives him some odd instructions about where to find new books after he returns the books he has already borrowed. He has to walk through a sort of maze, meets some very strange people, and various unpleasant events occur. And the end is terribly sad. The book is short, with a fold up cover and illustrations of all sorts on every other page. The back cover is sort of like a mandala.
Then I tried to read “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang but only managed to get half way and quit. This is highly unusual behavior for me because if I start a novel, I finish it no matter what. In this case, reading about a woman who steals a dead friend’s unpublished novel and makes it her own which becomes a best seller and then whines when she is attacked because she is white and the friend is Chinese and some question whether is she committing cultural appropriation and is this ok. There is also a lot about the intricacies and unfairness in the publishing industry with so much detail that I gave up. Do I feel guilty? A little.
The third book is “Cheating Death: The New Science of Living Longer and Better” by Dr. Rand McClain. I read most of this nonfiction book, picking and choosing the parts that seem most relevant to my own life and health. I highly recommend this book because it gives useful advice about supplements that can help with sleep, arthritis, diabetes, etc. instead of using some of the usual NSAIDs and some prescription drugs. However, he is not anti-many popular medicines like metformin, for example, so this is not an anti-prescription medicine book. There is a very informative chapter, “Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy”, that details the pros and cons and suggests certain foods to eat, e.g. cruciferous vegetables, to counter some of the negative side effects. This book is useful in many ways. He also discusses some cutting edge therapies that are not available to most people but might be of interest to those searching for what is new and innovative regarding aging.
This novel surprised me by being a page turner. Once I read through the first couple of chapters, I had to keep going. In Southern California the Salton Sea, once much larger and the home of a thriving resort, now has shrunk and only a few people live there. Not far away lies the Imperial Valley, one of the largest agricultural regions in the US which is close to the Mexican border. This is the setting of the story of the little town of El Valle, the surrounding areas, and the tale of two families, one rich, white landowners, the other Mexican-indigenous. Mal, one of the main characters, has always lived on El Valle, worked hard, tried to forget the disappearance of her sister, and raised two daughters alone. Another local girl goes missing, then a week later her youngest daughter also goes missing. Frantic, she searches for answers, wonders if there is a link, and keeps dreaming of the local, indigenous legend of the horse headed woman, El Siguanaba. Meanwhile readers learn about the long friendship and affair between Mal’s oldest daughter, Griselda, and the son of the valley’s largest, white landowner, Mal’s difficult, disabled mother, her father, and brother’s, one of whom is running for office after going to Stanford, and the youngest brother, Benny, who is now a detective. Not only does this work of fiction combine Latinx and indigenous cultures, it also addresses environmental collapse, family secrets, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.
Translated from French and written by a Senegalese author, this novel takes place during the time of colonialism and the slave trade. In Paris of 1806, a famous botanist, Michel Adanson, is dying. He never has finished the botanical work to which he dedicated his life, and as he lays dying, his last words are the woman’s name “Maram”.
His daughter finds an unpublished memoir hidden in a cabinet. It is the story of his younger life, what happened to him in Africa, all addressed to his daughter so she can understand his story and the meaning of his last word. It is a tale both strange and sad, filled with healers and magic and tragedy. Maram, a fabled revenant, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, was captured and sold into slavery but managed to escape. While working on his quest to find new plants, Adanson hears about this woman and becomes obsessed with finding her. His guide, Ndiak, the son of a chief, accompanies him everywhere and they become friends. This is a story of adventure, romance, and the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade.
Note: The author won the International Booker Prize for his other novel, “At Night All Blood Is Black”. Readers of this will miss several books I am reading because I am a judge for a literary context and cannot discuss what I am reading for the next several weeks.
This is a sort of travelogue, memoir, and recipe book. The author begins in Odessa and travels south from there to the port of Constanza in Romania as well as various other seaside towns in Bulgaria, then to Istanbul. After spending more time there she heads east to all the ports and some inland cities near Turkey’s Black Sea coast.
I hope to learn new information and become a little more enlightened when I read–especially when reading non-fiction. This book did not disappoint. Here are a few of the things I learned:
-Odessa is a very old and once a very international city. At one point it had the second largest Jewish population in Europe. Now only about 1/3 of the residents are Jewish. Many of the restaurants serve traditional Jewish food even if not Jewish. Once in the past, Mark Twain visited there and made it famous for its ice cream.
-In Constanza, Romania, she witnessed a huge Navy Day celebration with booming gun salutes. Once upon a time, this city was famous for its Casino which now is just a glorious ruin. Here a breakfast mainstay is polenta with a mushroom topping. The author apparently liked the food because this section contains more recipes.
-Varna is the main seaport city in Bulgaria. The author’s main quest here was to see the gold, yes, gold. Once upon a time, this city was a major Roman port. Now the Museum of Archeology houses a spectacular collection of ancient gold. “Breastplates, bracelets, burial gifts, regal-looking head pieces, figurines, and pendants–all gold–shone for attention. The silent Midas room was deafening, ringing out with finery, treasure and opulence. And the loudest, biggest treasure of all, was the smallest. Tiny pendant earrings, almost inconceivably old, dating back 6000 years….these earring are the oldest ‘worked gold’ in the world. They belonged to the first known culture to craft golden artifacts, and they lived here, on Bulgaria’s section of the Black Sea in what some archeologists consider the oldest prehistoric town. But it was not gold that made this area wealthy; it was salt which was mined nearby. The world salary comes from the Latin word ‘salarium’–a Roman soldier’s stipend to buy salt.
-She goes to Istanbul and then on to Turkey’s Black Sea towns, Amasra, several a bit inland, Sinop, Trabzon, and Rize. Sinop has a particularly good harbor. There is a saying that the Black Sea has three safe harbors, July, August, and Sinop. This is in an area often targeted by Cossacks who crossed the Black Sea to raid these more prosperous areas. The town also houses an infamous prison where Russian convicts taught Turkish cellmates how to make model ships for which the town is now famous.-More than 3/4 of the world’s hazelnuts are grown in this area of Turkey. However, that did surprise me as much as the tea, yes, tea. When I think of Turkey, I think of that thick, strong Turkish coffee. However, Turkey is the fifth largest grower and exporter of tea in the world. The tea grows in the fog and mist on steep slopes that end at the sea. Several photos in the book illustrate the lush green mountains covered in tea bushes.
-When I think of Hagia Sophia, I think of the spectacular building in Istanbul, the one that has withstood invasions and earthquakes. But there is another one. On the western edges of the city of Trabzon, there is a smaller, more tranquil Hagia Sophia, one of the Black Sea area’s most spectacular monuments. It was built as a church in the 13th century, converted to a mosque, then to a cholera hospital, then a museum and finally back to a mosque in 2013. The ceiling and walls are covered with frescoes that for a long time no one knew existed until they were restored.
In addition to all the tales of her adventures and the ordinary people she meets, the book is filled with recipes that are specialties of the areas she visited. I’ve taken some ideas from several to experiment with new dishes like combining Swiss chard and sultanas (golden raisins) with chopped onions and garlic sautéed in olive oil and served over Basmati rice.
“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars. Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil your chest.”
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big and grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be a nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough…People don’t know what’s enough. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
In a rather ordinary, small, dismal Connecticut town an elderly woman, suffering from dementia, saves a 19 year old boy from committing suicide. She takes him in and this act of kindness transforms both their lives in unexpected ways. While taking care of her, he also finds a job at a local fast food restaurant where his cousin works as well as several others whom many would consider lesser people. They help each other, form tight bonds, and develop unlikely friendships that reveal how caring and empathy can make all the difference in people’s lives.
This novel is touching, sad, and joyful all at once. These are poor ordinary people trying to survive the best way they know how. For many readers it will be a glimpse into the way many people in this country (and, indeed, the world) actually live–poor, struggling to survive, but also kind and caring.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
writingontherim 