This past week I read The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits. It was short-listed for The Booker Prize in 2025. It’s fairly short as novels go these days, just 229 pages. The main character, Tom Layward, is in his mid-50s and at a crossroads in his life, though for the first half of the book he doesn’t realize it. After driving his daughter to college for her first year away from home, he suddenly finds himself embarking on a road trip cross-country with no prior planning, visiting people who once were important in his life, pondering their connections with his current life. He’s confused about his relationship with his wife, which appears to be unraveling, but Tom is not a complainer, not a whiner, nor does he over-analyze. That’s for the reader to do!  He’s not into angst per se. He’s exploring the past and himself as he is now, and as he was growing up, in his 20s, and after his marriage. The novel is conversational, with plenty of dialogue, but more than that, Tom is in continual dialogue with himself, or is trying to be. 

I found this a compelling read, especially so given the riveting conclusion, and blessedly brief, which makes it sound as though I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but Markovits’s approach to the novel could not have borne 400 pages, and it’s a much better book for its brevity.  

I did not choose it because it was on the Booker Shortlist; in fact, I didn’t know it was until I opened the box. Oddly, I’ve now read three books that were on that shortlist; the other two being Audition by Katie Kitamura and The Land in Winter by the British writer Andrew Miller. I’ll be frank—I did not “get” Audition. It did not resonate with me on any level whatsoever. It, too, is a short novel. Have you read it? I would love to hear other opinions.

I was attracted to The Land in Winter because it is set in England during the historic harsh winter of 1962-1963. That aspect of the novel intrigued me, when the setting becomes an important character and catalyst in the novel. I was interested in the characters, two couples, very different from each other, living in the rural West of England. Because they live on adjoining landed properties, the brutal winter makes them interact, and forces them to be closer than they otherwise would have been—yet they have little in common. I enjoyed reading it, but towards the end, the events that unfolded were very strange, to the point of being downright bizarre. The plot then steers back on course—very different.   

Books of the Week

 It's going to take me awhile to get back into the groove of book blogging, as evidenced by the generic header for this post. 

Over a week ago I finished reading The Searcher by Tana French, the first book in the Cal Hooper series,  published in 2020. Cal Hooper, the former Chicago police officer and a newcomer to a small Irish village in the west of the country, is a wonderful, multi-dimensional character. I very much enjoyed the reading--it swept me away in a good way. But in many ways, it was a hard and sad story, despite the well-drawn characters. I do heartily recommend it, and the writing is brilliant. 

I listened to Snow in April, a short Rosamunde Pilcher novel. This easily could have been a much longer book, and I think it would have benefited greatly from the typically lengthy Pilcher treatment. I enjoyed every minute, especially the misadventure of siblings Caroline and Jody to Scotland. If you enjoy Pilcher, you will like this--It was published in 1972, and is an earlier book than many of hers that I have liked.  

I'm currently reading a historical novel by Beatriz Williams. Our Woman in Moscow has a dual timeline, and I don't feel it's effectively managed.  The chapters for each timeline do not dovetail well, and at times the entries seem pointless because they don't move the plot forward at all. A frustrating read, but I discovered all of this too late, so will plow through to the end. The setting's era is 1940-1952, and is set in Rome, Paris, New York, and Moscow. Twin sisters, each very different, but they, too, are not well-drawn. I just don't believe in them. Sigh. I've enjoyed others of Beatriz Williams's books, but this is not one of them. 

I have a new laptop computer and it will take me more time than I have right now to add images and links. I will be back! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books I Loved Reading in 2025

 So far in 2026, I’ve finished only two books! (I'll post about them later.) The problem is simple: I’ve not set aside time in each day, or in each week to read. Work has been unusually busy-frantic this year. My colleagues and I agree this status is at least partly due to the severity of the winter, with many people staying indoors digging into their genealogy, leading them to urgently seek help.

In 2025 I had a wonderful reading summer. I worked, but also had plenty of time to read. My favorite book of the year I read in July. Fox by Joyce Carol Oates weighs in at 652 pages, and I had no problem finishing it in ten days. I’d never read Oates before, had no inkling what a roller-coaster explosion of an experience it would be. It’s a tale of a fascinating sociopath, and what amazed me most is how Oates takes the reader inside the head of such a man—his dizzying, relentless stream of thoughts, the way he “manages” all the people around him—in fact, how exhausting it must be to be a sociopath! The other characters more than share their weight with him--they are all so unique and astutely drawn. And Oates is in her 80s! This novel proves her to be at the height of her powers. 

In August, I read the new mystery by John Banville, The Drowned, the fourth of his Strafford & Quirke novels written under his own name. Prior to the most recent four, he wrote Quirke novels using the pen name Benjamin Black. The best thing about reading Banville is his agility with language. All a description needs is one or two sentences and the reader sees and knows everything. The setting is Dublin and environs, sometimes hopping south to Wicklow, and the time is a noirish 1950s. His take on Irish culture at the time is so illuminating—the tension of being a minority “Prod” (Protestant) in the Republic of Ireland. Because Banville’s characters are both Prods and Catholics, even though the conflict between them is never stated, it hangs on every word of dialogue. Banville has sympathy for his Prod characters, of whom Strafford is the most notable--He opens up a view of Irish life that I hadn’t encountered before. Prods are the descendants of the English who ran the country before 1922, and their descendants have been in sharp decline as far as status and wealth are concerned ever since. I’m so glad I bought the book because it is definitely worth a re-read.

Another top read of 2025 I read in February or March last year. Bernhard Schlink, one of my favorite authors, had a new book The Granddaughter, which is, I think, definitely his best, if not one of his best. Schlink is most well-known for his novel The Reader, which was made into a top-rated film. Not one of my favorites of his, however.

Other favorites of 2025—All published in 2025 except for Elizabeth George’s mystery. Have you read any of these? 

The Wild, Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

The Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George

 

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell and Other April Reading!

I've been working long and hard this month, but I've managed to make time for my reading adventures. I've had to face it: It's essential for my mental health, the care of my brain, and my mood in these terrible times.

Earlier this month, Garth Greenwell won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Small Rain. I was lucky--I checked in with my fabulous library in Glens Falls--Crandall Library, and they had a copy. It has been a good read for me emotionally. 

Like the narrator, I am completely leery of doctors and their interventions. But when the narrator develops a life-threatening condition that leaves him hospitalized in the ICU for 2 weeks, he mentally scrambles to find a way to accomodate what's happening. He's only in his 40s, completely unprepared for such a venture, and feels an incapacity to handle what usually occurs only in people of poor health in their 60s and 70s. Yet he hustles, as we all do, to find ways to let his mind escape what's happening. Unwittingly he focuses on recent, past traumas, but also on the many wonderful relationships in his life. For me, as a hospital-phobe, due largely to a life-threatening condition that happened to me in 2012 and was not handled well, to say the least, I totally resonated with the narrator's experience and his all-too-real, understandable anxieties. A great novel! I know, it sounds too grim, but I highly recommend it for its veracity to human experience.

 

I am also nearing the end of The Distant Hours by the Australian author Kate Morton. It's 563 pages, and frankly, would have been improved by some tightening, to say the least. However, I have enjoyed it. Gosh--I only paid $1.99 for the ebook, so that's something. It's set in England, mostly during the early years of World War II, but also bounces forward in time so that the daughter of a very young evacuee can visit the "Castle" and the people who offered her mother shelter during the Blitz. A complex family saga, much more complex a story than I've described here. Although overly long, it is compelling. I recommend it!

 

Really Reading Now, As Much as I Can

Yes, another long time away from this blog. But these days I need to read and share with others, like I need to breathe. 

I've been immersed in the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy's recently published The Wild, Dark Shore. Without knowing what I was doing, I chose it as an Audible book. If I knew then what I know now, I think I would have chosen to read it as a book rather than an audiobook. The writing is beautiful, and because I am not a stellar listener, I feel I'm missing some of its beauty. 

 

I'm still wrapped up in it, nevertheless, and am near the end now. Powerful writing! The novel is set on Shearwater Island in the Antarctic. A friend asked if it's set in the future, and I would say yes, a bit in the future. Shearwater Island is about to become uninhabitable because the ocean is overtaking it, yet one family remains there, though only for a matter of weeks, at which time they plan/hope to be picked up by a ship and taken back to Australia. Wonderful nature writing, yet this novel is a nail-biter as well, and yes, a harbinger of climate disaster. 

I'm only 10 pages from finishing Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated and first published in English in 2008. I just came off being tremendously moved by Schlink's most recent novel, The Granddaughter, and decided, as a project, I would read all of his novels (many of them for the second time). I did read Homecoming back around 2009-2010. But this second reading has been nothing like the first; it has been much, much more startling. 

I reached the ending, and I saw what was coming, though I swear I don't remember. But some part of me remembers, because for a long time, I could not finish the last 30 pages. I did read much of it today, but all of it is so prescient, so unbelievably, incredibly timely that it is horrifying to me. No, nobody dies. No extreme tragedy ensues. But this ending is about our current status--now. A charismatic professor, a person at the helm, leading his students into danger for his own theories and purposes. And in the ADIRONDACKS, no less!! I kid you not!

 So, to rest the mind (!), I'm also reading a Kate Morton novel, The Distant Hours. Have you read that one? It's a very long one, set in England, during WWII to decades later, moving back and forth in time.

A Brief Check-In of Sorts!

 It has been so enormously long since I last posted. I've been happily consumed by satisfying work, and the research for an article I'm writing about the "Hard Winter," 1779-1780, during the Revolutionary War. I'm just barely grabbing moments for non-work reading these days.

A question for any reader out there: Did you ever read a novel set during the American Revolutionary War that you enjoyed, or that you remember reading? I can't recall a single one, other than The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which I really appreciated. 

I'm in the mood for Revolutionary-War era fiction, given my recent research. We're well into the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, and I hope fiction and non-fiction will be appearing, but thus far, given that I have heard nothing about any new historical fiction on this topic, I fear there will be nothing. 

Right now I'm reading the 2024 translation of the acclaimed German author Bernhard Schlink's The Granddaughter. It's so thought-provoking, so fascinating, I'm riveted, but then again, it's not easy reading, emotionally speaking. It's emotionally hard, as are all his novels. Very worthwhile, however. A young woman brought up in the GDR (East Germany) weds a young man from the FDR (West Germany). Lots going on. It all runs so deep. So deep.

I read The Sequel recently, the thriller-mystery novel by Jean Korelitz, and the sequel of her bestseller The Plot. This one was stupendously clever, I grant you, but the characters are colder than ice and worse than that. So if you need a novel to sustain you in harrowing times, this one is not it. 

I really enjoyed Nancy Thayer's audiobook, The Summer We Started Over. Family fiction, set on Nantucket, and I thought it extremely well done. I highly recommend it for these times. Very soul-satisfying. 

I'm sorry I have not provided links to any of these books. If I have time tomorrow or later, I will. I hope you will be able to find them if you are interested.

 

 

 

 

It's August 1st! So Where Are My 20 Books of Summer?

With only one month left until September 1st, I can truthfully "fess up" that my 20 Books of Summer plans have gone bust. I have been reading, yes. But my working hours, and other household challenges, have made a shambles of what I hoped would be a good stab, at least, at my list of 20 Books.

I have just finished listening to An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I'm so glad I listened to the audiobook first, which is replete with audio excerpts of speeches by JFK, RFK, LBJ, (many of those written by Richard Goodwin, Doris's husband), many of which brought tears to my eyes, and Martin Luther King's speech excerpts. So now, just this minute, I have ordered the hardcover, because I must return to this masterpiece of a book again and again and again. I don't know when a book has spoken to me, straight through to the heart, the way this book has. Hence, I've just this minute placed the order for the hardcover edition, which is selling now for only $20.99 at Amazon! I guarantee that this book will make the all the lists for Top Ten Books of the Year. The political and the personal--the personal and the political--all intertwined inextricably into this splendid mixture. I am so grateful to have been alive and totally aware during this decade. It matters a great deal to me to have experienced a period of such high idealism, integrity, and, well, intelligence!

And, in my last post, I was in the midst of reading The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant, which is set in the wilderness of the Idaho mountains. I was a bit uncertain during the first half of the book, but the last half was superb, and I really can say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Somehow or other, I managed to get myself (miraculously) detoured onto a book I hadn't expected to read, which has really riveted me. Motherland: Growing Up with the Holocaust by Rita Goldberg, has been a genuine surprise. Very well written, exceptionally researched, it's the story of the author's mother's youth as a German Jewish immigrant in Amsterdam, and later in Belgium with the Resistance, and then in Bergen-Belsen. While in Amsterdam as a child, her parents were very close with Anne Frank's parents. Indeed, Otto Frank is a constant presence in this book, throughout her mother's life and after the war, throughout the childhood of the author, and largely because the author was his goddaughter. What has been most surprising to me is that this book, to my knowledge, has received very little acknowledgement, but it is excellent. And I have read literally hundreds of books dealing with the Holocaust. 

Excerpt from Reviews:   A groundbreaking second-generation memoir of the Holocaust and its legacy by Otto Frank’s goddaughter—“The extraordinary tale is heroic” (The New York Times).
 
Rita Goldberg recounts the extraordinary story of her mother, Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—first among the Resistance, and then at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. In the words of The Guardian, the story is “worthy of a film script.”

SO! As you can see, I have been a totally serendipitous MOOD reader this summer. Reading happily, but frankly, with not anywhere near enough time to read! That is the only somewhat distressing aspect. 

This has been a Summer!!! Ken and I feel we are constantly reeling from the news cycle. Fingers crossed, we're hoping and praying for the best. And then the tornados hit! Our climate is crazy. We never used to get tornados here, and now they're a threat whenever there are severe thunderstorms. 

Well, wherever you are, I hope the weather gods will be kind(er) to you than they have been.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Outrageous HUMIDs Are in Residence! Where's My Brain?

I know that many people tolerate HOT and HUMID conditions fairly well. Alas, I have never been one of them. My physical and cognitive intolerance of these conditions has definitely become worse over time, but especially over the past few years. I can't think well--and thus I can't work well, obviously. 

But, thankfully, I can read books just fine. (And watch Wimbledon!! It's been so satisfying and so much fun!) 

What I'm reading: Yes, due to my dysphoria, I devoured another Lisa Jewell thriller. This one was I Found You, published in 2016, which received a rating of 3.96 on Goodreads. This was my second novel written by Jewell that I've read this summer, and I was not disappointed. As you know, I'm an eclectic/MOOD reader. When I'm feeling at wit's end, I find myself seeking out a thriller, but not just any thriller, but ones with heart. And Lisa Jewell's novels have been wonderfully twisty and filled with psychological nuances that fascinate, with some likeable characters. I steer clear from horror totally! Not for me! But if you are of a like mind, I recommend Lisa Jewell.

 

Right now I have only one novel going. And that is The Nature of Disappearing by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I absolutely loved her debut novel These Silent Woods, and Ken loved it, too, which we both read in 2022. (Don't miss this debut which is a perfect gem! I want to read it again!) Her second novel is The Nature of Disappearing, which is set in the National Forests of Idaho, the wilderness theme recurring, but this one is a bit darker than her debut. Still very good, so far, though I'm only halfway.  If you love novels set in wilderness, I urge you to try her books! I will post a final verdict when I'm finished. 

 

 

    

 

 

 

Reading Update: Eleanor Oliphant, The Safekeep, and Looking Forward

When times are very, very bad, it is such a solace to have lots of books to retreat to and, yes, be buried by! As of July 1st, we are in a constitutional crisis in this country, and the majority of the Supreme Court, in their presidential immunity decision, has created it. I am reeling...

I was absolutely enchanted by my reading of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.  I wondered why I haven't read it sooner, but I'm so very glad that I read it NOW, while I'm feeling so much despair (about our country). Eleanor is the completely original, wonderful, enjoyable, heart-warming heroine of her own story. I had no idea! I can't think of a book I have thrilled to more in the past few years. And to think I bought it on a sheer whim, when it came up for sale for $1.99 as an ebook. Then I devoured it! What great memories I have of this book to carry me forward! So, yes, I am counting it as one of my Twenty Books of Summer. 

 

The Safekeep by the Dutch author Yael Van Der Wouden (in translation), has received many mega-starred reviews. (To see the excerpts from reviews, click on the link and scroll down to "Reviews.") It was published in June. The wide-spread, though vaguely stated words of acclaim set me on to it. The novel is set in the Netherlands in 1961, and has been widely touted as an historical novel. 

Now that I've read The Safekeep in its entirety, I would agree that it is indeed an historical novel, definitely. But the first half of the novel betrays no evidence whatsoever of that fact. This half of the novel depicts the lives of Isabel and her two brothers and Eva, her oldest brother's girlfriend. Isabel, as a young woman, lives alone (and lonely) in the family house in the east of the Netherlands after her mother's death. When Isabel's brother Louis decides that Eva should stay with Isabel while he is away for 6 weeks for a work project, everything turns on its head. Why does Eva want to stay there, when she knows Isabel dislikes her and is totally antagonistic? And on that note, ensues a huge drama that reaches back to the world of the Netherlands and the Dutch people, especially the Dutch people as a whole, in World War II. 

The Safekeep deserves all the high praise that has been bestowed on it. I will say that for me, at times, it was an uncomfortable read, because of the relationship that evolves between Isabel and Eva, and the deeply unfortunate aftermath. It is so worthwhile--the language and the translation is flawless. I AM so glad that I read it, and I will always remember it, so I recommend it without reservation.

Another book that I've put on my Twenty Books of Summer List.