I choose many of my books for the year either based on my planned travels for the year, or from my huge collection. On this year’s list, I picked books that take place in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Italy, Texas, and New Mexico. I read 56 books in total, with one taking place in Nicaragua, one in Costa Rica, 14 in Italy, 4 in Texas, and 5 in New Mexico, in all some 17,368 pages. No wonder I can’t get much else done!
Books read in 2023
Here, you can see my 2023 Year in Books.
Valentine, Blood of Brothers and Crossing to Safety
1) Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore (Texas, USA) *****
I love the way this tense and haunting tale is told. In alternating chapters, moving forward in time, from different points of view, it captures the different perspectives of several women and young girls in a small desolate west Texas town during an oil boom in the 1970s. Gloria Ramírez, a young Mexican girl is brutally attacked and raped by a white worker from the oil fields. From out in the desolate oil fields, as her attacker sleeps off his drunken stupor, she somehow stumbles to a farmhouse where Mary Rose lives with her daughter and baby, and where Mary Rose’s husband is struggling with a failing cattle operation. We see the fallout from Gloria’s attack from the women of Odessa, who are generally more sympathetic to Gloria, and the men of the town, who are sympathetic to Dale Strickland, the rapist (the old ‘men will be men’ and ‘she asked for it by getting in his car’ excuses). The characters in this book are artfully drawn and the story pulls you in quickly and doesn’t release its tenacious hold until the end.
Elizabeth Wetmore has graphically depicted the barren Texas landscape, the patriarchal attitudes of the men of Texas, and the racist sentiments toward brown people, especially Mexicans. She captures not only a moment in time, but the long history of Texas, in this engaging yet infuriating book.
2) Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer *****
This is a fabulous history of Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the book leaves off with the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro, Kinzer has added an afterword from 2007. Still, a lot has changed since then, and I’d love to see a follow-up book discussing the last 16 years in Nicaragua and especially the current government under the authoritarian Daniel Ortega.
In this well-written book, Kinzer discusses everything from the Sandinista overthrow of the Somoza regime to the new government’s utter inability to govern once they took power to the United States’ and Ronald Reagan’s determination to get rid of the Marxist Sadinista government by funding the contras in what turned out to be a long and bloody civil war where thousands of Nicaraguans lost their lives. The book reads like a thriller in some ways; anyway it’s a tale that isn’t easily set aside. I wish I’d paid more attention to the situation in Nicaragua when it was happening in the 1980s, but like many Americans, I had my head buried in the sand when it came to foreign affairs. Shame on me. This book is a fabulous rendering of a time of tragic upheaval for a small country that was never a serious threat to the United States. It never should have been treated as one. Blood of Brothers only solidifies my view of the United States as a big bully, and I’m an American.
3) Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (Vermont, USA) *****
Whenever I see Wallace Stegner’s name, a warm feeling comes over me. His name and some world he conjured come to me in a vague sense; I feel that I’ve read him before and loved him, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was I read. So I decided I had better dive in and see if one of his books is the one I read so long ago that I fondly remember.
Crossing to Safety is not the book I remember reading, but I loved it just the same. It’s a quiet novel about two married couples and their decades-long friendship. It has been said it’s the most autobiographical of Stegner’s novels. Despite it seeming on the surface as a quiet novel, there is plenty of tension underneath. Larry and Sally, Charity and Sid. Sid has a huge trust fund, Charity married into it. Sid is a poet, a gentle soul, a man who is content with dawdling and enjoying life, but Charity has big plans for him, for their lives, for everyone’s lives in her orbit. She is a driving force in the novel, and Larry observes her, appreciates her and at the same time judges her. Sally accepts everyone and everything, including her polio that has made her life, and Larry’s, a hardship – and a blessing.
The novel explores marriage and friendship and all the complications therein. Marriage is negotiation, domination, subservience, push and pull. Friendship is gratitude, jealousy, obligation, annoyance and love. Stegner navigates, probes and exposes the complications and the joys of both. What an amazing storyteller.
The Atomic Weight of Love, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, and Olive Kitteridge
4) The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church (Los Alamos, New Mexico) *****
I loved this book about a young woman, Meridian, who was studying to be an ornithologist at the University of Chicago in 1941, near the beginning of World War II. She meets and falls in love with a physicist, Alden Whetstone, and eventually marries him and follows him to Los Alamos, NM, where he is working on a top secret project. She subjugates her dreams to his and becomes his supporter throughout his tenure at Los Alamos. Though he had fallen in love with her for her intelligence and curiosity, once they were married, Alden seldom seemed to appreciate Meri’s intellect. She struggles throughout to find her place in the world. She doesn’t want to have children and she feels she doesn’t fit in with the other wives. She continues her observations of crows in a journal, but not using strict scientific methods. Yet through her studies, and through another man she meets who is twenty years her junior, Clay, she comes to learn about life, sexuality, ambition, and individuality. This story is well written and carried me alongside Meridian’s life effortlessly. Fabulous!
5) It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario (all over the world) *****
This is an amazing memoir by photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who has continuously shown determination under extreme conditions to document the plight of people caught up in war. She documents front line battles, war casualties, desperate refugees, suffering populations such as drug addicts and trans-people, and civilian suffering so that the world can see the truth of what is happening. Her work is ultimately about bringing the truth to light and informing policy decisions.
I think there is an adrenaline surge for people who work in war zones. It must be hard to live a quiet humdrum life after the thrill and terror of being on the front line and seeing death and destruction all around. War takes its toll on many journalists, however, and many have lost their lives or limbs while reporting, filming or taking photos. Lynsey herself endured two kidnappings and was lucky she made it without being killed. She wanted to figure out if she could ever live a normal life, while being married and having a child, and still maintain her independence and her professional life in dangerous places. I think it’s an ongoing struggle for her, as for any journalist, but we can certainly be thankful for the sacrifices Addario makes in bringing the horrors of this world into our consciousness. All my gratitude goes out to journalists and photojournalists like the author.
6) Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Maine, USA) *****
This is a fabulous book and Olive Kitteridge is a most interesting and complex character. We see her from her own point of view, but also from the points of view of the townspeople in Crosby, Maine. I usually dislike interlinked stories that pose as novels, but this one is perfect. Elizabeth Strout is such a deft and accomplished writer that she knows exactly the details and interactions to show. Every detail, every story, has a purpose, not only to reveal the characters in the town, and their own relationships apart from Olive Kitteridge, but to reveal how Olive Kitteridge fits (or doesn’t fit) into their lives. How they see her tells so much about her. Some people dislike her, some find her annoying, some respect her. Her son finds her difficult and avoids her, pushes her out of his life actually, but she loves him fully, with all her heart. Yet, she seems to do things wrong in relationships. She often bungles them by being moody, judgmental, irritable, harsh. She also has a kindness about her that some people, not all, but enough, recognize.
We are all complex characters in our stories. In our quotidian lives, we do the best we can. Sometimes what we do is very good and meaningful, other times utterly inconsequential. Sometimes we are kind, loving, tactful, or quietly observant; other times we are harsh, judgmental, mean-spirited, outspoken, tactless. It’s no wonder this book about everyday people living their everyday lives won the Pulitzer Prize. It deserves it. It describes us all perfectly.
Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Removes, and The Four Winds
7) Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (Santa Fe, New Mexico) *****
This is a beautifully written novel about the life and career of the first Archbishop in the New Mexican Territory, based on the true story of Jean-Baptiste Lamy (October 11, 1814 – February 13, 1888), a French-American Roman Catholic prelate who served as the first Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Not only does Willa Cather bring to life the challenges and hardships faced by Catholic missionaries in the mid to late 19th century, but she brings the New Mexican landscape, as well as the Mexicans and Indians who lived there, to life. The territory becomes a character in and of itself. The other beauty of the book lies in the deep and abiding friendship between the Archbishop and his French-American friend and fellow priest, Father Valliant in the novel. Father Valliant would go on to become Bishop in Denver during the Gold Rush years under the Archbishop’s orders. Their separation would prove to be a great hardship for the Archbishop in his later years.
This beautiful story left me yearning to visit Santa Fe and see the cathedral that Jean-Baptiste Lamy built there.
8) Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg (Kindle) (Connecticut, USA) *****
I loved the way the author came to this story from the back end, revealing each person’s story in the present (after the fire), the near distant past (around the time of the horrific accident), and the far distant past ( the evolution of their relationships). The story centered around a woman, June, whose house burned down from a gas explosion the night before her daughter’s wedding. In the house were June’s ex-husband Adam, her daughter Lolly and her fiancé, Will, and June’s much younger black lover, Luke. June happens to be out of the house when it happens, and after the funerals, she numbly leaves town with the clothes on her back. Slowly the lives come into perspective: Luke’s long-estranged mother Lydia, a young boy who works for Luke in his landscaping business, Silas, and the gay owners of a hotel in Washington State. And the Connecticut town is a character itself: it is a town where rich New Yorkers come for weekends, and where the townspeople provide services for the weekenders.
The book, despite the tragedy, has a quiet quality to it, and it works well. I loved it.
9) The Removes by Tatjana Soli (Western USA) *****
I loved this historical novel set during the late 1800s in the Western territories of the U.S. It tells alternating but related stories of General George Armstrong and Libbie Custer, and also the story of 15-year-old Ann Cummins (the numbered “Removes”), who is abducted by the Cheyenne after they slaughter her family; she spends many years in captivity and has two children while living with the tribe.
Libbie is deeply in love with Custer, who gives her some of the grandest adventures of her life yet, at the same time, causes her great hardship and pain, especially as Custer is a womanizer and is morally bankrupt in too many ways to count. The complicated relationship between white settlers and the U.S. government and the Native Americans is conveyed here with fairness and sympathy for the plight of the people of this country who lived off the land and whose lands were forcefully taken from them. Their way of life was methodically destroyed by the malevolent force of the U.S. government, which never adhered to the agreements they made with the Native American tribes.
In the grand sweep of history are individuals, and it is these people who Tatjana Soli imagines so fully and realistically. Not only did I learn a lot from reading this historical novel, but I developed an interest in this whole period that made me want to learn more.
10) The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (Texas & California, USA) *****
I really loved this book about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. I agree with some of the reviews that poor Elsa Martinelli had so much suffering heaped up her, everything that happened during this period of history, but I still found it fascinating and feel like I learned much about the period of time and the suffering that so many people went through. Even if Elsa is a conglomerate character, the book still tells much about the period and the kind of people who managed to survive, and those who died as well.
It’s the American myth: never accept handouts no matter how much you need them; if you work hard enough you will be okay; never go on strike because that makes you a Communist. All falsehoods that people in this country have touted since the day I was born and since the country’s founding. Elsa said she’d keep working hard and all would be fine. It wasn’t. Elsa refused to accept handouts – until she had to in order to survive. Elsa thought she could never go on strike because that would make her a Communist – well if weren’t for socialist-leaning government programs, the greed of corporations would continue to run people into the ground. Hard lessons learned. I’ve always believed the main purpose of government is to alleviate the worst abuses of capitalism. And with the greed that runs rampant in this country, it is more vital than ever that government and unions take up the cause of the poor.
It is all great food for thought in this sweeping novel. I truly found myself unable to put it down.
The Painter
AND one bonus book:
11) The Painter by Peter Heller (Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico) *****
I loved this painterly and intense book about Jim Stegner, a painter who composes whimsical scenes; his paintings become darker after he’s disposed of a brutish man, Dellwood, who he encounters brutally beating a mare near one of his favorite fishing spots. Jim has a history of violent impulses and had actually shot a drunken man who spoke provocatively about his only daughter, Alce, in a bar. Jim carries huge burdens in the good memories he has of his daughter, and in the unforgivable last conversation he had with her before she was murdered while buying drugs. He has lost his wife Christine and is alone, having escaped Santa Fe to live near the Gunnison in Colorado. When he is called by his agent to return to Santa Fe for a lucrative commission, he grudgingly returns as he hates the pretentiousness of the art scene there. But there are people after him, Dellwood’s brother, Grant, and another man Jason, as well as law enforcement from both Colorado and New Mexico.
The writing in this book is so poetic and the scenes Heller depicts of Colorado and New Mexico are evocative and true to the places. You can’t help but feel sympathy for Jim, even though his dark impulses take over too often.
~ wander.essence ~ 
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