Tag: Books

top ten books of 2024

wanderessence1025's avatar December 30, 2024

I choose many of my books for the year either based on my planned travels for the year, or from my huge book collection. On this year’s list, I picked books that took place in Colombia, Japan and Bali. I read 52 books in total, with four taking place in Colombia, four in Bali, Indonesia, 24 in Japan, and others in miscellaneous places. In all, I read some 14,600 pages. Because many of them were short Japanese books, the average length of books I read was 280 pages. I also read 5 short story collections. No wonder I don’t seem to get much else done!

Sadly I fell short in reading nonfiction, although I had many nonfiction books on my list. I hope to improve on that in 2025.

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My 2024 Reading Bookshelves

Here, you can see my 2024 Year in Books. And below are my 10 favorites + one bonus book. 🙂
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At the End of the Matinee, My Brilliant Friend, and An Artist of the Floating World

1) At the End of the Matinee by Keiichirō Hirano *****

I loved this book. The two characters, classical guitarist Satoshi Makino and journalist Yoko Komine, are deeply drawn and sympathetic. Yoko heard Makino’s music when she was younger and when she finally meets him after one of his concerts, they form an immediate bond. But they lead complicated lives; Makino lives in Tokyo but performs all over the world. He seems to be in a slump with his music and much of the story is about his struggle to revive his career and how meeting Yoko affects him and his music.

Yoko is a journalist who lives in Paris but is assigned to work in the war zone in Baghdad; she has a fiance, Richard, who seems a rather blah and superficial American. After a bomb attack in Baghdad where Yoko just misses being killed, she later finds she cannot sleep and is suffering from PTSD. She is the daughter of a Japanese woman who was on the fringes of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki and a Yugoslavian father who is a famous filmmaker. Her father was largely absent from her life, but she develops a relationship with him when she learns to speak English. His films are thought-provoking works exploring the conflicts in Yugoslavia and both Makino and Yoko find a common bond in their appreciation of his films and the musical scores to them.

The meeting between Yoko and Makino leaves a lasting impression on both of them and both of them think often of each other when apart and cannot wait to meet again. The story tells of their attempts to get together, and all the barriers that contrive to keep them apart.

2) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante *****

Usually I never read a book after watching a movie or TV series based on it, but in this case, I found the series of My Brilliant Friend so intriguing, that I decided to read the book. This is the first of four of the “Neopolitan Novels,” and now, since I’ve seen seasons 1-3 of the series, I want to read the other books. The book gives so much more context and goes into the characters’ heads more than the series can do, so I think reading it adds much depth and understanding to the story. It tells the story of a post-war Naples neighborhood, in the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on the close yet fraught friendship between Elena Greco, known as Lenù, and her “brilliant friend,” Raffaella Cerullo, known to Elena as Lila.

I love the writing of Elena Ferrante, pseudonymous Italian novelist, and look forward to reading more of her works.

3) An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro *****

This book seems on its surface an ordinary and quoditian story about an elderly artist, Masuji Ono, and his life after World War II, as Japan is rebuilding and modeling itself on American-style democracy. He is the narrator, and a rather unreliable one at that. He draws you in, and you sympathize with him, but there is innuendo by the characters who he encounters, wispy & ephemeral suggestions, that he is not without guilt in helping to contribute to, and even encourage, the war effort in Japan.

Ono was educated in a community of artists who painted “the floating world,” that world of geisha houses, evening entertainment districts lit with lanterns, the nocturnal pleasures found in pre-War Japan. It was when Ono decided he wanted to do something more substantive and meaningful that his art seemed to delve into criticisms of the old businessmen and politicians who sent the young men to war; at another time, he ended up painting provocations against China, political posters that encouraged the war effort. His life pivoted from heroic to traitorous to heroic. His reputation became tainted, and he felt regrets over things he had done, but he insisted that what he did was suitable at that time; it was the best he could do under the circumstances. In fact many of the older generation of businessmen and politicians that sent young men to war ended up committing suicide by seppuku, in Japanese “self-disembowelment,” and it seemed some of Ono’s acquaintances and even one of his daughters seemed to suggest such might be appropriate for him.

I found Ishiguro’s writing very interesting as, in a very matter-of-fact way, he showed Ono delve into these moral dilemmas while at the same time going back in time to his artistic training, his encounters and misunderstandings with other artists. Then, in the current time, he interacts with his grandson and daughters as he tries to secure his youngest daughter’s marriage and his own reputation.

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The Sound of Things Fallling and Mad Honey

4) The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez *****

The sound of things falling: people getting shot on the street, airplanes falling out of the sky, a whole society falling prey to violence due to political factions and drug cartels. In this excellent novel, young lawyer Antonio Yammara looks back on the insane world of Colombia in the 1980s when Pablo Escobar was at war with Colombia’s government forces and seemed to rule the country with his Medellín drug cartels, his assassinations, and his terrorist attacks. Pablo Escobar was finally shot in 1993, ridding the country of what had been a long shadow over its history.

Pablo Escobar once had a zoo called Hacienda Nápoles, from which a hippo had escaped in 2007; the hippo was shot dead in the middle of 2009, when this story begins. This incident brings back a memory to Antonio, that of a man named Ricardo Laverde, a pilot, who seemed unassuming and even meek upon their meeting. It wasn’t long before Laverde was murdered on the street while Antonio was walking with him; Antonio also took a bullet but wasn’t killed. This incident led him to investigate Laverde’s life, which led him to discover disturbing things about him and about Colombia all the way back to the 1960s.

I love the way this book is written, although the timeline is a bit difficult to follow. The story is told in a straightforward manner and the reader is spurred on the learn more about Ricardo Laverde and how knowing this man impacted Antonio’s life, as well as how Pablo Escobar’s power tragically affected an entire generation.

5) Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (Kindle)*****

I loved the feeling I got while reading this novel, so I was sad when it came to an end. Just like the one semester I lived alone in Japan, teaching English at a university, I experienced a certain feeling of bliss and contentment by simply immersing myself in Japan. It’s a feeling of basking in solitude and in nature, in losing oneself in the tastes and textures of food and drink… and in soaking up the overall atmosphere and even melting into it. Like the main character, from whose viewpoint the story is told, Tsukiko, I was middle aged (actually quite older than her 38 years), and walked home to my tiny apartment each evening, stopping at least a couple times a week at a cozy wood-paneled bar to imbibe in a drink and eat the delectable fish prepared with great care by the owner. I didn’t meet anyone else there, except the friendly bar owner, who could speak a bit of English.

Tsukiko, on the other hand, goes often to a bar, Saturo’s, where she mainly eats and drinks (a lot) alone, but from time to time sits at the bar near “Sensei,” an old teacher (30 years her senior) of hers from high school. At first their relationship echoes their student-teacher relationship, with Sensei gently chastising Tsukiko for not paying attention to certain lessons in school. He recites Haiku to her and tells her his impressions of her as his long-ago student. Soon, Sensei reveals his interests to Tsukiko, inviting her to see his old battery collection or to go mushroom hunting. Tsukiko herself doesn’t seem to have many interests of her own, but finds Sensei to be dignified & old-fashioned, and she finds the way he appreciates simple things intriguing. She even admits of herself: “…as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn’t able to ally myself with time.”

They slowly develop feelings for each other, but these feelings take their sweet time to bloom. The slow-motion building of their emotional connection is fascinating to watch. They even go periods of time without seeing each other, and later, after Tsukiko confesses her love to Sensei, she goes to great lengths to avoid him, telling herself not to hope for any reciprocal feelings from him.

Both characters live lonely existences, but they don’t seem to mind being alone. They both think they’re perfectly happy being alone, but when they become closer, they add a depth and richness to each other’s lives that they couldn’t have imagined.

This could be a book I return to many times, just to recapture that feeling I had while living in Japan, a feeling I hope to recapture this fall as I return to Japan without having to work there. I hope to be able to bask in the feelings of contentment I felt when I was there before.

6) Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult & Jenniver Finney Boylan *****

I was intrigued by this book from the beginning, and I loved the way the co-authors started with the day of the alleged murder of a girl, Lily Campanello, and then went backwards in time and forward in time from that day, slowly unraveling any preconceived notions the reader might develop along the way. It turns out Asher McAfee was Lily’s boyfriend of only 3 months. He was found in Lily’s house holding Lily, who passed out with a bash to the head; shortly thereafter Lily dies. Asher becomes the prime suspect in her murder.

The story is told from the points of view of Asher’s mother, Olivia McAfee, a beekeeper who many years ago left an abusive relationship after hiding bruises for years, and from the victim Lily’s point of view in the months leading up to her death. Secrets are revealed, about Lily’s gender transformation, about Asher’s violent temper, about Olivia’s constant excuse-making in her marriage about her husband Braden’s abuse of her.

The story moved quickly and kept me engrossed. It is a long read, but I found it intriguing. I also learned a lot about marital abuse, beekeeping, and transgender identities and struggles.

I thank Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine for the ARC.

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The Samurai’s Garden and All the Lovers in the Night

7) All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami *****

How I love stories set in Japan that revolve around lonely people who blithely live their lives, come to a realization that something needs to change, and try, however tenuously, to connect with other people. I’ve read a number of similarly-themed books in various forms with different characters, yet all of them are unique because of the circumstances and people. In this case, the protagonist Fuyuko Irie is a proofreader in her late 30s who doesn’t connect with the people in her office, so when she is offered the chance to become a freelancer and work from home, she happily accepts the offer. However, working from home isolates her even more.

When Fuyuko realizes eventually that her life has nothing to it, that she cannot even speak to her boss Hijiri about anything of interest in her life, she decides something needs to change. She begins drinking at all times of day. She looks into taking some classes at a cultural center, but after several unsuccessful attempts, she passes out and loses her bag. A kind man in his 50s, Mitsutsuka, helps her when her bag can’t be recovered and they end up meeting in a cafe sporadically, then once a week, and finally twice a week, with some periods interspersed where Fuyuko backs off, fearing her intensifying feelings, and doesn’t show up. Fuyuko thinks often of Mitsutsuka yet she knows nothing about him except that he is a high school physics teacher. They both have an interest in light, and Mitsutsuka teaches her everything he knows about light. I love how the author uses light imagery and nature as reflections of Fuyuko’s ever-deepening feelings.

Fuyuko has a small circle of women friends, one from high school, Noriko, who is married with children but never has sex with her husband and is convinced he is cheating on her. Noriko is also having an affair. Fuyuko’s only other woman friend is her boss Hijiri, who is an intense, hard-working woman who sleeps with men whenever it suits her. Often, Fuyuko remains quiet when talking with them because her life has nothing in it except her work, her loneliness and the bad memory of a sexual assault in her senior year of high school. In much of the book, I think Fuyuko is trying to figure out her role as a woman in modern Japanese society, and to find her place amidst the expectations society has of women.

I loved all the layers in this book, and felt emotionally invested in Fuyuko’s life. Just my kind of story.

8) The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama *****

I adored this Japanese novel with its Zen-like quality and the quiet characters. Stephen is a young Chinese man whose parents have sent him from his home in Hong Kong to his family’s seaside home in Tarumi, Japan in September of 1937. They want him to have time to rest and recover from tuberculosis at this quiet town with its sea breezes. The caretaker of the family home is Matsu, an older Japanese man of few words. One day he takes Stephen for a walk to Yamaguchi, a small remote village where a colony of lepers has been forced to live in isolation. There Stephen is introduced to Sachi, a once beautiful woman, whose face (half of it) has been severely disfigured by leprosy. Stephen can see Sachi’s beauty, a beauty that radiates from within as well as the parts of her that are not disfigured. He watches as Matsu comes alive around Sachi. Later, in the village of Tarumi, they meet Kenzo, Matsu’s childhood friend who had once loved Sachi but abandoned her after she was afflicted with leprosy.

Stephen also meets a beautiful young woman, Keiko, who he yearns to connect with. He only meets her a few times but it is obvious there is a bond between them. However, as Stephen is Chinese, he is forbidden to see Keiko by her father during these tense years while Japan is invading China (beginning July 7, 1937), destroying everything in the Imperial Army’s path.

Besides the war in China looming over Stephen’s stay, his mother has informed him by letter that Stephen’s father, an international businessman, has a Japanese woman who he lives with in Kobe. When Stephen confronts his father about this, his father says he’s in love with the Japanese woman and refuses to leave her, but he will never abandon his family.

Between the stresses of the war news and the father’s infidelity, and the clash that inevitably occurs when Kenzo realizes that Matsu and Sachi are seemingly in love, Stephen tries to find peace in his deepening appreciation of the Japanese garden that Matsu so lovingly tends, in the sea and swimming, and in his growing friendship with Matsu and Sachi. It is a heartwarming story of a young man’s awakening to both the horrors and blessings of the world.

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The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

9) The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley *****

I really enjoyed this book. First, I always love a story told from different points of view and moving forward in time. I like the premise, that a person writes something authentic and revealing about himself in a book titled “The Authenticity Project,” and then leaves the book for other people to find it and do what they will with it. The first author in The Authenticity Project is Julian, a 79-year-old man who reveals his loneliness after his wife Mary died; after he writes his story and leaves the book in Monica’s coffee shop, we learn about Monica. Then Hazard, then Riley, then Alice, and so on and so forth. It was a pleasure to read about this little band of people who come together in the material world and form a community, such a refreshing and rare (in this day and age) coming together of people in real life.

In the Acknowledgments, the author tells how she was an addict and in trying to get sober, she started a blog, telling of her struggles and revealing her authentic self. I too write a blog and have revealed much of myself through various blogs over a 14-year period. You do form a community of sorts when you are authentic in telling your truth and in being open to others. Still, I like the community that is formed around Monica and wish for more of that myself, in real life. 🙂

10) Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Kindle) ****

I always enjoy a quiet Japanese read, and although this story is quiet, there is a deep undercurrent of emotion, pain and heartbreak. Toru Watanabe immerses himself in memories of his first love, Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki, who committed suicide. Toru doesn’t seem to have much going on in his life; for some reason people befriend him but he doesn’t understand why. He’s certainly not someone with a strong and decisive personality. He doesn’t know why but he somehow became a third wheel to Naoko and Kizuki, who were a couple when they were in high school. Toru doesn’t understand why Kizuki killed himself, and hadn’t noticed any hints that he might do such a thing.

After Kizuki’s suicide, Toru tries to be there for Naoko, but she is struggling with her own mental health issues and in fact stays of her own accord in a kind of self-healing place with an older woman and other societal misfits who also have emotional issues. There are apparently no doctors at this facility and it seems it is like a commune removed from the real world. And the “patients” expect to be healed by the community and by themselves from their emotional traumas.

Toru seems disillusioned by the world, has no direction until he decides to to man up and be whatever Naoko needs him to be. But Naoko really doesn’t seem to need him or want to improve her life. She says she wants to be better, but she has been too devastated by Kisuki’s death, as they were close since they were children. She seems unable to escape her grief. It is frustrating for Toru, and for the reader, that she is so aloof and unreachable.

Overall, I liked the story, which took place in the late 1960s mostly in Tokyo, with a lot of musical references like the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” thus the title.

BONUS: Special Interest Book:
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The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage

The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage by Robert C. Sibley *****

This is an excellent account of author Robert C. Sibley’s experience of walking the 1,400km Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage in Japan. He describes his reason for walking the pilgrimage at first as “escapist”; he wanted “to escape the confines of everyday life.” He admitted he wasn’t a Buddhist; however, pilgrimages have a way of changing people, and he was open to finding a “spiritual sensibility.” Sibley had completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain already (as I have), and this was another quest for him. He wove together interactions with his companions and other henro (pilgrims) he met along the way, Japanese culture, landscape and food, and finally the proper ways to approach and offer prayers in each temple.

He met a Japanese father and son, Shūji and Jun, who were walking together in hopes of solving the son’s “problems.” They became friends on the trail, although it wasn’t until deep into the pilgrimage that Sibley found out the extent of the family’s struggles. He also met another Japanese man, Tanaka-san, who was walking to “fill an emptiness in his heart.” Together, the four of them completed the pilgrimage despite many struggles and blessings along the way.

I don’t think from his descriptions that I could walk such a pilgrimage with all of the mountains on this pilgrimage route. But it was wonderful to share in his experience by reading about it. It seemed a wonderful experience.

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Did you read any great books this year? What were some of your favorites?

my top ten books of 2023

wanderessence1025's avatar December 30, 2023

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!

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Books read in 2023

Here, you can see my 2023 Year in Books.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

my top ten books of 2022

wanderessence1025's avatar December 23, 2022

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 Florida, Ecuador, The Canadian Maritimes, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I read 58 books in total, with 13 taking place in Florida, 6 in Ecuador, 5 in the Canadian Maritimes, 4 in Nicaragua, and 3 in Costa Rica. I even read the entire guidebook for Colombia when I thought we’d have to cancel our Ecuador trip altogether. Altogether, I read 16,897 pages. No wonder I can’t get much else done!

Here, you can see my 2022 Year in Books.

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My journal with books read

Here is my list of top ten books read this year.  I gave 5 star ratings to nine out of ten of these on Goodreads. They are not in order of preference, but rather the order in which I read them. I loved them all.

1. The Body in Question by Jill Ciment (Florida)

I loved the slow boil of this tale of a Florida murder trial where a girl on the spectrum, Anca, is accused of setting her baby brother Caleb on fire and killing him. The focus is on the jury of 6, especially C-2, a-53 year-old woman photographer who is married to a much older famous photographer, and her growing attraction for and eventual affair with another juror, F-17, who is an anatomy professor. The story is told in a tight and compact way with a building tension and an emotional punch. I definitely want to read more of this author.

2. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (The Hague)

I loved this book! The story is a thoughtful and slow reveal of uncomfortable truths in a number of intertwining threads. An interpreter is in The Hague translating in a case involving a former president, a jihadist accused of war crimes. She is uncomfortable with the accused war criminal’s seeming affection toward her. Meanwhile the interpreter falls for Adriaan, a man separated from his wife but still hoping to reconcile for the children’s sake. At a party with Adriaan, she meets the somewhat menacing Kees, a friend of Gaby, Adriaan’s wife, who it turns out is the defense lawyer for the former president. The interpreter’s only friend in The Hague is Jana, who lives in an undesirable neighborhood that is vaguely threatening. The different shadowy characters and the interpreter’s unfamiliarity with The Hague, her rootlessness and her feeling of not belonging, and the characters she meets through Jana, all create a tension that slowly builds and reverberates. Excellent storytelling all around.

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Intimacies and The Body in Question

3. The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua)

I loved this memoir by Gioconda Belli about her life and passionate involvement with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s. She is adept at weaving together her personal life, her loves, and her revolutionary zeal in short chapters that unveil the timeline of her life and her awakening to political causes. From her upper middle class upbringing, she comes to see clearly the inequalities in her society under the dictatorship of Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza Debayle. On December 23 of 1972, a devastating earthquake leveled Managua, and when Somoza absconded with much of the aid offered by other countries, the Nicaraguan people across the board, rich and poor, became united in their opposition of him.

This book is educational about the situation in Nicaragua, the Sandinista movement, and the shameless involvement of the United States; it also reveals the passion a woman has for her country and the revolutionary actions she takes to change the system. In the long run the Sandinista experiment did not work out, not only because of infighting among the revolutionaries but also because of the U.S. attempts to disrupt the movement by supporting the Contras and by imposing devastating economic sanctions. I wonder what would have happened had the U.S. not gotten involved.

4. The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee (Hong Kong)

Janice Y. K. Lee inspired me in 2010, when I was living in South Korea and reading her fabulous book The Piano Teacher; I determined that I must visit Hong Kong after reading it, which I was finally able to do in 2015. Now, after immersing myself in The Expatriates, I discovered that my expat experience was on a much lower socio-economic level than this group of expats who work for international corporations and live in a bit of a bubble in Hong Kong, possibly during the same time period I was visiting. Still, it took me back to my visit there, and I was glad I could place myself in the center of her story.

I worked as a lowly English teacher in China (and in South Korea, Oman and Japan), and our expat community was definitely not as high in the stratosphere as this group of people. Here, Lee focuses on three expat women: young Mercy, a Korean-American Columbia graduate who has found herself adrift in Hong Kong; Margaret, the wife of a senior executive to an unknown company, and mother of 3 children; and finally, wealthy Hilary, in a rocky marriage to an accomplished attorney, a wanna-be mother without a child. These women’s lives intersect in a way that is devastating. Coming to grips with all the havoc wreaked by this unsettling series of events is what propels this fascinating novel about expats living in Hong Kong. I love Janice Y.K. Lee’s writing too!

Here’s an interesting video with SCSreads (Star Crossed Smile) discussing The Expatriates. I love how she describes the expat community in Hong Kong and how it often is living as an expat.

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The Country Under My Skin and The Expatriates

5. Our House in the Clouds: Building a Second Life in the Andes of Ecuador by Judy Blankenship (Ecuador)

I enjoyed this memoir even more than I did the author’s first book, Cañar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador. This one tells how Judy Blankenship and her husband Michael Jenkins built a second home in Cañar, in the highlands of Ecuador. I enjoyed reading the whole process of building the second home and their dealings with locals and neighbors, who were mostly friendly and helpful, but sometimes confrontational. It was fun to read the dynamics between the author and her husband, which were quite entertaining. Although I don’t think I’d like the cold of the “eternal late fall” in Cañar, at an altitude of 10,100 feet, I would certainly enjoy the “eternal spring” of Cuenca, at 8,370 feet elevation. I hope to make it to the Andes in Ecuador as soon as the strikes are over and things have calmed down (June, 2022).

6. The Farm on the River of Emeralds by Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador)

This is a fascinating story by Moritz Thomsen about his years on a farm on the Esmeraldas River in Ecuador. I love how he adeptly reveals layer after layer, exposing the struggles of farming in a relentless environment, unveiling the characters he encounters on the farm, delving into the challenges of the country and its culture, and finally, coming to terms with his complex relationship with his partner Ramón. What I love most is his ability, often belatedly, to get glimpses of his own destructive attitudes and tendencies, and, instead of hiding from them, to admit them with some degree of trepidation, disgust, and embarrassment. He’s brutally honest; he doesn’t shy away. He has a good heart, this man, yet he has his demons and his North American upbringing that he can’t quite escape.

What a wonderful book.

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The Farm on the River of Emeralds & Our House in the Clouds

7. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (South Africa)

What a fabulous book. It’s a quick read about Trevor Noah’s growing up during and just after apartheid ended in South Africa. Trevor tells about how he was “born a crime,” with a white father and a black mother; having sexual relations between races was illegal in South Africa during apartheid. He always had to figure out where he fit in, with the black people, the colored people or the white people. His mother was a stalwart woman who was determined she would give everything of herself to raise her son to be a good and successful man. His great love and admiration for her is evident throughout.

I watch Trevor often on The Daily Show and as I read, I could hear him speaking. The book is clearly in his voice. It is an amazing story of how a child in a very racially divided, often violent, and poor country grows up and finds success despite all the odds.

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Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

8. In the Field by Claire Tacon (Nova Scotia)

I loved this story set in Nova Scotia, which we visited this year for 5 days after Hurricane Fiona. It was interesting in so many ways because of the setting; we had visited many of the towns around the Minas Basin where this took place. There were so many obstacles for the main character Ellie to navigate: her job loss, her husband’s great successes in his field contrasted with her perceived failures, her mother’s loneliness and health and dementia problems, racial issues with her mixed race sons in a primarily white region of Nova Scotia, her own mistakes as a teenager which come back to haunt her when she reconnects with her old dear friend Bernie. Her whole identity is in flux. Who is she and where does she really belong?

9. Bodies of Water by T. Greenwood (Massachusetts/Vermont)

This book is incredibly well written. It draws you in with ordinary details: a woman, Billie, is living her less-than-perfect life with her adopted daughters and her alcoholic, junk-collecting, Italian-American husband Frankie. The story is set in the 1960s, when women weren’t thought of as anything more than servants to their working husbands. When a new couple, Ted and Eva, move in across the street, Billie is thrilled to find a friend in Eva. But a past incident that Billie’s parents forced her to disavow and bury begins to surface. Billie begins to have yearnings for Eva, and these deepest yearnings cannot be denied or brushed under the rug. It turns out Eva reciprocates Billie’s feelings. And in 1960s America, a relationship like theirs was simply unacceptable. The story deals with the struggles of motherhood, marriage, fidelity, freedom, independence, homosexuality, domestic abuse, and finally, the freedom to be one’s own person, to love who one wants to love.

A fabulous book. It’s hard to believe this was T. Greenwood’s first novel.

10. Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet (Florida)

This book is a complex, mulitlayered tale that explores the many facets of being a first generation immigrant who wants to attend college. I guess I’ve too often assumed that immigrant families are thrilled to have their children attend college, but in the case of Cuban-American Lizet Ramirez, her family is upset that she applied for and got accepted to an Ivy League school far from her Miami home without consulting with them first. Lizet has to negotiate going to college without any support from her family; she’s dependent on scholarships and she feels out of place as she’s pegged as one of only a few minority students at Rawlings, a small college in New York.

Lizet gets in trouble at school right away for plagiarism and for failing to meet the rigorous requirements of a demanding class schedule. When she surprises her family by returning home for Thanksgiving, not knowing if she’s going to get kicked out of school, she finds her mother is caught up in defending the right of Ariel Hernandez, a young Cuban boy whose mother died while fleeing with him on a raft from Cuba to Miami. Her mother and her sister, who has a baby out of wedlock, feel Lizet has abandoned them, and her mother is so busy supporting Ariel’s cause that Lizet is unable to talk with her, or her sister or father, about her troubles at school. When the school gives her a second chance, she dives in and is able to save her semester with just-passing grades.

The story is all about not fitting in, with either her family, her Cuban heritage, or the school. She is pulled back and forth between her Miami family’s high drama and her solid dreams to achieve a college education. Sometimes she negotiates this pull with wisdom and maturity, other times not.

I thought the book dealt with a lot of complex issues very well. Although Lizet’s desire to “save” her mother from her involvement with Ariel was frustrating and some of her interactions with her sister and mother seemed rather immature, overall, the story was well-told and kept my attention and interest all the way through.

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In the Field, Bodies of Water & Make your home among strangers

What were some of your favorite books read in 2022?