In the great bookshelf purge of the past few years (21 books left until there are none!), I came across faith by Jennifer Haigh. When I went to look it up on Amazon, it turns out I also own the Kindle version. That’s pretty sad. In any event, even with a slow start, I very much enjoyed this sad read. “When Sheila McGann sets out to redeem her disgraced brother, a once-beloved Catholic priest in suburban Boston, her quest will force her to confront cataclysmic truths about her fractured Irish-American family, her beliefs, and, ultimately, herself. Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh follows her critically acclaimed novels Mrs. Kimble and The Condition with a captivating, vividly rendered portrait of fraying family ties, and the trials of belief and devotion, in Faith.” (Amazon) I have mixed feelings about Haigh’s books and this was a better one.

Those who read my posts regularly know that medical history books do not often make my list. I was loaned The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris though, and decided to give it a try. It’s a short volume and quite readable. And, even though the subject was somewhat gruesome, it was interesting. “In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history. Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries—some of them brilliant, some outright criminal—and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.” (Amazon) Looking to expand your knowledge? Grab this readable volume.

I swear I own The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson, but I can’t find it anywhere. It was loaned to me, but the cover is SO familiar. And, how pleased I was to have finally read it. “After an exhaustive countrywide search, the Chicago Tribune announced Amy Dickinson as the next Ann Landers. They wanted a contemporary voice and they found it. Bracingly witty and honest, Amy’s voice is more Nora Ephron than Dear Abby. Readers love her for her brutal honesty, her small-town values, and for the fact that her motto is ‘I make the mistakes so you don’t have to’. Her advice column, ‘Ask Amy’, appears daily in more than 150 newspapers across the USA, read by more than 22 million readers. In THE MIGHTY QUEENS OF FREEVILLE, Amy Dickinson takes those mistakes and spins them into a remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the women in her family who helped raise them after Amy’s husband abruptly left. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates and adult education classes, travels across country with her daughter and their giant tabby cat, and tries to come to terms with the family’s aptitude for ‘dorkitude’. Though they live in London, D.C., and Chicago, all roads lead them back to her original hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny upstate village where Amy’s family has tilled and cultivated the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, and built houses and backyard sheds for over 200 years. Most important though, her family has made more family there, and they all still live in a ten-house radius of each other. With kindness and razor-sharp wit, they welcome Amy and her daughter back weekend after weekend, summer after summer, offering a moving testament to the many women who have led small lives of great consequence in a tiny place.” Turns out, Amy’s daughter went to the school where I work (not that she mentions that except in passing in the book) and the local aspect made me enjoy it even more. And, it was the second book I have read in a week where the character live at the Kennedy-Warren. Funny. This is a delightful, short memoir, and well-worth reading. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in some places and dear in others.

I followed one Maine book with another. Haven Point by Virginia Hume is just the kind of story I like, multiple character’s stories over time. And it was SO engrossing. I had trouble putting it down, which hasn’t happened for me in a while. “1944: Maren Larsen is a blonde beauty from a small Minnesota farming town, determined to do her part to help the war effort––and to see the world beyond her family’s cornfields. As a cadet nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center, she’s swept off her feet by Dr. Oliver Demarest, a handsome Boston Brahmin whose family spends summers in an insular community on the rocky coast of Maine. 1970: As the nation grapples with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Oliver and Maren are grappling with their fiercely independent seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie, who has fallen for a young man they don’t approve of. Before the summer is over a terrible tragedy will strike the Demarests––and in the aftermath, Annie vows never to return to Haven Point. 2008: Annie’s daughter, Skye, has arrived in Maine to help scatter her mother’s ashes. Maren knows that her granddaughter inherited Annie’s view of Haven Point: despite the wild beauty and quaint customs, the regattas and clambakes and sing-alongs, she finds the place––and the people––snobbish and petty. But Maren also knows that Annie never told Skye the whole truth about what happened during that fateful summer. Over seven decades of a changing America, through wars and storms, betrayals and reconciliations, Virginia Hume’s Haven Point explores what it means to belong to a place, and to a family, which holds as tightly to its traditions as it does its secrets.” (Amazon) This was a great book, engrossing, and surprising. I highly recommend.

A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes written by Garcia’s son Rodrigo was wonderful and sweet. I adore Gabriel Garcia Marquez and this short memoir was a delight. I listened to it while getting a root canal and it almost made me forget what was happening. “In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as “Gabo,” was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don’t think we’ll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother’s words, Rodrigo wondered, ‘Is this how the end begins?’ To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of García Márquez’s final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father’s mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity. Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its center is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humor shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savors affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose—and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo’s life and his art.” (Amazon) This was well-worth picking up and the audiobook was wonderful as it was read by the author.

Landslide by Susan Conley was super depressing. I wanted to know what happened, but the story was sad, cold, dark, and not particularly to my liking. Amazon: “After a fishing accident leaves her husband hospitalized across the border in Canada, Jill is left to look after her teenage boys–“the wolves”–alone. Nothing comes easy in their remote corner of Maine: money is tight; her son Sam is getting into more trouble by the day; her eldest, Charlie, is preoccupied with a new girlfriend; and Jill begins to suspect her marriage isn’t as stable as she once believed. As one disaster gives way to the next, she begins to think that it’s not enough to be a caring wife and mother anymore–not enough to show up when needed, to nudge her boys in the right direction, to believe everything will be okay. But how to protect this life she loves, this household, this family?” I’d give this one a pass if I were you. It was disappointing.

Boy, am I behind the 8-ball on this one. Everyone was talking about Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell a while ago and it didn’t spark my interest. Some of this apathy was because I didn’t like her book This Must Be the Place. But, someone left it in my Little Free Library, so I gave it a try. Amazon: “In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.” I really enjoyed it. My one complaint was that Shakespeare’s name was never used in the entire novel. It became kind of annoying. But, otherwise, it was a good read.

I have read a million reviews of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier and, oddly, when I posted a photo of me reading it in front of the fire on our snowy day, two good friends told me they were also reading it right now. So, it’s making the rounds. Amazon describes: “In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer. Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay. Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client. Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame. About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.” This was a GREAT read. Mind-bending, thought-provoking, and just very interesting. My only complaint is I can’t envision it actually happening…

After reading Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, I was eager to find another of her books to enjoy. November 9 was that book. It was such a good read. Romantic and creative, while deeper than I expected. It’s too chick lit to be five-star, but it’s the perfect book to take your mind off reality or stick in your beach bag. “Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day before her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon’s last day in Los Angeles together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always sought for his novel. Over time and amidst the various relationships and tribulations of their own separate lives, they continue to meet on the same date every year. Until one day Fallon becomes unsure if Ben has been telling her the truth or fabricating a perfect reality for the sake of the ultimate plot twist.” (Amazon) Liked Sliding Doors or Jojo Moyes? You will enjoy this.

2022 has had a slow reading start. I read 50% of Colm Toibin’s The Magician, but really didn’t love it. It’s quite long, so that was many days of wasted reading. I picked up The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak because of Reese, of course. It had a bit of a slow start as well, but I did stick with it. “Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love. Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited— her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.” (Amazon) This was a fine read, but I can’t say I loved it. Hoping for a better choice next.