This is an amazing book: a terrifying catalogue of human ills, a list of inspiring stories about the astonishing amount of good some people have been able to achieve in the world, and a call to action for the morally ambitious.

Every January, I list the books I’ve read in the past year. It’s February, but here goes. Last year I read 95 books, compared to 101 in the two prior years. Sometimes I blog about the books I really enjoy.

The photo shows a current to be read pile. Can anyone relate?

We live in a time, says the author, when “resume virtues” have achieved ascendancy over “eulogy virtues.” It’s hard to disagree. This is a sign of social imbalance. While the young are taught to focus on resume virtues, the deeper and more important eulogy virtues can be learned only through experience and sincere seeking.

Subtitled The Book of Nautical Expressions, this volume was amusing and enlightening. As well as providing arcane knowledge on the origins of some common expressions, it evoked the voices of my Newfoundland-born mother, and my seagoing dad, who served in the RCNVR during WWII.

Amazingly, author Keiran Fox was studying to be a medical doctor when he wrote this thoughtful and deeply researched book. In addition to the main idea expressed in the title, it provides a wealth of context for major thinkers and thought of the twentieth century, as well as more ancient thinkers on whose work so many of these ideas are based.

Set in a small town in Ireland, this amazing story is told through the eyes of a huge cast of characters. Inhabitants of the same village, they are connected in various ways to its troubles, past and present. I was drawn in immediately, as much for the stark beauty of Ryan’s language as for the story itself.

Since childhood I’ve loved looking at the night sky. Though I know little enough about astronomy, Starry Nights on Burnaby Mountain had long been on my radar. On a cool clear evening, I finally attended the event. While waiting to enter the room housing the big telescope, I looked through one of the external telescopes and saw a comet.

For some reason, I expected this book to be funny. Beyond a hilarious incident described in the opening essay, it was anything but. Also unexpectedly, it proved a page turner—not what one expects from a book of essays.

The novel opens on a murky night in Troubles era Northern Ireland. Briefly, we meet a boy who “never strays from” the familiar boundaries of “a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city’s centre.” This child, the product of poverty, ignorance and violence, nurtures a single ambition: “The desire to be someone.”

On the surface, this simple tale relates a frail old man’s imminent separation from the beloved dog he’s no longer able to care for. From the beginning, the reader knows Bo will have to let Sixten go and will blame his son Hans for relocating the animal.

Set in homestead country near Lacombe in the first decade of the twentieth century, the story portrays a disparate group of women with one goal in common: to have homes of their own. This is an era when women had no vote and no property rights.

We meet Seamus sporting his new corduroy trousers, an innocent five-year-old Seamus who dismays his elders by asking the title question with a smile on his face. It will be a long time before true comprehension enters his little heart. “I knew Heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there…she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me that heaven and Belfast were different in that respect and several others.”

Set in the former Greek Leper Colony of Spinalonga, a small island off the coast of Crete, this novel portrays the nature of leprosy, and how society coped with it.

In her inimitable and lighthearted style, the author of Swedish Death Cleaning, (86 when she wrote this book), brings us some of the suggestions that have helped her cope with the challenges of old age.

Sleuth and editor Susan Ryeland is back! In her third outing, her creator combines a jolly romp through a classic style mystery set in 1955 on the French Riviera with a contemporary whodunit that imperils our intrepid editor once again. Susan’s newest adventure showcases the dangerous oddity of a fictional author and reveals some seamier aspects of the publishing world as it grapples with the realities of an era dominated by huge multicultural entertainment corporations which control so much of the visual content that novelists and publishers must now contend with.

Beautifully written, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser portrays deep human flaws and dilemmas in story form. An Australian woman student originally from Sri Lanka witnesses the dogmatism, irrationality and prejudice in the academic world that surrounds her.