This novel was published a hundred years ago. Reading it made me ask myself what’s changed and what remains the same.

This meticulously researched novel portrays the Sri Lankan civil war through the eyes of Sashi, a medical student in Jaffna. In Tamil culture, family loyalty is valued, yet her family is torn apart “like an old newspaper,” beginning with the death of her eldest brother, a doctor, in in a senseless attack.

This unusual novella, written with a single paragraph break, plunges the reader into a series of scenes recalled by a dying Chilean priest, Father Urrutia Lacroix. Following his graduation from the seminary, he recounts a weekend visit to the estate of the famous critic Farewell. The literary guests converse about poetry in the the critic’s library, watched over by “a dozen mounted heads, including a pair of pumas bagged by Farewell’s father.”

Christopher Gaze is the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s 36-year-old Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach. He began writing the story of the Bard during COVID, when lockdown forced the company to cancel two seasons in a row. Bard stayed alive with the determination of the company. Helped and supported by many friends, they went online during the pandemic, venturing into film production and focusing more on education.

It was the bit about the pistachios in the subtitle—a subtle hint at the tone—that made me determined to read Ayoade’s book. His aphorisms veer between the zany and the profound.

Jane Thynne’s latest WWII espionage thriller features the investigative team of Stella Fry and Harry Fox, previously seen in her prewar novel Midnight in Vienna. Both characters intrigue readers with their internal contradictions.

Barnett’s novel portrays human dilemmas we all face: love, loyalty, duty, and our tendency to wonder about the roads not taken when our lives brought us to crucial choice points. What work would we pursue? Who would we choose as friends? As partners, which leads ultimately to who our families will become? How much of our inner drives and ambitions can we sacrifice for the sake of our partners and children? How can we find courage to go on when we discover that choices that seemed right at the time return to haunt us in retrospect as terrible mistakes. What, if anything, we can we do to compensate for these old errors?

The daylight Edinburgh so delightfully portrayed by Alexander McCall Smith in this story of friendship among student flat mates could hardly be more different from the dingy gang-ridden nighttime underbelly seen through the eyes of Ian Rankin’s pessimistic police officer John Rebus. Yet the themes raised in the two novels have more in common than a first glance suggests.

After finishing the The Shadows of Men, the last Wyndham and Bannerjee novel in 2021, I waited eagerly for the next to come out. In spite of their personal differences and the colonial atmosphere that shadowed their friendship, I hoped that Suren and Sam would work together again. It took four years before The Burning Grounds came out, and it proves a worthy successor to the previous five novels that portray Calcutta in the run-up to Indian Independence.

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.