Sanaka Hiiragi

Fiction 2019 | 199 pages

This is another delightful book given to us by our former book club Pam, written by a Japanese author and translated into English.

Mr. Hiraaka holds the position of the keeper of the door to the afterlife.  People who die wake up on his couch, where the after-life FedEx person delivers a box of photographs to Mr. Hirasaka.  People die and enter his chambers.  They must choose one photograph for each year they were alive, and then he puts them on a lantern, and they see their entire life on display.  They can travel back unseen to one of the days of their life and take another photograph.  Once they have see their entire life, they can enter the afterlife and move on to heaven or wherever.

He shepherds three people through this process.  The first is Hatsue, who is 92 and has spent her life being a nursery school teacher.  Then we meet Wanigichi, a criminal who also has compassion.  Finally, we encounter Mitsuru, a nine-year old little girl who dies at the hands of her abusive parents.

Charming, whimsical, easy to read, uplifting, this is a fine short read.  I recommend it completely!

February 2026

Ian McEwan

Fiction 2025 | 303 pages

The year is 2119.  Tom Metcalfe is searching for a poem written in 2014 by the famous Francis Blundy.  There exists only one copy of the corona poem, a birthday gift and tribute to his wife Vivien.  At a small birthday party in which Francis reads the poem to Vivien, she takes the one copy, rolls it up ... and does what with it?  Our protagonist, perhaps an important historian, perhaps just someone who is obsessed, is searching for it.  He studies journals and e-mails of Vivien, Francis, and their friends, especially those who attend the “Second Immortal Dinner,” during which Francis reads his corona for Vivien.

Slow and a bit boring, I decide to stay with this slightly dystopian novel.  I was disappointed that McEwan didn’t insert more visceral descriptions of the decline of the human race.  It is the background, the context, but not very vivid.  However, there is something about it that speaks to me.  It promises a surprise.  Not to mention the irony that I am at a writing workshop and we are learning to craft poetry.  Much has happened in the period Tom studies, 1990-2030. We pay no real attention to profound climate change, tension between countries, nuclear capability, authoritarianism,  and the decline of civilization.  An apt read for these current days.  And the results in this novel are a crisis of dystopian proportions.

And then, just over half way, we meet Part Two. Part Two is an entirely different book.  No more bouncing back and forth between 2119 and 2014.  We are now firmly ensconced in 2014, and we are about to hear Vivien’s story of what really happened with her first husband Percy and her second husband Francis.

Suddenly it is a page turner.  I am balancing this book in the midst of a travel crisis.  Our flight from Cabo (where I had just spent eight days in a writing workshop in Todos Santos) was cancelled.  Abruptly, all of us on flight 2423 are catapulted into the arms of dazed Alaska Airline employees who are befuddled, confused, and anxious.  “What do we do with these hordes of people who need to collect their luggage (because we are still in Mexico and have not yet cleared customs) and every single one of them are seeking new flights?”  They shepherd us quite well I think.  My companion Leslie calls Alaska while we are standing in some line.  (Good thing I checked with my phone carrier before I left to make sure I could make phone calls in Mexico.  Um, not.) She discovers that they rebooked her on a flight the next day.  Then she asks about me, and discovers I am booked on a flight through Seattle in 58 minutes.  I quickly say goodbye to Leslie, run up the escalator with my luggage, cut into line, and deposit my bag again for its trip to Redmond after convincing the agent that I really DID have a seat on the “completely full” flight.  I run to the gate and board, only to find that it seems I am sharing seat 3A with another woman.  All that sorted out, I eagerly open my page turner to finish that last 80 pages.

Though you may struggle a bit with the first half (or maybe not) it is worth sticking with What We Can Know.   But Part Two clearly engages my literary senses.  I recommend it.

The is a book to be read later in the year by the book club of the very same Leslie and my other friend René.  Thank you for the suggestion.

p.s.  A corona (or "crown of sonnets") is a demanding poetic form comprising seven linked sonnets of 14 lines each that explore a single theme.  The final line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet, and the final line of the last sonnet repeats the opening line of the first, creating a continuous circular structure.

February 2026

Kate DiCamillo

Fiction 2000 | 182 pages

February in my book club is always a fun month.  Because it is a shorter month, we typically select a shorter book.  But lately we have been selecting two short books.  This month we will be discussing Grayson by Lynne Cox (see my blog post in November 2024) and Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.

Because of Winn-Dixie is a children's book.  And it is as delightful as they come! In Because of Winn-Dixie, ten-year-old India Opal Buloni learns how to make sense of life after moving to a new town with her preacher father. Opal carries a sadness around with her, as does her father, because her mom left her when she was three. And she just left a town where she had friends and is beginning anew.

Opal goes to the grocery store one day and encounters a dog who is rambunctiously freeing all the vegetables from their shelves.  There are peppers and onions and tomatoes rolling around and the store manager is screaming.  The dog is clearly a stray, with patches of fur missing, a bum leg, and his ribs showing.   Opal claims the dog is hers and, when she needs a name, she can think of nothing else other than the name of the store they are in ... Winn-Dixie.

We follow Opal and Winn-Dixie as they make new friends in this town where her dad is the new preacher.  She meets lovely characters, some adult and some children. The story is about hope, love, kindness, forgiveness, listening, generosity of spirit.

A favorite moment for me is when elderly blind Gloria Dump ("unfortunate last name" Gloria says!) shares a family tradition, Littmus Lozenges, with Opal.  The candy tastes like root beer and strawberry and also … the secret ingredient … sorrow.

This is a really sweet book, a feel-good tale, optimistic and filled with love.  And yet, I had to make certain it was a children's book, because it spoke so clearly to my heart.

Yes, read this little gem.  You can get through it in about two luxurious cups of coffee.  I look forward to our discussion at book club.

February 2026

Stef Penney

Fiction 2006 | 371 pages

I was looking for a book set in the north Canada provinces and territories.  The one is set in the Northwest Territories.   (It is a long story WHY I was looking for a book set in the Territories, but if you want a list of books set in every province and territory in Canada, let me know.  I created such a list.)

The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny, isolated settlement in the Northwest Territories, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River.

On the day that Laurent is killed, his 17-year-old next door neighbor, Francis Ross, disappears.  The plot begins to unfold as Mrs. Ross, our protagonist and narrator, leaves her lackadaisical husband behind and goes in search of her son, traveling deeper into the northern wilds of Canada.  Others also begin to search, including Andrew Knox, the Dove River town magistrate; three men from the Hudson Bay Company; Thomas Sturrock, an amusing American itinerant trader; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide; and a native guide, Jacob, who works for the Company and has chosen to protect Donald Moody, a clumsy young Company representative

One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape - home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives - variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture, before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

Once all of these characters have been introduced, the novel follows their respective journeys - and the discoveries they make along the way - through a land gripped by winter.

Much is left unresolved at the end, so don't look for all the loose ends to be tied together with a bow.  We don't even actually find out who killed Jammet, though a number of reviewers have inadvertantly attributed the murder to various characters.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, romance, mystery and humor into an exhilarating thriller.  I loved her writing.  Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time she wrote this novel and did not actually visit the Northwest Territories.  She used museums and books to do her research.  For a novel which takes place almost entirely outdoors in very remote and snowy land, I found her descriptions of the landscape and weather astounding.

The lovely title was a mystery until the end.  I don't think it is a spoiler for me to tell you what it refers to, but in case you don't want to know, I will add it below the date I read this fine book, February 2026.

I do recommend this mystery, with its myriad of fascinating characters, powerfully describing a time long gone.

February 2026

As it turns out, The Tenderness of Wolves refers not to the actual wolves our characters encounter, but it is a metaphor for the people of northern Canada, who work very hard and who wander and seek food and shelter, and love, who can be tender or violent, and are at times isolated and at times in community.

Rebecca Yarros |  Fiction

2019, 424 pages

The average reading level of The New York Times bestsellers has trended downward over the past 60 years, with most books from 1960 to 2014 falling into the seventh-grade level, and roughly 97% of 2014 bestsellers reading below a 7.2 grade level.  Since 2000, only two books on the list exceeded a ninth-grade readability level.

I know this, which is why I don't read off the NYT best seller list anymore.  I should have done my research before I started The Last Letter.  Its genre is romance.  The average writing level for this genre is fifth grade. I feel like I am not only being treated like a fifth grader, but the story and the characters are pure fluff.  I have way too many books on my shelf to spend my time here.  I wonder how this made it to my reading list?  Interestingly, it has one of the highest scores on Goodreads that I have seen in recent months, a 4.5.  Which causes me to lose trust in Goodreads, also.

Friends and book clubs and the occasional NPR article and Washington Post review generally source my TBR list, but this has me wondering ... is there another best seller list you use and recommend?  Is there a source of reviews, not Goodreads, that you use and recommend?

January 2026

Sarah Winman

Fiction 2017 | 462 pages

We begin during WWII, 1944, on the battlegrounds of Tuscany. As allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. He has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian, 40 years his senior, who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins.  Ulysses and Evelyn form a kindred bond amongst the rubble of war-torn Italy and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses' life for the next four decades.

After the war, and the death of a soldier who is very important to him, Ulysses returns to London.  But his time in Tuscany remains in his heart.  When an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.  Perhaps it helps that I have been to Florence, but Winman's descriptions of the next four decades in my favorite Italian town are vivid.  I can see the town and feel the culture.  Once Ulysses and entourage leave London for Florence, reading Still Life is like a soft warm blanket thrown over my shoulders.  I guess the London time was necessary for context, but it doesn't compare to time in Firenze.

With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor, Still Life is a portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a life. Ulysses gathers Col, Cressy, Pete, his former wife Peg (at times), and his adopted daughter Alys, and eventually, years later, Evelyn, into an intentional family.  And, of course, I cannot forget the blue parrot Claude.  This family has more respect, love, and caring than many families.  It is a joy to experience vicariously.

An example of Winman's writing from page 128. "They'd traveled more than a thousand miles, had eaten twenty plates of spaghetti, nine stews, seventeen baguettes, a crop of apricots and a wheel of cheese.  They had drunk forty coffees and eight bottles of wine and seven beers and two brandies."  Instead of her describing the 1000-mile journey with roads traveled and villages encountered, she makes it real and tangible and visceral. This is her gift as a writer.

She also uses her writer's prerogative for an unusual display of style.  She employs no quotation marks (and thus uses the word "said" ad nauseam).  Now supposedly this technique creates more intimacy between the reader and the characters, heightens emotion, reduces distance, and is fluid.  I can't say if credit goes to this stylistic choice or not, but I felt intimately connected with the characters in Still Life.  I came to know and understand them well.  It takes a bit to get used to this way of writing ... and some reviewers never do. But I felt comfortable with it after a while.

The one disappointment I have is that we did not return at the end of the book to the opening pages.  I am wondering still today how many paintings Evelyn and her life-long friend Dotty actually found and saved.

This is our current book club read.  I highly recommend it as a novel to immerse yourself in.  It is particularly good as a winter read, because it made me want to build a fire in the wood stove and cozy up to it with my book.

January 2026

Sophie Elmhirst

Nonfiction 2024 | 249 pages

This is the story of an English couple, Maurice and Madalyn Bailey, who have simply had enough with living on land and occupying themselves with boring jobs.  They decide to build a sailboat and live on it, perhaps for the rest of their lives ... who knows how long?  Maurice is a quiet loner, awkward around people, and Madalyn is charismatic and ambitious.  But together they complement one another and build a powerful and obsessive dream.  In June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all goes well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocks a hole in their boat, and it sinks beneath the waves.  

What ensues is a dramatic fight to survive nearly four months in a dinghy and a rubber raft.  Starving, exhausted, resourceful, they have to figure out how to survive their physical and emotional challenges, and their marriage,  Their personalities are so in display in this adventure.  Maurice navigates using a sextant ... no technology for him.  Maralyn organizes food and water and the staples and basics of living on a boat and later, just a raft.  They end up fishing with a safety pin, and catching rainwater to drink, and, against their values, killing turtles for some sustenance.

Elmhirst"s writing is tight, as dramatic as the story is, and very readable.  The tale of their survival is jaw-dropping.  You will sail through this true story (pun completely unintentional!) and, if you are like me, you will find Maralyn's menus for what they will serve after they have been rescued, as intriguing as how they patch the hole in the raft, perhaps created by skeleton fish.

On the last page before the epilogue the author writes that one of the main characters  "...had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, and an isolated end."  Yes, the end is difficult, as both Maralyn's and Maurice's lives come to an end.  But realistic, yes?  And this book is way more about the "dramatic middle."

I heartily recommend A Marriage at Sea."  I started it last year (New Year's Eve) and finished it this year (New Year's Day), and it was hard to put down.

January 2026

Daniel Kraus

Fiction 2025 | 385 pages

READ THIS REVIEW EVEN THOIUGH IT IS ONLY 2 STARS.  WHILE I CANNOT RECOMMEND IT, YOU MAY STILL CHOOSE TO READ IT

Wow, I have never read a book anything like this, and I suspect you haven't either, but before I drive into why it us unparalleled in its uniqueness, I will first get you up to speed on the plot of this book, listed as one of the top ten books for 2025 by the New York Times, and also acclaimed by The Washington Post and NPR,

U.S. Private Cyril Bagger, our main character,  is in France during WWI,  his job is to bury the dead, he and four other grunts are also given a deadly mission, to venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade, but what they find, however, is an angel,

and, if it weren't for the spectacular story telling of the author Kraus, this book would be unreadable, but Kraus drew me in and kept me at the edge of my seat, despite the challenges to overcome, and I could hear, feel, and see what the author was trying to create ... as best as possible through my naive lens,

and so, the challenges, first, Angel Down is extremely gruesome and gory, and the worst is at the beginning of the book, but if you can make your way through those gory scenes, you will be provided some relief, but not for long, and the unspeakable horror of life in No Man's Land continues sporadically throughout the book, and you will face it again and again, someone  who is burying the dead, not shooting at advancing forces, sees strewn body parts, embedded barbed wire, burns, acid, heads blown apart, and more ... all the results of unspeakable brutality, except Kraus has the courage to speak it,

and second, you have probably heard about this book .... it is one long sentence, commas and chapters help keep the pace (yes, like this!), and I didn't find it too hard to adjust to -- it actually rather amused me -- but some of you may,  (I found some periods in chapters 7, 33,  and 35.  I wonder if they are intentional, or an editing error?!), it is fluid and actually easy to follow, once you change your expectation, he employs this extreme style to convey the overwhelming, stream-of-consciousness experience of a soldier in World War I and the relentless, dizzying, blood-soaked atmosphere of the battlefield, and if you read my last review, The Guest Cat, in which every time I opened to a page, my breathing slowed down and I calmed, Angel Down did the exact opposite, it raised my heartbeat and my anxiety,

and, I cannot recommend this book to anyone, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a try, and if you have read it, or read it in the near future, I would very much like to hear about your experience and reactions

December 2025