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Self Portrait with Sanctuary (2021)

First book in 2026.
The narrator is the mother of a 4-month-old baby&an artist.On a hot summer day in 1998, she leaves New York City alone with her son to spend a few days in the countryside.We learn that she&her husband have grown apart:he recently lost his mother&the baby needs all their attention.As soon as they arrive,mother&son set off on a hike&as the narrator loses herself in memories,colors,nature&famous paintings, she also loses her way.

Last book of 2025.
There are no recordings of Leonard Cohen's concerts for IDF troops in Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Friedman interviewed witnesses and combed through interviews and Cohen's numerous notebooks to reconstruct his time with Israeli soldiers. The result is a fascinating story that is worth reading not only for music lovers but also for those interested in Israeli history.

Train Dreams reminds me of Seethaler's A whole life. It tells the story of a manual labourer,Robert Granier, who,because he loses everything that would allow him to lead a “common” family life with children and grandchildren,becomes a lonely man.Beautifully written&told,I also loved the interspersed elements of myth& the evocation of time (1880s-1960s)&place (the American Frontier).Not sure I want to watch the movie,I heard they changed the story…

To bail or not to bail was the question I asked myself after starting Good Mother on a car ride&because it was too much of a fumble mess-while driving-to change audiobook,I kept listening then enjoyed how Miller writes about family,parent child,marriage dynamics/love but there‘s too much meandering for me and I‘m not interested in detailed descriptions of passion.I know this is going somewhere else with Leo but don‘t care enough to find out what.

A book that I really had to struggle through. It's very well written, and the world that Groff creates is convincing and well-crafted. I just didn‘t care much about Marie and her rise to power in the convent. Glad I‘m done but also glad I read it.

Various characters who are somehow connected to a wealthy family in contemporary Pakistan:an electrician whose motorcycle is stolen,a young woman who enters into relationships with men to secure her financial future,a childless marriage.What just doesn't work for me are the female characters,&the stories are bleak,somehow a variation on the same theme without offering the reader anything new.I loved Mueenuddin‘s The Golden Boy in Nov23 New Yorker.

Gross deals with old Jewish issues in an original way: assimilation vs. isolation,small-town community vs. opening up to modern big cities,the Shoah,survivor‘s guilt&intergenerational trauma.The tone is rarely sad,the story told with humour&love for its characters &the fictional village of Kreskol. The book can be summarized quickly. After a dramatic divorce, Pesha, the wife, disappears, followed shortly after by her ex-husband.

The title story,My Father's Tears,stands out in particular.In the scene at the beginning,you can feel the son's anticipation of college life freedom clashing with the father's sadness of separation. Updike doesn't need dramatic words to convey this. Sentences like “I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller” are enough. Wonderful collection of short stories.

Thirty Years War (1618-1648):Mother Courage,a shrewd woman travelling through Poland,Italy and Germany with her canteen business contained in a cart,struggles to keep herself and her 3 children alive.She needs the war to survive-mainly making business with the troops but the war kills everyone she loves.At the end of the play, she is the only survivor, yet still follows the army caravan with her cart. War has no meaning and teaches us nothing.

Ray met Paul when she led a writing workshop at his nursing home.The two fell in love&despite the age difference(she was in her forties,Paul in his eighties) &his health issues (Parkinson‘s disease),they started a relationship.The memoir/love story is framed by what reads like a research paper on gerontology.The writing is ok but not good.I really grapple with how the love story unfolds,not because of the age

It‘s unfair to say that the book is shallow because Segal‘s research is so extensive.But somehow I missed a certain depth or insight that go beyond you shouldn‘t be afraid of getting old.And although I loved how many authors&literary works she quotes I would have also loved to hear more about what Segal thinks and feels&how she copes with ageing.She does describe this in part but somehow I felt her voice gets lost in all the quotes.

Eva,a young Jewish woman from a rich Berlin family,falls in love with the artist who paints her portrait.When a terrible tragedy strikes the family,Eva blames herself and,as an act of atonement,marries Abraham Shein,just returned from America.His surname,Schein=make believe,is metaphorical for his life because as soon as the couple reaches Santa Fe,NM,it turns out that the riches,above all the house Abraham raved about,do not exist.Meyer,Abraham‘s

South is a police officer with a past and passionate birdwatcher who lives alone in a small English coastal town.In his first murder investigation the victim is his friend and neighbor and the man suspected of the crime connected to South‘s mysterious past.I loved the story and writing until the finale which is eye rollingly ludicrous.Still I give it a pick because I really enjoyed it until I got to the last 50ish pages.

This is not for me but I can see why it appeals to readers.It‘s a very fast paced story about a nice young bartender in NYC with health&addiction problems on the run from all kinds of criminals because his neighbor asks him to take care of his cat while he‘s away.Cat carrier contains something they all want.What bothered me most is the graphic violence& the perpetual variation of he gets away they catch up with him he gets dragged deeper into it.

Hertman's Ghent house,where he lived for 20 years,is a metaphor for Belgium's history after World War I.The family that lived there represents the divided society during Nazi occupation: collaborators&opponents as the family is divided within the house-the father,Willem Verhulst,who wears an SS uniform,is an informer&Nazi,while the mother,Mientje,is a liberal,art lover,&religious woman. Hertmans combines his own memories of the house

When Roseanna came out in 1965, the portrayal of an independent woman travelling alone and being comfortable in her own body and sexuality, thus defying norms of the time, must have been original but is a bit outdated today. I didn‘t enjoy the writing style much either and Beck is a total bore. Overall, it‘s an engaging enough mystery and I love that the series was written by husband and wife (a journalist and a poet). First book in the series.

A book club pick that we discussed today and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and appreciate the chance to have read and discussed a book that if it hadn‘t been for our meeting I‘d have returned to the library after the first 40 pages.What bothered me most was that all the characters are very flat and cliched, and although this probably was done intentionally, the contrast with the (fictional) Talmud excerpts-which are fascinating but simply

The narrator,telling his grandfather‘s story,is present throughout almost the entire book.The narrative is interspersed with photos of places the narrator visits or masterpieces that influenced his grandfather or that his grandfather painted himself.In the second chapter,the first person narrator is no longer the grandson but it switches into the grandfathers point of view.We follow him into World War I trenches and combat.That makes it difficult

Berlin today:Kaspar and his wife, Birgit,own a bookstore.After Birgit‘s death he starts reading a novel she was working on and finds out that Birgit had a daughter right before she escaped from eastern Germany. He starts looking for her and finds Svenja in a Neonazi village married with a teenage daughter that she raises in their crazy Nazi world view/twisted history.

Reading buddies 📚📖🐹

France in the 11th century:Vigdis,the Christian daughter of a nobleman,sees David Todros,the rabbi‘s son,while walking past the synagogue in Rouen.It is love at first sight for both&soon they begin to meet in secret.When rumours about the lovers begin to spread,Vigdis&David elope,fleeing to Monieux in the South of France to stay with David‘s parents.Close on their heels follow knights sent by Vigdi‘s enraged father.The couple will only have a few

A farming family in today‘s Austria:the daughter lives in Sweden,the younger son,Jakob,runs the farm,the older,Alexander,was first in seminary to become a priest,now he‘s in the military.The grandfather has come into money,no one knows how,the father squanders money on dubious investments,has to sell field after field.What sounded promising at first-faith,Austrian army,farming communities in Austria today-quickly gets bogged down in many strands

Krabat,an orphan,teenage boy,becomes one of 12 apprentices at a mysterious mill.However,their Meister teaches more than how to operate a mill-he is a sorcerer-& soon Krabat becomes versed in the art of magic. Yet it all comes at a cost- the Meister binds the boys to him with a spell, they can never leave.And before the spell can be broken other secrets have to be uncovered.A wonderful YA novel,perhaps outdated for today‘s readers but I enjoyed it

I have two reading buddies, but only Porky likes the book. Nugget is having too much fun running around the bathroom.

Paul Biga,an Australian taxi driver who picks up young women and men,then kills them is at the center of each story without ever being the main character.Yet the characters in each story are somehow affected by the murders.There‘s Eva,principal of the school Biga attended&his former neighbor,Simon whose sister is one of his victims or Grace who fought back&got away.

2 young white men burst into the home of a Muslim family looking for Bob.There is no Bob,only Omar & Billal,so they kidnap the elderly father&demand to be paid 2 million pounds in exchange for Aamir.The family insist they don‘t have that kind of money as Aamir only owns a corner store or do they?I most enjoyed the character Aamir,born in Uganda,& his backstory. I also enjoyed the writing but the case was far fetched&the love story ridiculous.

Lucrezia de Medici is 15 when she marries Alfonso Duke of Este who is much older. A gifted painter & free spirit, Lucrezia does not want to submit to her fate&Alfonso‘s cruelty but is trapped in a time &place where women were at their husband‘s mercy. I really liked how O‘Farrell transports the reader into the world of an Italian Renaissance court, the story has some weaknesses but overall is engaging & well crafted, especially images &metaphors.

Fee is 12 when he joins the choir lead by Big Eric who soon starts sexually abusing him and other boys. The first half was beautiful. I loved the writing, the metaphors, depths&the way Chee handled the horror of sexual abuse. I also loved Korean folklore interspersed in the story because of Fee‘s heritage. I didn‘t care much for the college years. I thought they lacked the strength of the first half. Overall, a sad but beautiful book.

Kitty is raised to become a shallow woman whose only goal in life is to find a husband who is a ‘good catch‘. She marries Walter, a bacteriologist, because she can‘t find a better eligible match and follows him to Hong Kong. Never in love with Walter she soon starts an affair with an older, married man. When Walter finds out he takes a position in a town struck with cholera and forces Kitty to come with him. Left alone and despised by her husband

I expected more of a travel rather than a political book but perhaps it is impossible to write about Israel without focusing on politics. It‘s shocking how current To Jerusalem and back is: left wing antisemitism was the same 50 years ago, so was the accusation that Israelis are colonialists, also Israel was and still is held to a higher moral standard than any other country and no other nation‘s right to exist is questioned. The book is outdated

The concise history of the GDR covers the time leading up to the building of the Wall and ending in 1990. Hoyer aims to show the reader what life in the GDR was like - including welfare state, home and family, popular culture and foreign relations -while also focusing on key figures such as Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and head of Stasi, Erich Mielke. When it comes to women‘s equality, the GDR was one step ahead of the west: women were working

The slow horses are MI 5‘s losers. They “work” in a rundown office building separated from MI 5‘s glamorous headquarters. Herron deftly created a cast of antiheroes, the plot is full of twists I didn‘t see coming. There‘s humour and action. Slow horses is a well written, clever spy novel. I already borrowed book 2 in the series.

None of the stories worked for me. I‘m perhaps not smart enough to understand “Kafka‘s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds” or perhaps I prefer reading original work by Kafka rather than others writing like or being inspired by him. I don‘t know. Didn‘t work for me.

Hmmm. Difficult book to rate. Ridgway is a writer I admire for his beautiful prose and outstanding dialogue. I really liked the first story, The Party, and the diverse set of characters, the setting (London) but I didn‘t get what the central point/theme is that connects the stories and makes them a novel because that‘s how the book is marketed. I also found myself drifting off too many times, the stories meandered too much. Still a pick, but low

I cannot understand the hype around this novel. The beginning was good, the writing ok but overall it was dreadfully saccharine. Why I read to the end? I was hoping it would get better but it didn‘t. The ending is really the icing on the cake of lame “twists”. Character decisions at times made no sense and felt contrived.

I‘m glad I finished the book because the last novella (I think we have 3 novellas here rather than a novel) brings Nevo‘s thoughts & themes to the fore and there were a few ‘a-ha now I get it‘ moments. Overall, the first & second story are a bit forced & the sex scenes range from despicable to weird. The last story‘s familial conflicts were what I could relate to most & also found most interesting. Overall, this is not a great but an ok book.

Relationships are at the center of all stories: child and parent, husband and wife. Other themes are displacement through immigration and how the generations cope differently with their longing for the other country. I love Madeleine Thien‘s writing style, the way she crafts characters and leads us into their world is masterfully done. It makes me want to read everything she ever wrote. Definitely a pick.

It‘s a very low pick, the writing is good, the stories are original but the author was trying too hard to reveal some deep meaning, yet didn‘t really succeed. Also, many stories dragged on for too long. I liked Butter Chicken but the rest wasn‘t for me.

Chick lit is not my genre but I was gifted ticket and book for the Jennifer Weiner event by a friend and I‘m so glad I got to see and listen to her talking about women, women‘s literature, her writing process, publishing, women‘s bodies, how they were and are shamed in media, motherhood and so much more. She‘s funny, intelligent, charming and generous. I had a great time! Looking forward to reading her book.

Y-Dang Troeung was a scholar& wrote this beautiful book at the end of her life.It‘s marketed as memoir but I‘m not sure that‘s the word we should use as it is a book told in vignettes or fragments containing stories of survival her parents &brothers recounted, her own thoughts on Cambodia&travels to the country but also letters to her son&her memories. It‘s a book about refugees, war, unspeakable cruelty&survival.The writing is lyrical&haunting.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is an author from Canada.In this book of prose fragments&poetry she explores decolonisation,resistance&healing.”You see, tragedy happened again. The details don‘t matter because details are hopeless, overwhelmed, shut down.”
The painting is by Clemence Wescoupe(Anishnaabe/Ojibwe),1975.I saw the exhibition on the Woodland Artists today.After two tough weeks&no end in sight this book&the paintings brought some solace.

Nila,the daughter of doctor refugees from Afghanistan,grows up in poverty in Berlin because both parents cannot work in their profession.she hides her identity,saying she‘s Greek or Israeli&instead of studying for college,goes to raves&techno clubs.One night she meets Marlowe&is mesmerised by the older man whose debut novel made him an Indy celebrity.lots of drugs,sex,art,books,self hate,hate for Germany&its racism,Islamophobia,oppression of women

I really enjoyed Long Bright River.It works on many levels:it‘s a mystery but it‘s also social commentary. It‘s about poverty& addiction& about people who abuse women in vulnerable positions.And then it‘s about family, grief& loss.I also loved the questions it raised about motherhood& taking responsibility for a child, really having their best interest in mind &what that means.

Japan 1903:Ichi,daughter of an ama&a fisherman from Iojima, is sold into prostitution. In the Shinonome brothel she is trained in the art of pleasing customers but also attends school where Tetsuko,a failed prostitute from the family of a samurai, teaches “writing to women trapped in the prison of bestial desire” and finally to read and understand their account books since the women are often charged too much for food or clothes&deliberately kept

Divorce is a difficult topic for a book& although the writing is good, it feels too much like a reality tv show where we get too close to a couple &witness something that should be private. It doesn‘t help that Bea &Niklas are both unlikeable characters.Bea “sacrificed” career for the sake of family & with divorce looming has financial worries, that feel very real for many women even today.Yet she also loves luxury items

The graphic novel written by Evie Wyld and illustrated by Joe Sumner was only ok. Evie remembers growing up in Australia where her shark obsession begins. Interspersed with shark attack stories this is really about family and loss but stays too much on the surface to be a moving, heartfelt memoir. I enjoyed Sumner‘s artwork.

Eilis returns to Ireland after 20 years for her mother‘s 80th birthday &to escape her husband‘s infidelity& the child he has with the other woman.She gets close to Jim again who is now secretly engaged to Nancy& who in turn doesn‘t tell Nancy about his feelings for E.A big mess in the States is followed by a big mess in Ireland.Frankly this is a telenovela script&although I do appreciate the questions of:can you return to an old unfulfilled love?

In 1975 Barbara vanishes from the summer camp on her family‘s property.In 1961 her brother disappeared in the same woods&was never found.Told through the eyes of several mostly female characters&jumping back&forth in time could have been confusing but is done so well that it adds to the suspense.I love that Moore wrote both an engaging story with an unexpected (sad) ending&created characters the reader can relate to.Her criticism of sexism