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Departures by Julian Barnes

April 17, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Julian Barnes’ latest book, Departure(s), is difficult to classify. It’s part memoir, part literary analysis, part diary, and part meditation on friendship, memory, and the finality of death, while still leaving room for the story of how the narrator (unreliable?) introduced two friends at Oxford, and how, after a 40-year gap, he brought those same friends together again with hopeful intentions. Unlike a novelist’s artistic godlike designs, we are soon reminded that there are few happy endings in life. Things happen for no reason. Or don’t. And death is cruel and final.

It seems to me that humans are often so busy living that they forget they are human – or at least forget what it is to be human, and what its consequences are – and therefore what it means to be dead.

Along the way, we are treated to glimpses of the author’s private life: his adoption of a dog, his insomniac writing in the middle of the night on his IBM Selectric typewriter, his eccentric journaling practice, the many vagaries of aging, his battle with cancer, and his grief of losing his wife of thirty years. There is a continual flow of dark wit, though melancholy lies just below the surface of almost every page.

Barnes turned eighty when this book came out. He says it will be his last, preferring to have the final word, and dreading the potential for dying in the saddle, mid-sentence. And yet, I can’t help wondering if he might still have more to give us. Earlier this year, he married his former publisher and long-time partner. This seems like an optimistic act. If not another book, we can at least hope he finds peace and love. We should all be as lucky.

Roads of Destiny by O. Henry

April 12, 2026 / Literature, Reading

I got the idea to read some O. Henry during our time last year in Manhattan. While wandering around Gramercy Park, we happened upon Pete’s Tavern, where the author allegedly scribbled out his stories, including his famous The Gift of the Magi.

The twenty-two stories in this collection were all good. My two favorites were A Retrieved Reformation and Friends in San Rosario. The language is peppered with slang and colorful metaphors:

I was coming out of a printing-shop one afternoon with a batch of fine, sticky prospectuses when I ran against Denver coming round a corner. I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily. He was as beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as a clarinet solo.

Almost every story included the trademark twist in the last few lines. After reading the first ten stories, this became predictable and a little tiresome. I got the feeling that O. Henry cranked out these stories on a deadline in the smoky confines of that old tavern, probably after a few beers. There’s genius here, but it’s formulaic. It’s maybe best to dip in and out of these stories when the mood strikes, not straight through like I did.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

April 11, 2026 / Reading, Science Fiction

This classic science fiction novel drops you in the deep end of the pool from the start. There’s strange new vocabulary and culture to learn from an alien race on the planet of Winter. Even stranger is the gender fluidity that all the inhabitants of the planet possess, except for the rare sexual deviants born exclusively male or female.

I love the elaborate world-building of truly successful science fiction writing. Le Guin brings this world alive by tapping into all the senses of what being on this frigid planet is like: the perpetual chill, the descriptions of the mountainous terrain, the unique architecture designed for the deep cold of long winters, the strange smells and tastes of alien food, and the many different kinds and even sounds of snow. The immersive descriptions for a completely imagined world is astonishing. Couple this with luxuriant writing that flows with such rhythm, bordering at times on poetry. Even if I didn’t always understand the vernacular, I marveled at the language.

Our point of view is shaped by Genli Ai, a human visitor who is making first contact to invite the people of Winter to join a planetary federation. Over the course of the novel, Genli’s rigid views on what it means to be human gradually relax and expand to encompass the beauty and wisdom of a race unshackled from the extremes of gender. We learn the most about Winter’s culture and values from Estrevan, a high-ranking political leader who befriends Genli at a high personal cost. Their growing friendship during an arduous journey serves as a catalyst for a profound spiritual transformation for both of them, and for us, as trust and understanding connect two distinct cultures and belief systems.

Winter is a society that, due to a lack of male (or female) dominance, has never engaged in war, has adopted Platonic ideals of equality and child-rearing, and has achieved an enviable level of equality that values balance and harmony over growth and ambition.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness . . . how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.

All great science fiction uses fictional worlds and alien cultures as a mirror to challenge our own beliefs and culture. I can’t imagine how readers received this book when it first came out, though it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1970. Almost sixty years later, the ideas on gender and society still feel fresh and relevant. And important.

My only complaints about the novel concerned the reading format. I borrowed the e-book and read it on a Kindle. It would have been much better to read a physical book, which would have allowed more flipping back and forth to better absorb the strange vocabulary and character names. Further, the e-book included a short appendix on terminology at the very end that would have helped immensely had I read it before I started.

This was my first exposure to Ursula K. Le Guin. It will not be my last.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

March 29, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Claire Keegan is fast becoming my favorite living author. This latest book features three short stories, though just the title story is new. The others were reprinted from her earlier two collections of short stories (Antarctica and Walk The Blue Fields, both of which I now have on order).

A theme connects these stories, as hinted by the book’s subtitle: “Stories of Women and Men.” Indeed, each story depicts an unhappy encounter between the sexes with unsettling consequences.

My favorite was So Late in the Day, where a man reflects on his sad life on what should have been his wedding day. He treated his fiancée horribly, but can’t seem to accept responsibility for his deplorable behavior once she broke off the engagement. A flashback to a breakfast with his family when he returned home from college will haunt me for a long time.

An autobiographical thread runs through The Long and Painful Death, where a writer’s idyllic residency at a renowned seaside cottage is disrupted by a crazed and misogynistic academic.

Antarctica is the shortest and bleakest story of the collection. Tension builds throughout its few pages to a devastating end.

Ordinarily, any Claire Keegan book garners an automatic five-star rating from me. In this case, I knocked off one star because this one offered just a single story that hadn’t already been published. If I had known this, I would have read the new story online with my New Yorker subscription and purchased her two short-story collections instead.

Highlights

Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.

She watched the clock on the bedside table, the red numbers changing. The cat was watching her, his eyes dark as apple seeds. She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

March 24, 2026 / ★★★★★, Essays, Reading

How to sum up this wise, wonderful book? Cheryl Strayed, writing under the pseudonym Dear Sugar, wrote a weekly advice column from 2010 through 2012. The questions covered the gamut of the human experience: grief, love, infidelity, abuse, parenting, estranged families, friendship, wedding planning, divorce, you name it. Sugar’s response often included heartfelt sorrow or sometimes an upbraiding, but almost always a story from her life that fit the situation perfectly. These weren’t two or three-paragraph responses. These were beautifully crafted, thoughtful, deeply moving essays. This book collects the best of those essays.

I listened to this while driving and taking walks around the neighborhood. Since this book is narrated by Strayed, the feeling of a personal connection was amplified, especially when her voice cracked with emotion as she related her own stories. There were times I would stop on a walk and marvel at this raw emotion wrapped in unconventional yet utterly appropriate advice.

On one long drive, I was feeling a little down and growing weary of the foolish worries of the last few advice seekers. I told myself I would listen to just one more before turning off the book. And then came a letter from a bereaved father who had lost his 22-year-old son in an automobile accident. Living Dead Dad‘s loss stuck very close to home. “Sometimes the pain is so great, I simply lie in my bed and wail,” he wrote. I knew this kind of loss as only another grieving parent could.

I thought, “Oh no, Sugar. Don’t. Don’t answer this.” So many times, I have been counseled by well-intentioned but clueless people on how to get over the loss of my son. They lean on their experience of the death of a pet or a grandfather as an appropriate benchmark for grief. But answer, she did. I sat up as if about to watch a trainwreck in slow motion. And yet … and yet her advice to this grieving dad was just about as perfect as you could ever wish from someone who has never lost a child. You don’t get over this, she said. You grow around it:

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

For me, this letter to Living Dead Dad was the acid test for the book. If Sugar could comfort and help a person suffering this kind of loss, so empathetically and yet infused with constructive advice on moving forward, then she could help anyone.

When I finished the book, I wondered whether all the time I’ve spent reading the ancients about how to be a good person and how to lead a purposeful and happy life might have been misplaced. Maybe I should have just asked Sugar.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

March 20, 2026 / Reading, Science Fiction

An alien from a dying planet arrives on Earth to establish a sanctuary for his home world. All goes well until the alien decides to deaden his homesickness and sensory terrors of humanity with copious amounts of gin. Substance abuse runs through all of Tevis’s books. Even extraterrestrials aren’t immune. Tevis himself battled alcoholism for most of his life, so there is an autobiographical ring to the struggles that almost every character in this novel faces with drinking.

He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray, dismal morning—a morning of limp, oyster-colored weather—to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy.

The broader message of this cautionary tale is that while sufficiently advanced technology may bedazzle us, it will eventually destroy us.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

March 9, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Fast Eddie Felson is a hustler trying to make a living playing pool. He has the talent, but lacks the grit and endurance to prevail in a game that requires a gambler’s mental toughness. As someone who has spent way too much time circling a pool table in dive bars, who, in fact, met the love of his life playing pool in a dive bar, reading about Eddie’s love of the game put me in a fine reverie:

Eddie loved to play pool. There was a kind of power, a kind of brilliant coordination of mind and of skill, that could give him as much pleasure, as much delight in himself and in the things that he did, as anything else in the world. Some men never feel this way about anything; but Eddie had felt it, as long as he could remember, about pool.

There are parallels between Eddie Felson’s pool and Beth Harmon’s chess in The Queen’s Gambit (also written by Tevis). Both protagonists have a self-destructive side, both are alcoholics, and both find a way to overcome adversity with the help of a coach or a friend.

Unlike Beth Harmon, Eddie isn’t a likable person. He makes questionable decisions, treats people badly, and seems to care only for himself. This made it hard for me to root for him as he faced his demons later in the novel. Knowing more about his life before we meet him as an small time pool hustler could have deepened his character for the reader.

Still, if you have even a passing interest in pool or gambling or gritty city life, this is a great read.

The Best American Essays 1986 by Elizabeth Hardwick (editor)

March 7, 2026 / Essays, Reading

This is the inaugural volume of the Best American Essays series, which has celebrated the best annual essay writing for forty consecutive years. This one showcases the essayistic talent of some literary icons in their heyday: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Jay Gould, Julian Barnes, and Cynthia Ozick, among others.

Many of the collected pieces here failed to stand the test of time, but there were exceptions. I loved On Boxing, which I read as part of a larger collection by Joyce Carol Oates (see my review). And The First Day of School by Cynthia Ozick was a wonderful, evocative essay about the excitement and nerves of the first days of college at NYU’s Washington Square campus in the 1940s.

The standout for me was Kai Erikson’s Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters, where he muses about the deliberations leading up to the decision to drop atomic bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Why not a test on some uninhabited part of Japan to demonstrate the awesome power?

There is no law of nature that compels a winning side to press its superiority, but it is hard to slow down, hard to relinquish an advantage, hard to rein the fury. The impulse to charge ahead, to strike at the throat, is so strong a habit of war that it almost ranks as a reflex, and if that thought does not frighten us when we consider our present nuclear predicament, nothing will. Many a casual slaughter can emerge from such moods.
Kai Erikson, Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters

The notion that humans have a natural, unstoppable killer instinct is a depressing but plausible conclusion.

John Adams by David McCullough

February 28, 2026 / History, Reading

A riveting history of the people and events of the American Revolution from the perspective of arguably our most important forefather. This is timely reading to remember the causes of revolution and the original intentions of the U.S. Constitution as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I had been lulled into thinking of our Founding Fathers as selfless and intrinsically wise. McCullough dispelled any notion that these men were perfect, including Adams. The revolution led to heroic moments, for sure, but time has glossed over the miscues, indecision, and backstabbing that plague all of humanity. Adams stands out as a beacon of honesty and decency in a sea of selfishness, pompousness, and betrayal. No spoilers, but I will never feel the same about Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson!

Beyond the American history lesson, I enjoyed learning about Adams as an attorney, farmer, father, devoted husband, voracious reader, and lifelong scholar during a time of incredible turmoil and uncertainty. He achieved tremendous success and suffered utter heartbreak throughout his life, all while staying true to his personal values and beliefs. Adams embodied the very best of what it means to be American.

…

John Adams by David McCulloughRead More »

The Best American Essays 2025 by Jia Tolentino (editor)

February 13, 2026 / Essays, Reading

I love essays. I have a shelf full of these Best American essay collections dating all the way back to its inaugural volume from 1986. I’ve dipped in and out of these over the years, picking and choosing what looked interesting to me.

I’m taking a different approach with the latest volumes (I read the 2024 collection last year). I’m reading all the essays straight through, cover to cover. This means I’m reading essays I probably would have skipped after the first two or three paragraphs, thinking the topic or voice wasn’t for me.

This new diligence has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because, out of 21 essays in this volume, four did absolutely nothing for me. I should have skipped these and been better off for it. But rewarding because there were a few essays I wouldn’t have read that surprised me. I either learned something fascinating or developed an appreciation for a different style of essay writing.

My four favorites from this year’s collection:

Gone for a Spell by Angie Romines is a mixture of Appalachian history, the bizarre ancient confusion of midwifery and witchcraft, and a soulful meditation on faith.

Man Crossing an Ice Field by Laura Glen Louis tells how her marriage disintegrated from her husband’s early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. She captures the despair and shame of this awful disease. Alzheimer’s never ends well, and I wondered how she would bring the essay to a close. The ending here is perfect. I loved it.

A Little Slice of the Moon by Summer Hammond is a mini-memoir about a teenage girl growing up in a highly religious and highly dysfunctional family in rural Iowa. The scene with the girl’s mother near the end of the essay haunts me still.

The Olive Branch of Oblivion by Linda Kinstler discusses the importance of intentionally forgetting the wrongs and painful losses we’ve experienced. She cites the Pacts of Oblivion between warring groups in Ancient Greece as the only way to move forward after horrible acts of war.

A dose of forgetfulness allows us to put aside, if only temporarily, the sheer volume of all that we must mourn, to break the cycle of vengeance, to see through the fog of fury in moments of the most profound loss.
Linda Kinstler

In today’s world where everything is digitally captured and saved forever, it’s harder to let go of painful events or wrongs. Kinstler’s essay forced me to think about my own packrat nature of keeping and reviewing my old notes and journals. Is this helping or hurting me? A piece of writing that makes you challenge a deeply held belief is the very definition of a great essay.

The Running Man by Stephen King

February 9, 2026 / Horror, Reading

Continuing my quest to read all of Stephen King’s published works with this Richard Bachman dystopian thriller, published in 1982. The Running Man is set in a 2025 America with extreme income inequality, a polluted environment, an authoritarian government, and a population obsessed and controlled by streaming media and ultra-violent reality TV.

The hero of the story is Benjamin Richards, who signs up for the most dangerous “Free-Vee” show to save his sick daughter. Richards is tough, gritty, and smart. A badass that we rarely see as a protagonist in a Stephen King novel (hence the Richard Bachman pseudonym).

Hijinks ensue as Richards attempts to evade his would-be game show killers. It’s a fast-paced read with some good plot twists. I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say it’s another example of King’s uncanny ability to predict future events.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

February 2, 2026 / History, Reading

A meticulously researched history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Keefe delves into the motivations behind the horrible actions taken by both sides of this decades-long conflict, which I had never really understood. Ultimately, the book is a tale of tragedy and woe for both sides of a pointless war.

There were necessarily a lot of names, places, and dates included in this account, which for me didn’t translate as well in an audiobook. Reading the physical book would have been a better experience, though I loved the Irish accent of the narrator.

Foster by Claire Keegan

February 1, 2026 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.

Favorite Highlights

‘Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’ I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between. ‘Can you see it?’ he says. ‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’ And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

January 31, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Set in a near-future New York City, we follow ten-year-old Vera, an exceptionally gifted yet anxious child, through a dystopian landscape of far-right extremism, absentee parenting, cultural diversity, and hilarious yet ominous technology.

Throughout the novel, Vera’s intelligence allows her to wrestle with dilemmas no ten-year-old should ever have to face alone. My heart broke for this little girl, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved.

Of course, without gravity, everyone in heaven would fall straight to hell, a word Anne Mom did not like. But that’s how the universe worked, Vera thought. You wanted to believe someone was in a pretty place like heaven, but really everybody, herself included, was living in hell.

I did not expect to be as moved as I was by the end of the novel.

As an aside, I was able to attend “pub day” for this book at the 92NY in New York City, where Shteyngart and Amor Towles discussed the book and took questions from an intimate audience. I love New York!

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

January 28, 2026 / Literature, Reading

I have started and stopped reading this novel at least three times. I was initially stalled by my lack of knowledge about the French Revolution. Having recently read Durant’s excellent Rousseau and Revolution, I felt ready for the challenge. I’m now glad I waited.

Easing into a Dickens novel takes patience. The vocabulary and strange setting are initially bewildering. Before long, though, the story took hold, and I found my footing through the twists and turns. There are some delightful characters in the novel, some bordering on stereotypical, some surprising. The last fifty pages had me turning pages as if this were a modern-day thriller.

Dickens wrote this as a warning that polarization, the corruption of power, the awful propensity for human barbarity, and the refusal to address legitimate grievances can lead to catastrophic consequences. He implies that a bloody revolution isn’t confined to 18th-century France, 19th-century England, or, for that matter, 21st-century America.

Favorite Highlights

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

January 13, 2026 / Philosophy, Reading

This is an easy book to read. The chapters are short. Most can be read in just a few minutes. Each relays a virtue, interspersing anecdotes about well-known public figures with quotations from ancient Stoic and Eastern philosophers that validate the message. The thirty-two chapters cover a wide swath of good Stoic living: keep a journal, be brave, manage your anger, be present, appreciate beauty, etc.

The risk with a book like this is that you let these short chapters of feel-good but shallow advice roll over you like water without anything sinking in. Maybe read a chapter every night and sleep on it. Or, better yet, use each chapter as a journaling prompt and write for thirty minutes about the particular virtue or practice that could fit better in your life.

There are important lessons here on leading a better life. The trick is to find a way to take each of these lessons deeper in your own life to affect lasting change.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

January 4, 2026 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Because of the subject matter, the death of a child, I read this highly acclaimed novel with trepidation. O’Farrell writes beautifully, and she lulled me into a world of a quasi-fairyland of evil step-mothers, abusive fathers, young impossible love, magic forests and elves, and the joy of life in harmony with nature.

While there were inklings and premonitions, the book carries on for two hundred pages before anything truly awful happens. When the tragedy finally strikes, the writing tone and structure shift from a conventional novel to short, trance-like visions of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Most people can only imagine the mere surface of grief like this. O’Farrell writes with brutal honesty as if she knows exactly what this is.

How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.

While Shakespeare is never named, his character represents an important counterpoint in the novel. He begins as an unhappy son with ambitions far beyond his father’s business, a suitor and newlywed, a fledgling playwright separated from his wife and family, and finally as a grieving father.

I won’t spoil it, but the ending is about as perfect as you could wish for a novel dealing with the loss of a child.

Favorite Highlights

Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was.

She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.

(and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).

“O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

The Last Lion: Alone by William Manchester

January 2, 2026 / History, Reading

There can be no better role model for resilience and fortitude than Winston Churchill in the years preceding the Second World War. The British public, Parliament, and His Majesty’s Government considered Churchill a fool and a war monger due to his constant warnings about Hitler and Nazi Germany. Students at Oxford heckled him off stage. Newspapers lampooned him. Parliament leaders walked out of his incredibly eloquent (and prescient) speeches. And two prime ministers spurned him from any role in their cabinets. Down deep, they must have been profoundly afraid of Churchill and what he believed.

No strongly centralized, political organization feels altogether happy with individuals who combine independence, a free imagination, and a formidable strength of character with stubborn faith and a single-minded, unchanging view of the public and private good.
— Isaiah Berlin (about Churchill)

Reading this second volume of Manchester’s biography of Churchill is both a pleasure and a frustration. A pleasure because Manchester writes like a poet trapped in a historian’s body. He intersperses vignettes of everyday life that enliven the dates, places, and names of typical history. And Churchill is certainly a riveting figure, brought to his bigger-than-life persona before our eyes by Manchester’s evocative writing style. I loved the parts of Winston’s life at Chartwell: his hilarious morning bathing ritual, the lunches and dinners, the marathon writing sessions to cover his extravagant lifestyle (“experience had taught him that budgets did not work with his family. The reason—though he would never have acknowledged it—was that he was the family spendthrift”).

The frustration stems from knowing, with perfect hindsight, how incompetently and disastrously British government leaders acted in their appeasement of the obviously evil Adolph Hitler. Again. And Again. And Again. There were so many opportunities for England and/or France to stop Hitler, if only …

The biography concludes with Churchill becoming prime minister during one of the darkest periods in European history.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat … You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us…. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
— Winston Churchill, First Address as Prime Minister

Cutting off the biography at this critical date provides almost no sense of redemption or vindication for Churchill’s sacrifices, and hardly any I told you so moments. I knew from history that this would necessarily be the case, but I felt disappointed. I wish that Manchester had been able to stretch this further into the war or the end of it.

Manchester left Churchill’s revenge for the final volume of the trilogy: Defender of the Realm, covering the war years through the end of Churchill’s life. Manchester suffered a debilitating stroke about a third of the way through writing the book. He asked his friend and journalist, Paul Reid, to complete it. Manchester died before it was published. By most accounts, the book is well written, but it necessarily lacks Manchester’s style. I’m torn on whether to read it or not, but I probably will. Even without the deft hand of Manchester on the tiller, getting more time with Churchill and finally reading about his hard-earned vindication will be worth it.

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

December 31, 2025 / ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

I chose this children’s story as my last read of the year after listening to an episode of the Old School podcast where musician Nick Cave shares how the book changed his life.

The volume I curled up with in my easy chair tonight was a Christmas present from an aunt and uncle back in 1971. The pages now brittle with age, the inscription to “Bobby” faded, felt both foreign and eerily familiar. I was a precocious seven-year-old when I read this, but I surely wasn’t prepared for all the violence and poverty and deceit. I remembered only vague outlines of the story, but found my hair standing on end a few times as long-hidden memories resurfaced. I wonder how many unconscious phobias and life decisions have come from reading this at too-young an age.

This time around, I brought a father’s perspective to the book. How Gepetto must have suffered during the many years of searching for his lost son; how helpless he must have felt. It also reminded me of all the crazy stuff I got away with as a teenager and young adult, and like Pinocchio, I lived to tell the tale. I thought about how some never get these second chances.

In the podcast interview, Cave chokes up when he shares how reading the book helped him during a time of intense grief:

I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.

Is this really a children’s book? Maybe. It is a fantastic story, and the language is simple enough for a child to understand. But only an adult could appreciate the religious symbolism, the moral quandaries, and the woes of loss. I’d call this timeless literature masquerading as a children’s story. I’m better for reading it.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

December 6, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I listened to the audiobook, which was probably a mistake. I could not stand the narration, particularly Louisa’s strident voice, which made me cringe for much of the book. How these teenage characters spoke, acted, and thought rang false far too often. The author’s continued use of literary device cheats grew tiresome by the end. I loved the book’s ideas and themes, but not its execution. As was repeated often, this was a really long story. Too long for me.