** Splinters by Leslie Jamison

If there’s any love story in Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, it would be between the author and her baby daughter (or her own mother), and certainly not with her ex-partner and father of said daughter, who seems to contribute nothing but insults and grumpiness to the tale. There are some well-captured moments of motherly panic, and lovely paeans to the role of grandmothers, but I could not quite identify what the author wanted to accomplish with this memoir.

* Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! stars an Iranian-American man who is trying to put himself together after a tough childhood and various addictions and settles on writing a book about martyrs. He travels to visit a performance artist who will illuminate his life. There’s a lot of surprises in the book and yet I failed to connect with the hero or even the story, especially when it featured dreams, which I tend to find tedious.

*** From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith

From a Far and Lovely Country takes us once again to Botswana, this time to ponder what it feels like when everyone forgets your birthday–and what happens when a well-love teacher has a disreputable second job. It’s all part of the job for an experienced detective.

*** The Second Stranger by Martin Griffin

The Second Stranger takes place on a stormy night in a secluded Scottish hotel that creates a perfect closed-house mystery–with the arrival of two strangers who bizarrely claim to be the same person. The night manager and one of the guests will need to figure out what to do while battling dangerous criminals. The plot is nicely twisted and takes full advantage of the setting.

*** Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

Ordinary Human Failings starts with the chilling death of a toddler, and it seems that it’s an open-and-shut case, with a dysfunctional family readily available to blame. Over the course of the book, the author (and a deliciously slimy journalist) unspool their story and the case becomes much more complicated. A quiet story told very skillfully.

* 1984 by George Orwell

What makes a book age well? I just re-read 1984 and it failed the test. The first part, which describes Big Brother’s totalitarian regime which routinely rewrites the past, aged the best. Sure, the future is devoid of any technology we would recognize today and seems to be mostly a recreation of post-WWII England, but the slogans and the very reinvention of history are as fresh as ever. The second part, where our hero reads a tedious anti-regime book, is mind-numbing. And the third part, where he’s tortured and “re-educated” is so gratuitously gory as to be almost unbearable. So if you’d like to re-read, stop early!

** The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

The Covenant of Water is a sprawling family saga mixed with the history of the Malabar Coast of India, and the larger country, which reminded me of Cutting for Stone, by the same author, the action of which takes place in Ethiopia. Like Cutting for Stone, it features many medical adventures and enough familial misadventures to annihilate multitudes. It all felt too much, like an overgrown Zola novel (this one is 800 pages, way too long!)–although portions are lovingly observed and rendered amongst the mawkishness. One of my favorite moments was the overtaking of a preacher’s fire-and-brimstone sermon by a local translator keen on building a hospital and adept at “mistranslating” the sermon into a very successful appeal for funds.

*** Bottle of Lies by Katherine Eban

Before I read Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, I thought generic drugs were a great way to contain health care costs and bypass the eye-watering greed of drug companies. In this account, there are enormous holes in the way the FDA oversees the quality of generic-drug manufacturing, especially in foreign countries but even within the US. Even if we set aside ethical concerns about knowingly sending substandard drugs to third-world countries, it’s amazing that the FDA seems unable to employ the most basic best practices to conduct useful inspections: don’t schedule them in advance, go on the production floor, ask workers direct questions. Yes, this is a story of a small set of companies and plants but it poses fundamental questions about regulators.

*** My Side of the River by Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez

The author of My Side of the River was born in the US and has undocumented parents. She tells a story of having to spend her high school years on someone’s couch as her parents were not able to stay in the US, hungry and barely cared for by her host; fighting to keep up her grades in college so her scholarship could be renewed; and finding her way into the workforce while caring for her younger brother. While I may not buy her arguments that her parents should have been automatically allowed to stay in the US, her story shows the struggle of families with mixed status and how important vigilant teachers and administrators can be to help.

** Terrible Maps by Michael Howe

I find maps to be a very interesting way of presenting information, and Terrible Maps: Hilarious Maps for a Ridiculous World is a good laugh, full of absurdist examples (rivers in Saudi Arabia, anyone?) and occasionally a map that makes you think (prison population for 100,000 people, for instance) . Overall it’s more a compendium of funny TikTok posts.