* 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.

** Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman

Written for K-12 teachers and administrators, Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms proposes a new way to grade, one that’s entirely founded on concept mastery. So no more points for completing homework, class participation, or extra credit. And welcome to a world where students can take and retake tests and turn in assignments when they want. I thought that the author made a strong argument for schools to define coherent grading policies that focus on achievement (and he backs it up with multiple case studies). His justification in favor of unlimited retakes and lax deadlines failed to convince me.

** Equality by Darrin McMahon

Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea describes how the concept of equality has been defined and applied through the ages, focusing mostly on the Western world. From hunter-gatherers to early civilizations, a passel of philosophers, the French revolution, Marxism and Fascism, we see that humans have mostly defined equality as something for the in-group to enjoy, and the in-group can be very small indeed. They’ve also struggled to establish whether equality requires leveling off or allows differences, and if so, how much.

The author is wonderfully erudite and both the concepts and the elaboration of them requires effortful reading.

*** Trondheim by Cormac James

Trondheim opens with a French exchange being admitted into an intensive-care unit in Sweden (specifically Trondheim, as the title suggests). He’s in very bad shape and his two moms rush to his bedside after a harrowing day of travel. It’s every parent’s nightmare, and the author does a great job of conveying the terror of it, so much so that I almost gave up on the book. But it’s worth going on, as the moms discover the closed world of ICU staff and families, reflect on their soured relationship, and hope for the best.

*** Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream

After a difficult childhood, the author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun converted to Catholicism and entered a Carmelite monastery, which turned out to be a place of intrigue and intense politics, where mental illness and mistreatments had become tolerated and even turned into a weird religious masochism. Who knew that monastic life could be so eventful? The story is delivered through beautiful writing and the author makes clear distinctions between the ideals of monastic life, which she respects and admires, and the bad actors in her specific circumstances, which makes for a remarkably tranquil tone.

** Safe by Mark Daley

Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family is a memoir of a gay dad fostering, losing, and eventually adopting siblings from the foster system. Along the way, the author highlights the dire lack of foster families, especially for older children, sibling groups, and in high-cost areas–as well as the maddening bureaucracy that makes it very challenging to be a foster parent, and to appropriately protect the very children the system is supposed to help.

The writing is middling and it’s clear that the author is quite privileged and has access to all kinds of workarounds, but the story carries through.