The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026--San Antonio

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named as a top book of 2025 in many places.  It is a well written book.  It's a little slow at the beginning.  (I only read about 5% of the novel the first day, and I had to go back and re-read it again the next day to remember what was there and to apply that knowledge to what I was reading beyond there.)  But there comes a big turn of events just after all the characters introduced in the book have attended a boxing day party (Dec. 26, 1962).  Within a few days a snow storm has started and is not letting up.  It became known as the Big Freeze of 1963.  The first half of the book had set up the characters in a way that you know that many of them have made decisions in life that are questionable and others have suffered because of events in their lives that they had no control over themselves.  Most of the characters are not that appealing.   In the second half of the book, there is a snowball effect in which the consequences of the poor decisions and the actions of the characters spiral downward and the reader wonders what is going to go wrong and how bad will it get.  Well, there is no happy ending (and the author adds one sentence about 3/4 of the way through that lets you know in advance that this will be the result).  But it is an exciting ride which, combined with the very good writing, caused me to rate the book 4 stars out of 5.

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben

Monday, Jan. 11, 2026--San Antonio

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is about family relationships, personal desires, a road trip to figure things out, and coming to terms with how it has all turned out.  It's a short novel (240 pages) that was a finalist for the Booker Prize last year.  Tom is a middle-aged law professor living in Westchester County, New York, who has always talked about writing a book based on interactions with strangers in pick-up basketball games at local parks around the country.  He has had students file a complaint about his teaching and is on a semester-long enforced sabattical leave.  His father left his family before he was a teenager and his relationship with both his younger brother and his son are somewhat estranged.  His wife had an affair with another man 12 years ago, but he decided to stay with her until both their kids had left home.  His trip starts when he drives their daughter to Pittsburgh where she will begin her freshman year of college and then decides that rather than returning home he would like to see his brother in the Midwest, his best friend from his college days in Denver, and his son and the grave of his father in Los Angeles.  It's an easy read which kept my attention so well that I finished it within 2 days.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Playworld by Adam Ross

Thrusday, Jan. 8, 2026--San Antonio

Playworld by Adam Ross was named a best book of 2025 by The New Yorker and a notable book by the New York Times and Washington Post.  I agree with the judgement of the latter two.  The book is a bit too long with too much detail and only rare instances that are particularly interesting.  But this coming-of-age novel does have some rare instances of "meat" to keep the reader involved and and to make the story unique.  Griffin, the central character, is a 14-year-old boy whose family lives in Manhattan.  The father has made a passable living mainly doing jingles and commercials.  The boy, however, has been starring as the central character in a super hero TV series for children for several years.  He has done this at his father's insistence to help "pay his way" in life.  Supposedly the cost of his private school is paid from his money.  There is a question of whether the rest of his money is all being saved for paying for college for him or whether it may also be helping support the family's lifestyle.  The story covers a critical period when the boy, even after having been cast in a feature film by a universally respected writer/director, is questioning whether he wants to continue being an actor, has as his main interest in life a desire to participate in his school's wrestling program, and is feeling like a misfit when it comes to establishing a relationship with a female.  He wants a girl his age to become his girlfriend, but she is more interested in a senior who treats her poorly.  In the meantime, he finds himself developing an inappropriate relationship with a married woman who is a friend of the family.  His family life also becomes unsteady.  His father has left town to play a major role in touring tryouts for a new musical that might be his big break in life.  His mother has eventually left the apartment because of becoming aware that the father is having an affair with one of the leading ladies in the musical.  And his brother who has always been his roommate and who he loves, has also moved out of the apartment and is becoming distant because of both what's happening with their parents and his frustration with Griffin whose memory has blocked what really happened when their apartment burned many years ago.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.  

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025--San Antonio

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar is not an easy book to read.  I could only tolerate reading a few pages a day.  Why?  Because like so many books set in India, there are new hardships ready to befall on every character around every corner.  It is a very depressing book--one set a few decades into the future in Kolkata.  Global warming has become so severe that seas have heated to much to maintain fish and are rising and flooding the land, crops cannot be grown because temperatures are so high and because the soil is deteriorating from salt water flooding and regular water is so scarce that there is barely enough to drink, people are eating artificial manufactured food with no taste and even it is scarce, scammers and thieves are everywhere, and people who can get a climate refugee visa to join relatives living elsewhere are leaving (but citizens elsewhere are starting to rebel against the issuing of these visas.  With the turn of every page, life for the central characters keeps getting worse and worse.  The book was a finalist for the National Book Award this year.  It is well written and quite realistic in terms of what life is like in general in India (as I have observed it for months at a time over 6 visits).  But a "good" book can be a miserable one to read, and that is what this one was for me.  My inner turmoil caused by reading it causes me to feel that it merits a rating of 2 stars out of 5.  Because it is well written, I will raise my overall rating to a generous 4 stars out of 5.  

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

 Dec., 2025--San Antonio

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan was published in 2005 and was a very progressive novel for its time.  It would be very progressive even today.  It takes place in a school unlike any other.  Different sexual orientations are accepted by all in the high school.  The main character is a gay boy whose clique of friends includes the transsexual (male-to-female) football quarterback who is accepted by all of her teammates.  The cheerleaders enter the fiend on motorcycles instead of doing tumbles.  In other words, the book imagines a world of acceptance.  Like all teenagers there are common stresses acting upon their lives:  How to move on when a relationship ends?   Will our relationship last when the older one leaves for college elsewhere?  What should be the theme of the prom this year--one that decorations can represent?  Etc.  It's a easy read.  It's a young adult romance novel.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025--San Antonio

The Correspondent by Virginia Evens is the life of a woman delivered in letters--letters written by her and to her.  It has become the surprise breakout hit of 2025 and been named a top book of the year by NPR and The Washington Post.  It is a fascinating story of a woman who became powerful when that wasn't common, of a woman who was only 5'2" tall and would not normally become powerful at that time for that reason alone.  As a lawyer, she joined and became a partner at a prestigious law firm.  Then when the owner of the firm was named a federal judge, she went with him as his clerk.  But by the time of this book, the early part of this century, she lives alone in a home facing a bend in the river in Annapolis and is slowly losing her sight.  All her life, she has handwritten letters to communicate--sometime to friends, but sometimes to people she has never met before.  She continues to carry on a robust schedule of correspondence and through the copies of selections from all of those written letters we learn about the details of her life which has further changes occurring beyond the development of blindness.  Even though she is in her 70s, two men are pursuing her.  Although she was adopted and never cared to search for information about her birth family, a son gives her s subscription to a DNA service as a Christmas gift.  And she continues to dwell on two events in her life that have depressed her and remained on her mind--the death of one of her children when he was 10 years old, and an old court case where she believes more mercy should have been given considering the situation and the fact that the man had a wife and two sons depending on him for support.  Reading the letters provides the story piece by piece with occasional nuggets of information that serve as clues to what will be revealed later.  I enjoyed the book and gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Endling by Maria Reva

Monday, Dec. 8, 2025--San Antonio

Endling by Maria Reva was longlisted for the Booker Prize and has been named a top book of 2025 by several prominent publications.  Most of the story is fascinating.  It takes place in Ukraine just before the latest Russian invasion and during the invasion while centering on various characters--a woman so obsessed with saving snails (when the last existing member of any species on earth dies it is called an "endling") that she maintains a mobile lab in a small van to try to save the last few survivors of several species of snails in hopes of regenerating their population and when the endling dies, she freezes it in a jar hoping that science will advance enough to use that specimen to reintroduce the species; two sisters whose mother, a protester very well known throughout Ukraine who is against the marriage businesses bringing men from the western world to find Ukrainian wives who disappeared almost a year ago with no trace or contact since; and a group of bachelors who have arrived from North American and England for a week of speed dating with hope of attaining the goal of the trip:  "May You Find the One!"  I had two problems with the novel.  The very beginning spent way too much time providing the details of the decreasing populations of snails in the world and the process the Ukrainian woman (and a man in Hawaii with the same goal there) goes through trying to save them, the way that snails reproduce, etc.  And in the middle of the novel, there is a strange "insert" where the main story stops and the the author writes about the problems she is having writing the story and how she needs to change the direction of it.  Maybe that insert is what has brought acclaim for the book, but for me it wasn't needed; the main story told alone and with a shortened beginning would have been perfect.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.  It would have been a whole point higher without the problems that lowered my rating.