Books I Read in 2026
from ggprints on Etsy
* = Stars (rating)
#1 - James: A Novel - 5*
Percival Everett
James is a great book. Great writing, incredible creativity to imagine the story of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective, wonderful writing. As I read it, I felt immersed in James’ world. For me, that was a problem. I felt so immersed in it, empathized so deeply with the trapped, beaten, unfair, horrific world James lived in, that about halfway through I could not read on. I found this detailed summary of each chapter, and then skimmed the last part of the book. I cannot watch movies or shows where people are in prison for the same reason. My stomach gets tighter and tighter, my heart beats faster, and I have difficulty getting through the stressful feelings in my body and soul. Whether it’s trapped in prison or trapped in slavery, it has the same effect on me.
One of the first things I observed about the story was the way James spoke “slavery language” around white people and normal, quite educated English around fellow slaves/black people. At first, I was distracted by wondering if that actually happened. But soon I just marveled in the imagination of it, and enjoyed watching it play out.
Some quite harsh anti-Christianity/anti-religion comes out in the character of James.
…the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. (page 90)
I am always interested in what people think and say against the faith I love. It helps me understand their reasoning, and wonder how I can try to ensure I do not foster the evil they see by what I say and do. James does not explicitly give details on his view of Christianity. I can imagine, though, the Christian people who defend slavery using the words of the Bible, the cruelty and injustice practiced and justified by Christians must contribute to his opposition.
The reviews often write about the “humor and horror” of the story. I have to admit I didn’t laugh out loud or consciously think something was funny. Characters said or did absurd things that were humorous. Mostly, I felt the horror part.
I am struggling with how to encourage people to read the book. I mentioned I have a hard time watching prison movies because my body responds so viscerally. Have you seen “The Shawshank Redemption?” It’s a great movie. I highly recommend it. Yet, I had a hard time watching it. That gut reaction happened. I had to wait until I felt psychologically strong enough to handle it, and purposely watched it on a TV to counteract the overwhelm of a big screen. That feeling of liking and highly recommending James is the same for me as liking and highly recommending James. Try it.
#2 - Glimmerings | Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian - 5*
Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman
I've read a lot of Christian Wiman and heard him at the Festival, but I haven't read anything by Miroslav Volf, though I have heard of him. They're both Yale professors. It was a very good book. Deep. What Titanic minds those two are. They usually take walks around Yale together, but this book is a collection of letters they wrote to each other while Wiman was undergoing cancer treatment. He's had cancer multiple times and has been close to death several times.
There were lots of gems:
MV: I am saved by God’s faithfulness, not primarily by my faith. (page 4)
I always feel befuddled when Jesus says, after performing a miracle, “Your faith has made you whole.”
CW: I find it very consoling to think of my faith not mattering so much, of it being mostly a form of patience.”
He writes about having a hunger, “a restless and appetitive drive” for faith of two types, a good hunger and a bad one:
CW: The former [the good hunger] lives with no expectation of permanent fulfillment. “Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of,” as Seamus Heaney puts it in “Old Pewter.” One gathers one’s soul, one’s god, fitfully, fugitively, and is content with that.” (page 7)
Hence the book title. :) It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s description of seeing glimpses of God, or hope, or something like that when he was clinically depressed, immobile with depression. He describes seeing a kind of wild creature hidden in the forest, glimpsing it only briefly now and then.
MV: I am less reaching for God than recognizing, at times, that God is holding me. (page 10)
I love this way of expressing the feeling I have that there is a bedrock, a foundation, within me of God’s love and my trust in it, even when I may not recognize or feel it.
MV: My love can be love only to the extent that it participates in God’s love, or, rather, to the extent that God is doing the loving through me. (page 13)
Oh. May God love through me.
MV: Our lives are not in our control, and whoever controls them rarely seems to have our best interests in mind…
I trust God even when God isn’t doing what seems reasonable to think that God should do…Hope is trust on tiptoes, said Charlie Moule, a Cambridge New Testament scholar…
[H]ope isn’t a reasonable expectation that some determinate positive goal, the hope’s object, will become reality. Instead,…hope is a way of living into the future with objects or expectation themselves only vaguely and tentatiely known. And lightly held, too, with a readiness to recognize as the hope’s fulfillment even things that weren’t explicit in expectation…
Hope, [Luther] writes, transfers a person ”into the unknown, the hidden, and the dark shadow, so that he does not even know what he hopes for.” And then, miracle of miracles, in the arrival of that which was beforehand not known or not fully known, I recognize with joy the object of my hope!
Christ…both fulfilled and transformed hopes. (pages 103-104)
“Hope is trust on tiptoes.” OMG.
And, “miracle of miracles,…I recognize with joy the object of my hope!”
Hope, glorious hope!!!
These are only a few gems in the first third of the book. I think I need to read and re-read it many times.
I love this picture from Christianity Today of Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf. It envisions what I see when I think “Titanic minds,” which is what came to me over and over as I read this book.
#3 - Inhabit the Poem | Last Essays - 5*
Helen Vendler
My fascination with poetry is pretty recent. I’ve often thought it would be fun to take a class on poetry. Poetry Unbound with Padraig O’Tuama feels a little like a class—he reads a poem, reflects on it, then reads it again. It’s awesome. I read or heard someone talking about this book by Helen Vendler, and it sounded like a class, another way to learn about poems and poetry, that would be more scholarly. She wrote all the essays—an essay for each poem—in her last 3 years of life, and wrote the introduction 3 days before she died. They truly are her “last essays,” as the subtitle says. The introduction ends with:
For each of these poems, I hope to cast light on its imaginative originality, its escapes from cliche, intellectual mediocrity, and linguistic intertia; and its ambitious adventures in linguistic play as it searches out, for its own era, the passionate and permanent feelings of the human race.
Doesn’t that sound fascinating? Ha-ha. I know it does not to many of you, but it did to me.
In the first essay (the first chapter), I already dog-eared a bunch of pages and underlined all over the place. So rich with understanding. The first poem she writes about is The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats. The last two lines very likely sound familiar to you:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I associated the phrase “Slouches towards Bethlehem” with Joan Didion. She wrote a book titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I have heard of but never read, and I had no idea where the phrase came from. It was so interesting to learn that Yeats was writing about the second coming, describing it like:
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs…
It was this beast that was slouching towards Bethlehem. What a strange, intriguing way to describe the second coming of Christ.
I know we enjoy poetry for many reasons—the sound of the words, the look of it on the page, the associations it brings to mind, the feel of it on our tongue, the way it makes us feel, and so on. I am grateful to have learned that we do not have to analyze the poem like a puzzle to find out what it means or what the poet is trying to say. Not being able to “figure out” poems took away my enjoyment of them. But it adds to my enjoyment to learn allusions and references I missed. That’s what these essays gave me—insights into those allusions and references, understanding of the various forms the poets were using (sonnets, blank verse, couplets, rhyme, lyric poems, etc.), and why the poet may have made the decisions he/she did.
If you have the slightest interest in learning and understanding more about poetry, this is a great book to pursue that.
#4 - Indivisible - 4*
Fanny Howe
In “The Tune of Things” in Harper Magazine, Christian Wiman says, “I can’t overstate how important a presence [Fanny Howe has] been in my life, though we’ve probably spent a total of fifty hours together.” He calls Indivisible her masterpiece. Well, I think Christian Wiman is a marvel. He’s one of my heroes, as I call people whom I admire to the utmost. So, I got Indivisible and read it—most of it. I didn’t have the patience to keep reading. I got confused a lot; I would have to go back to previous pages to figure out who or what they were talking about. I’m sure it’s a failure of my ability to focus. I wish I could take a class from Christian Wiman about this book. He did write a review of it, but it’s in the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall.
I read other things about her, such as “Dear Fanny, Don’t Worry I Know You’re Dead” in Literary Hub by Ezra Fox, and a book of her poems, Second Childhood (#40 in my list of “Books I Read in 2025”). In Indivisible and the other things I read, I saw and admired her writing. I may come back to the book at some point, and I will read more of her writing wherever I see it.
#5 - Solito | A Memoir
Javier Zamora
Incredible story! Javier Zamora, nine years old, goes from El Salvador to the US. I loved this book! I just now googled to find out what the title means. Solito means Alone. At first, I was surprised by the title, since Javier is not alone. He is “adopted” by Patricia, Carla, and Chino, all of whom are on the trip with him. Patricia and Carla are mother and daughter, on their way to join their husband/father and younger daughter/sister in Virginia. Chino is a nineteen-year-old boy/man, unrelated to them, but they become a family.
Chino poses as the husband and dad, even though at nineteen, he is quite a bit younger than Patricia. Javier writes that Chino looks older and Patricia looks younger, and it works. They all take on names and have papers, making them into a family. The love they show for each other fills my heart. In the long, long walk, Chino carries Javier, the youngest, who cannot even tie his shoes yet. They share their water, their “beds”—mattresses on the floor, or the floor itself, or the desert dirt—, their scant food, everything.
The book is written from the nine-year-old’s perspective. He doesn’t understand English. Often, sentences, passages, or words are written in Spanish. It reminded me of the way some of Georgette Heyer’s novels have French in them, untranslated. As when I read those, I did not stop to look up the words. I was able to get the gist, or enough of it, by the context. Javier is a poet, too, and I thought even at nine he was showing a love of language. He named the cacti and bushes he saw, even the lizards. He called the cacti “the Spikeys,” “Cheerleader bush,” with flowers like pom-poms, “Crayon bush,” “Paint-Roller Fuzzies,” “Mascara Brush Fuzzies,” and “skinny green smooth tree,” which he abbreviates to “SGS tree.” A blogger who calls him/herself “The Time Traveler” describes these and many other things wonderfully in the entry titled “Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir Like No Other.”
Immigration, and especially what is called “illegal” immigration is a huge topic right now. This book does not talk about the topic at all. It is just a detailed description of Javier Zamora’s trip. It is heartwarming, harrowing, beautiful, sorrowful, full of yearning, hope, disappointment, and love.
#5 - The Briar Club - 5*
Kate Quinn
If I’d have read that The Briar Club was a historical fiction novel, I might not have even picked it up. I often do not like historical fiction. To me, some of them are sentimental or “gushy,” portraying the historical person(s) as unrealistically heroic. There is a word for a biopic that does that—makes the celebrity practically a god—but I cannot think of the word or find it. Anyway, The Briar Club did not strike me that way, thankfully!
The book is about a boarding house in Washington, DC, and the people living there. It is set during the McCarthy era. There are historical figures and events spoken of: McCarthy, the president, the Korean War/Military Action, the women’s baseball league, and others. I did not recognize any of the characters as a real person, but there are some reviews that claim the characters are based on real people.
I enjoyed the book. It begins kind of strangely, with the house itself talking. I liked it, though. It was fun to imagine the house observing everything going on and wishing for certain outcomes, enjoying some things and not others.
The main character is Grace March, the “lovely, mysterious widow” (from the book flap) who moves into the attic room. Each chapter, though, is narrated by a different character, including the house itself. It starts with a murdered body being found, and as you read, you find out what happened that led up to the murder. Each of the characters is interesting. It is fun to read the thoughts, motives, and actions of:
poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of World War II; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. (book flap)
As the chapters unravel what happened, you get to know each person, and understand how they became a part of the murder mystery. For a little extra fun, there’s a recipe for each chapter and each person. Food is a central player. When Grace moves in, she starts inviting everyone to have dinner together once a week, with alternating persons cooking. The house is rather bleak, and the boarders keep themselves to themselves, mostly thanks to the owner of the house, a bitter, stingy widow with two young children. Grace’s dinners happen while she is at her weekly bridge game. Not only do friendships grow, but the house becomes a nicer place to live as Grace begins painting the walls of her room with flowers, and others join in.
I cannot remember reading anything else set in the McCarthy era, and it was intriguing to see the effect of the Red Scare. I heard of it in history classes, but it made it more real to get to know people living in it and affected by it. As I think back on the book, I realize, too, that Quinn did a good job of making it feel true to the time. Sometimes books (or movies) bring in sentiments or words that make me wonder, “Did people really feel that way back then? Or say that?” I never thought that once while reading this book.
No one knows who Grace really is. That is a mystery until the end, just like the murder. I did not figure it out and enjoyed the revelation.
I recommend The Briar Club!
#6 - Forgive Everyone Everything - 5*
Gregory Boyle
I couldn’t find a review of this book to link to that said something I always tell people when I speak of Father Greg Boyle—he is funny! Forgive Everyone Everything is a collection of 52 of Father Greg’s stories from his various books, compiled into a weekly devotional. I like it so much, I am planning to buy a copy for each of my kids. The stories are short, easy to read, touching, often funny, and give you pause.
I have written about Father Boyle many times (Google "Boyle” on my blog—https://www.mavismoon.com/search?q=Boyle—, and you’ll see!). He is one of my heroes. I have heard him speak several times at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, which I often go to. He is a Jesuit himself and has a special relationship with the retreat center. When he speaks there, and nearly everywhere he speaks, he brings two of the “homeboys” from the Homeboy Institute he founded in Los Angeles. One of the things I often remember is what he said about “making good choices.” He said people often talk about needing to help others make good choices. But the thing is, these homeboys (and girls) have no choices to make. They are often trapped and have no choice.
Father Boyle began ministering to LA gang members in the ‘80s. They first tried mediation, but they realized that it was not working. Then they thought the best way to help would be to find jobs for the guys. That was effective, and eventually, with support and funding, Homeboy Industries was formed. They provide many services, both to men and women—not just jobs (where gang members often work side-by-side with rival members), but also housing, education, tattoo removal, counseling, and more.
Often, the humor in Father Greg’s stories comes from the homies’ unique use of words. Here are a few samples of his writing from Forgive Everybody Everything.
I asked Horacio if he had ditched school that day. “Noooo,” he said, “we didn’t ditch school—we just didn’t go.” My apologies. (page 4)
[From a homie who texts him up to 4 times a day.] “I’m fond of you,” he texts me once, from left field. I write back, “Well…I’m fond of you, too—and I’m grateful to God that you’re in my life.” His response is immediate: “The feeling is neutral.” I’ll take it. (page 40)
You can’t tell Rascal anything—except this one day, he actually listens. I am going on about something—I can’t remember what but I can see he’s listening. When I’m done, he says simply, “You know, I’m gonna take that advice, and I’m gonna let it marinate,” pointing at his heart, “right here.” (page 45)
Here is an entry called “Masterpieces.”
Anthony is in his mid-thirties and in his tenth month as a trainee at Homeboy Industries. He and his wife have three very young daughters. He was mainly missing in action for the birth of his first two. When the third is born, he holds her in his arms and tells me later, “Damn, G…I looked at her face and I thought, ‘She looks exactly like her mother—angry.’” We laugh.
Half of Anthony’s life had been spent in jails and detention facilities. Before coming to us, a meth addiction crippled him surely as much as his earlier gan allegiance did. We’re speaking in my office one day and he tells me that he and his twin brother, at nine years old, were taken from their parents and a house filled with violence and abuse and sent to live with their grandmother. “She was the meanest human being I’ve ever known,” Anthony says. Every day after school, every weekend, and all summer long, for the entire year Anthony and his twin lived with her (until they ran away), they were forced to strip down to their chonies, sit in this lonely hallway “Indian style,” and not move. “She would put duct tape over our mouths…cuz…she said, ‘I hate the sound of your voices.’” Then Anthony quakes as the emotion of this memory reverberates.
by Fabian Debora, the Executive Director Homeboy Art Academy. Page 19, Forgive Everybody Everything.
“This is why,” he says, holding a finger to his mouth, “I never shush my girls.” He pauses and restores what he needs to continue. “I love the sound…of their voices. In fact, when the oldest one grabs a crayon and draws wildly on the living room wall and my wife says, ‘DO something! Aren’t ya gonna TELL her something?’ I crouch down, put my arm around my daughter, and the two of us stare at the wall, my cheek resting on hers, and I point and say, ‘Now that’s the most magnificent work of art…I have ever seen.’”
Here is the Good News: The God we most deeply want IS the God we actually have, and the god we fear is, in fact, the partial god we’ve settled for. Good looks at us and is ecstatic. This God loves the sound of our voices and thinks all of us are a magnificent work of art. “You’re here.” God’s cheek resting on ours. God’s singular agenda item. (page 25)
The book is also illustrated with awesome art by Fabian Debora, the Executive Director Homeboy Art Academy.
#7 - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves -5*
Karen Joy Fowler
What a good book! As the author writes, it begins in the middle. This is a novel, written as if it were a memoir. Rosemary, the “memoirist” and narrator, begins the story of herself, her brother, sister, mother, and father in 1996, when “ten years had passed since I’d last seen my brother, seventeen since my sister disappeared.” (page 5)
Have you heard the term "unreliable narrator"? I thought of that while reading this book, especially in the first half. Rosemary gives her life story to various others in her life, and that is how you think you are learning her story. But, in some cases, afterward she’ll write something like:
That story I told Harlow—that story in which I’m sent to my grandparents in Indianapolis—obviously that story isn’t really from the middle of this story. I did tell it to Harlow just when I said, so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. (page 48)
Okay…not obvious to me. She goes on to say that “an oft-told story is like a photograph,” which I get. It is true that sometimes I am not sure whether my memory is real or based on photos. There are even memories I am not sure whether they happened or were a dream, especially from when I was very young. But, I guess, at least for me, that doesn’t happen—as far as I know—with something as significant as whether I went to my grandparents’ home or not, for example. Anyway, I started reading the narration with a grain of salt, waiting to see whether she would reveal its veracity. (Although, of course, it is fiction, so not literally the truth, but you know what I mean. True for this story.)
Every so often, I appreciated her dry humor and sarcasm, or at least the bordering-on-sarcasm. For example, she wrote an entire paragraph about her father’s theory of child development, drawing on Jean Piaget’s expertise. Then, a few pages later, she described a childhood home and ended with:
My new room may have been bigger than the bright little nook I’d had in the farmhouse, but I could see that the house itself was smaller. Or maybe I coudn’t see that when I was five. Ask Piaget.
I liked her love of The Lord of the Rings, which she referenced as an aside a couple of times. In one case, she found a note from her brother in her copy of Fellowship of the Ring because “He knew I reread that trilogy often; he know that the day would soon come when I’d need the consolation of the Shire.” (page 118) That’s me! As I grew up, I reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy about every other year. I would think, “I need a visit to Middle Earth.” Another time, she describes a room that had been trashed:
We are Romans amid the ruin of Carthage; Merry and Pippin in Isingard. (page 290)
Cool! Referencing The Lord of the Rings as if it were a classic literary allusion—equivalent to the Roman Empire, maybe even the Bible.
I’m leaving out a key fact (and it is an actual fact in the context of this story) about Rosemary’s sister Fern. If you read the book based on what I’ve written, I think it would be a good experience for you, as it was for me, not to know that key fact until Rosemary reveals it. If I had read the back cover and other reviews, I would have known, but I only skimmed the back cover and missed it. So, finding out about Fern was a surprising twist for me, and I liked it.
I highly recommend We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Fun, funny, well-written, quirky but believable characters, twisty plot, intriguing, and thought-provoking. I think you’ll like it.
#8 - The Thorny Grace of It: And Other Essays for Imperfect Catholics - 5*
Brian Doyle
I love Brian Doyle! I have read many of his books and essays, and have marked more in Amazon and the library to read later. I noticed recently, though, that the prices are going up. I think his books are starting to go out of print because he died in 2017. It makes me sad he is gone, but I am thankful he was such a prolific writer during his lifetime.
His writing reminds me of Billy Collins. Their styles are different: Doyle does not write poetry (although sometimes he writes what he calls “proems,” prose that comes close to poetry), but both write with humor and are down-to-earth, straight shooters.
You can see the subtitle on this book says it is “for imperfect Catholics.” I am an imperfect Protestant, and it is for me, too. Doyle was a lifelong Catholic. Isn’t the title good? The Thorny Grace of It. The title essay consists mostly of a list of all the imperfect things (I guess that’s as good a way as any to label them) that made me smile just to read them. Here’s a sample:
The kids are surly and rude and vulgar and selfish and their feet smell so awful your eyes burn if you are trapped in a confined space with their empty sneakers or both of those horrors at once, which happens. Your spouse can be testy and snappish and unfair and inconsistent and obsessed with finances and so liable to mood swings you have more than once considered erecting a barometer in the kitchen…The dog has barfed in every room in the house. The house is mortgaged until the day Jesus Blessed Christ returns in His Radiant Glory to resolve all mortgage payments and carry us home to His house…The rain it does not cease nor does it falter. (pages 115-116)
It goes on from there with galloping hilarity, and heartbreak, too:
My wife and I lost a child, a being unlike any other that ever was or will be, and I will not meet her or him until Jesus Blessed Christ leads me to her or him by the hand and we embrace, weeping. There is so much pain and loss and suffering and fear and helplessness and greed and violence that sometimes I lay abed and feel naught but a great despair, and cannot see how to go on.
Then, the pivot, the turn toward God, like a poem or a psalm:
But then I arise, because I know there are laughter and compassion, and creativity and wonder, and kindness and generosity beyond measure, and I know we are the tools and means by which light pierces the darkness. I know, as well and truly and deeply as I know anything at all, that the thorny grace of it is the shape and nature of its holiness.
How lovely and wonderful is that?
This is only a foretaste of the delight, the tenderness, the joy, and full-heartedness you will receive from these essays.