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.