Book #21 of 2026 was Summer Island, by Kristin Hannah. This was a sad story of family dysfunction but there was some reconciliation in the end.
Book #22 was Punching the Air, by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. This verse novel interested me for a couple of reasons. One was that a Facebook friend had her high school students reading it in a book club. Another was that Ibi Zoboi is of Haitian origin. And having just read The River is Waiting, I was especially sensitive to the subject of prison. After reading it, I learned that Yusef Salaam is an activist around the topic of incarceration, being one of the Exonerated Five. I enjoyed this and could imagine discussing it with students.
Book #23 was So Far Gone by Jess Walter and book #24 was A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar. I'm putting them together not because of similar settings, since the former is set in the Northwest of the US in the present and the latter in Kolkata, India in the near future. But both books seemed at first to be fast-paced, fun adventures that would all work out in the end, only to turn much darker than I had anticipated. Both were brilliantly structured and I was glad I had read them, but neither had much in the way of hope or redemption. A Guardian and a Thief is climate fiction, a genre I have been meeting more and more in my reading.
Book #25 was the non-fiction A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck, by Sophie Elmhirst. It would have been easy to romanticize this event which took place in the early seventies, but I appreciated Elmhirst's very matter-of-fact style. I felt as though I got to know both members of this couple that decided to leave everything and take to sea. It was a gripping read.
