Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lilith Assadi

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Birth to death tale of an exiled Palestinian longing for the home with the blue door left behind as he migrates to Kuwait, Syria, Italy, New York City and Arizona. He marries a Jewish woman, fathers a beloved daughter, makes forever friendships, and keeps cats while working in sales and cab driving and going bankrupt. Nominated for the National Book Award shortlist, Hannah Lillith Assadi impresses with her beautiful prose and heartfelt story. The reader's sense of being given credit for following her the through the foreign phrases and cultural traditions which enhance her tale expands one's relationship to the characters. The book was one I couldn't put down.

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Strangers, a Memoir of Marriage

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Belle BurdenStrangers: A Memoir of Marriage is impressive for its writing and its message to all women to be aware of their financial situation, support to those whose partners move out with little or no explanation or empathy to begin a fraught legal case. Of course, lawyers divorcing lawyers brings out the worst in divorce, but even after reading Jessica Winter's New Yorker article on the author's considerable assets as American royalty, I empathize with Belle Burden's story and feel it offers a valuable tale of being blindsided by the physical and emotional aspects of severing a decades-long relationship while raising three kids and maintaining sanity.

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The Oyster Diaries

The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lemann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I didn't see him until ten years later. It was at a plantation in the Louisiana countryside called Perseverance. A branch of his family had lived there since the Civil War and farmed the land. Sugarcane was doomed but they had more luck with soybeans. They had names like Po-boy and Peanut and took their vacations at a summer house in the next town one mile away.

To get there you went through the swamps outside of New Orleans towards Baton Route and took the ferry at Gramercy across the Mississippi river, then followed the levee the rest of the way. It was pretty much at the ends of the earth.

And there was the blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile and the sublime hell in his soul. And was I myself toddling about at the beginning of lie, among the ghosts in their now remote nether realm. "They must have let the angels out of heaven," he said when he saw me. "

"In Venice with my father when Grace was twelve he took us to approximately one zillion churches to look at the Carpaccios. He pointed out the red bird in the corner of a Carpaccio he said had led him to have an epiphany in 1958. Every day his secretary FedEx-ed him hard copies of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which he read on the boats while gliding past the palazzos with their marble angels, the ornate architecture everywhere, sometimes opera playing, on the green canals. We had oysters on an ancient court with Moorish arches and white umbrellas under awnings crisply flapping in the wind. Opera, oysters, the world."

"The next day a certain evidence of fall was in the air--the Southern fall--a hot fall, amid the oaks, the kind that in childhood when you went home from school with a friend, their mother would be sitting at the kitchen counter wearing a black lace slip and drinking vodka, staring out at the velvet green lawns."

Aren't three quotes enough to want to read this book about New Orleans, unique characters, heat, romance, travel, and mostly families? I loved this book and its meandering observations and people.




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They

they by Helle Helle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started this slim, fragmented tale of an unnamed sixteen-year-old and her ailing mother with some reluctance as I tried to get my bearings amid the weather reports, clothing, meals, housecleaning, rentals, furniture, shops, towns, friends, etc., a story which starts and ends with a cauliflower. But suddenly I was with the author, still puzzled from time to time, but reading avidly and submerged in their story told in the present tense without much concern for plot, and the translation of the author's words. A perceptive portrait of a relationship.

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Unfit by Ariana Harwicz

href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/227989326-unfit" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">Unfit by Ariana Harwicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oddly gripping dual narrative in first person of a mother battling her husband, his parents and his village for custody of their seven-year-old twin boys after she is declared unfit in court. Unhinged in her determination, she tries arson, kidnapping, assault and a car chase to get back her boys. Almost unbearable in places...the fighting and abasement...I read it in gulps late at night. The ending is inconclusive, or perhaps someone will enlighten me. The writing is razor-sharp and the translator, Jessie Mendez Sayer - translator, has done a stellar job.

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Reading Recap of 2025

2025 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Read fewer books than last year's seventy titles, not sure why I was so busy, but only totaled about forty-four counting a couple DNFs. I only read, don't listen. Eighty percent were by women authors, or names that sounded female, fourteen percent (6) were translations from Norway, Portugal, Mexico, Chile, Italy or France. Over half, 27, were fiction and the rest non-fiction or the outstanding poetry of Diane Seuss. Memoir accounted for eight titles.

The art books were particularly rewarding as I explored the work of Surrealist Painter/Poet Alice Rahon Alice Rahon and Shapeshifter also the stunning book from Wayne Thiebaud called Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art chock full of color works from the many artists he copied.

If a theme was to be gleaned from the novels I read, it is bemoaning the evils of the patriarchy, particularly in marriages of the fifties represented by Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, A Bowl Of Cherries, and Fonseca, and Single Lady from 1931, as well as Heat Wave from the nineties.

The diaries Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1986 of Helen Garner were favored reading as was rereading Helen Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road and the Sontag memoir from Sigrid Nunez.

I continue to be impressed by the quality of translated literature available at our local bookstores like Elliott Bay Books and hailing from so many small publishers. And I learn of many of these titles from GR friends. At least in reading, it was a very good year.

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Fonseca by Jessica Frances Kane

Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fonseca is a good and gentle fiction read based on the author Penelope Fitzgerald's visit to Saltillo, Mexico after WWII with her young son seeking a future inheritance. She'd been summoned by the two wealthy Irish women who own a silver mine in the area. Fitzgerald never wrote about it, but it is an involving tale peppered with memorable characters, some actual like Edward Hopper and his artist wife, Jo.

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