Cleopatra by Saara Al-Arifi

I really enjoyed this book, which closely adheres to what is known about Cleopatra's life. I did not realize until I was halfway throught he book that the author did her thesis on Cleopatra and the impact she has had on black women. She came to rule at a precarious time in the region. Caesar was upending the order of things in the Roman Republic, and while he was initially successful as a soldier, he had trouble establishing himself as the undisputed leader under a newly established system. Egypt is in the thick of it because of their long established relationship with Rome, and it all goes wrong for Cleopatra. She was a talented leader at a time when women were not given the reigns of power, she was the beloved of both Caesar and after him Marc Anthony, her child with Caesar made her a threat to the new regime, which therefore put them both in danger, and this is a fascinating take on a well known historical figure.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

This is a Parnassus "if you haven't read it, it is new to you" recommendation--I have to say that every time I think that I am an above average reader, something comes along to knock that sentiment right out of my head, and these recommendations that Ann Patchett and her friends make are almost 100% books that I not only have not read, but very often have not even heard of. This is a short, humorous and poignant novella that is ostensibly about Queen Elizabeth II developing a passion for reading after her corgis lead her to a mobile library, changing her worldview and disrupting the routines of the monarchy as she discovers the joy and subversive power of literature. The book follows her journey from a dutiful monarch to an avid reader, aided by a kitchen porter named Norman, much to the alarm of her staff, and explores themes of literature's ability to change lives and question the status quo. The subtext, for me, is about what reading can and will do to you if you spend enough time doing it--no wonder the alt right wants to ban all these books, because when yo read, your mind is opened up to all sorts of ideas and where you go with them is anybody's guess (parenthetically, you would basically have to ban all books in order to better control the thought pathways that people undergo when they read)--and this book is about the power and the danger in that.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible by Rabih Alameddine

I picked up this book because it won the National Book Award and interestingly was not listed by the New York Times in their hundred notable books for 2025. I have read one book by this author previously and I have to say upon reflection this book is nothing like that one and yet it they are both equally enjoyable. It takes place in a tiny Beirut apartment, where sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. He is both a beloved high school philosophy teacher and "the neighborhood homosexual", his words. Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son's desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja's work life and love life, boundaries be damned. Mother and son are both equally irritating as well as entertaining. When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn't be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget. With little left unsaid between the sharp-tongued mother and her self-aware son, humor and poignance bring their challenges — close living quarters, difficult family members, financial turmoil, and wartime trauma — into bittersweet perspective. In summary this is a vivid story set in Beirut over six decades, that juxtaposes life changing moments from a gay man’s coming of age with the upheaval of a city in perpetual strife.

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

This falls into the genre of fan fiction--It is not the retelling of Pride and Prejudice but rather an extention of that story. The novel explores the predicament of Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of the Bennet household. Mary doesn’t have a story of her own in Austen’s novel – she’s there to serve as a foil to her sisters’ charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness. Bookish and gauche, Mary is the one who can be relied on to give an ill-judged performance on the pianoforte or deliver a sententious comment at exactly the wrong moment. By the end of the novel her circumstances have changed, but she has not; she’s still just as plain and awkward as she ever was, but with her sisters variously settled elsewhere, she is at least not compared to them daily but she is not a woman of note either. In this version of the story Mary begins very much as Austen depicted her – plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist, the one we are supposed to be rooting for. As the great majority of us are not beautiful to look at or glittering company, we are predisposed to hope that her studiousness and loyalty will somehow eventually pay off. We come to understand what has made her the way she is. From girlhood, she has been mortified by her mother, who constantly evaluates her five daughters’ looks, and finds only Mary’s wanting. Her father, too, is a source of grief; she is desperate to be close to him, but he makes a pet of Lizzie, and only seems to speak to Mary – Hadlow is quoting Austen here – in put-downs. Her sisters exist in fixed pair-bonds: Jane-and-Lizzie, Kitty-and-Lydia; Mary is left to drift alone. Teased, belittled and criticised, it is no wonder she is so ill at ease; no wonder she blunders. I cringed a few times at Mary's missteps but mostly was rooting for her, and very much enjoyed once again being plunged into the world of Austen.

The Personal Librarian by Maie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This is an ordinary fictional biodrama about a truly extraordinary woman. So it is well worth reading even though it is not spectacular literature. This tells the life of Belle da Costa Greene, born Belle Marion Greener, who was a Princeton-educated librarian who lands a high-profile job with steel magnate J.P. Morgan. She had an illustrious career that was all the more remarkable because she was a woman. She successfully out maneuvered everyone to build a world class and widely renowned collection that went from private to publicly available after the death of J.P. Morgan. Even more remarkable is that what J.P. and the elite New Yorkers she encounters do not know is that Belle is a Black woman passing as white. Belle quickly learns that being white will not allow her to overcome prejudices against women working in the male-dominated field of art and rare book collecting. She also learns at a party at the Vanderbilt mansion that women in this world are bold and use flirtation as social currency, an approach that runs counter to the modesty and invisibility Genevieve, Belle’s mother, has always advised. In several flashbacks, the reader learns more about Belle’s history. Belle’s parents, Richard and Genevieve, had a promising start in life. They were free blacks before the Civil War, and in the brief but heady time of Reconstruction, they had great opportunities. Richard, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard, married Genevieve, the beautiful and ambitious daughter of the elite Fleet family of Washington, D.C., and moved his family to South Carolina so he could work as a philosophy professor at an integrated state university. The family later left under threat of lynching when Reconstruction ended in the South and the school became segregated. Genevieve never forgot the precariousness of that time. Once the family moved to New York, she listed the family as white to avoid ejection from their fine New York apartment. When Richard discovered this lie, he abandoned the family. From that moment, Belle became the focus of Genevieve’s ambitions to secure the family’s financial future—by passing them as white. It decribes the ins and outs of why this was both painful and profitable to do.

Next Year In Havana by Chanel Cleeton

This is one of Reese Witherspoon's Book Club choices and I am in the midst of slowly reading all of those, which is a fun endeavor. It is also the first in a series of books that look at this family across family members and over decades. The book shifts between present day and the time of the Cuban Revolution. The past focuses on Elisa, who is the daughter of a sugar plantation owner who falls in love with a revolutionary. The present is Marisol, who is her granddaughter. After the death of her beloved grandmother, she travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity–and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution. The past is Havana, 1958. The Perez family supports Batista and is forced to leave Cuba for Miami, but hope to return one day. Elisa believes her lover has been killed, but she leaves Cuba pregnant with his son. Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa’s last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba’s tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she’ll need the lessons of her grandmother’s past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

This is a creepy bit of historical fiction. I had the same anxiousness reading it that I had when watching the 2024 movie Zone of Interest, which depicts seemingly innocuous family life--but right next to a concentration camp. A review noted that the book has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms' fairytale. Couldn't agree more. The true life character who is fictionally depicted here is Georg Wilhelm Pabst. He was one of the most influential film directors in Weimar Germany, probably best known on the international stage for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. His radical approach earned him the nickname of “Red Pabst”, and when Hitler was elected to power in 1933, Pabst reacted by taking his family to the United States--where he struggled to be at home. He intended to emigrate permanently, but what was supposed to have been a brief trip back to Austria to visit his sick mother saw Pabst detained inside the Third Reich for the duration of the second world war. He was conscripted as a film maker. Pabst himself seeks refuge in work, taking on subjects that are “German enough” not to offend the censor. The films he creates offer their own coded criticisms of the regime, though his resistance is too clever, too artistic to be easily discerned. The novel’s denouement takes us finally to the film set of his last film, relocated to Prague in order to escape the allied bombing. Pabst is determined to finish the film by whatever means necessary, even as more and more of his support staff are forcibly drafted and sent to the front. The really difficult part is that, much like in America in 2025, the people who are the most racist, the most vile, and the least needed are the ones who have the upper hand and they openly grind down those they hate in the most despicable ways.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Ok, first of all, I made a mistake here. I added this to my library holds, I cannot remember why, but it happened in the flurry of articles about "The Best Books of 2025 So Far". Somehow in the rush to capture things I thought I would like but had not discovered, I missed that this book is categorized under "Horror", which is a genre that I most definitely do not read. Consider that as you read forward! I thought this was a non-fiction book, and I have a stack of them to read out from the library, so I brought it on a plane trip, and even though I recognized my mistake, I felt committed at that point, and read it. This isn't a fun read or even necessarily an enjoyable one, and the subject matter is dark and difficult to stomach at times. It is however is an unforgettable novel about a Pikuni vampire seeking revenge related to all that happened to both the buffalo and the Blackfoot in the mid-nineteenth century. So if horror is your jam, you might enjoy this.

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

This is a fictionalized version of the story of Doctor Zhivago and the CIA's use of it--funnily enough, there is a non-fiction book about part of this story, The CIA Book Club that you can follow up with if you want the more factual version. This is two stories, one from the Russian side and one from the American side, and they are woven together. At the height of the cold war, the CIA ran an initiative known as “cultural diplomacy”. Following the premise that “great art comes from true freedom”, the agency seized on painting, music and literature as effective tools for promoting the western world’s values, and funded abstract expressionism exhibitions and jazz tours. But when it came to the country that produced Tolstoy, Pushkin and Gogol – a nation that, might value literature like the Americans value freedom (or at least we used to) – the focus was always going to be on the written word. And her subject, the part the CIA played in bringing Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece Doctor Zhivago to worldwide recognition, was the jewel in cultural diplomacy’s crown. In 1955 rumours began to circulate that Pasternak, hitherto known largely as a poet, having survived a heart attack and Stalin’s purges, was ailing and politically compromised but had nonetheless managed to finish his magnum opus. The sweeping, complex historical epic – and simple love story – that is Doctor Zhivago had been a decade in the writing under the most adverse circumstances imaginable: the imprisonment of Pasternak’s lover, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya; the death in the gulag of his friend and fellow writer Osip Mandelstam and the suicides of two others in his circle, Paolo Iashvili and Marina Tsvetaeva; constant surveillance and his own ill health. Because of its subversive emphasis on the individual and its critical stance on the October Revolution, no publishing house in the Eastern bloc would touch it. It was smuggled out by an Italian publishing house and this is the story of what happened to get it back into Russia. It is a well told story, and one that lays out why women who were of great use during the war and then discarded in the peace might have been tempted with becoming double agents for oh so many reasons.