The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb

I have read a number of these sorts of books, where the reader is urged to think of things in a different way and I continue to read them, one because they show up on lists of books that are worthy of reading, and two because while I am largely in the land of the already converted, I learn a thing or two and it makes it overall worthwhile to have read, although it is slow going because my pervasive thought is yes, I agree. This is one such book. The author has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves. Is this new? No it is not. Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet one might that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. The opposite approach, the author posits, is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to heal and rejuvenate our shared planet.

The Spinach King by John Seabrook

This is a memoir that chronicles three generations of the author’s family and their South Jersey-based agricultural empire, Seabrook Farms. At the heart of the narrative is the author's great-grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, an autocratic, driven patriarch who revolutionized the frozen-food industry. Often hailed as the "Henry Ford of agriculture," C.F. built the company into the biggest vegetable factory on earth. This is a story of improbable success followed by implosion through his paranoia, greed, and abusive treatment of family members. The emotional core of the book lies in the author's complex relationship with his father, Jack—a stylish, patrician figure and playboy who desperately sought his father's approval. Jack had a lavish life style and hobnobbed with movie stars but further squandered the financial resources of the business. Beyond the family drama, the book does not shy away from the darker history of Seabrook Farms. Seabrook made a fortune during World War II by employing interned Japanese Americans and, later, displaced persons from Europe to staff his massive fields. The book uncovers the company’s controversial labor practices, including a violent 1934 labor strike involving armed vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan. These events paint a complex picture of ingenuity coexisting with labor exploitation.

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh

I picked this book out because the New York Times put it on their Notable Books of 2025 list, and I try to read somewhere between a 1/3 and a 1/2 of their picks over the course of the following year (if I didn't manage to read them before the list came out, that is), and this was both on the list, and an intriguing idea. The author was a contestant in the Great British Bake Off and is a food writer. In this book she examines the forces shaping our appetites. What unseen cultural baggage do we bring to the table when we choose what to eat? In the 17th century eating was understood to have a transformative power on one’s character, with the constituents of food able to define and alter an individual’s constitution, an association that persisted even as its scientific underpinning faded away. Eating beef, for instance, was believed to make one strong and honest, but also violent and stupid, and was particularly associated with Englishmen. A series of 17th- and 18th-century satires contrasted the solid vigor of English beefeaters with the frog-and-soup-eating French. Food, the satires suggest, has always been about more than just taste, touching on issues of nationhood, ideology, and collective identity, and we have yet to escape that in modern times. Now we are influenced by Tik Tok and Instagram. The author contends that your great-grandmother would likely not recognize your lunch, but she certainly wouldn’t recognize the Instagram Reels recipe you followed to make it, or the multinational megacorp delivery service you ordered the ingredients from, or perhaps even the ingredients themselves, imported out of season from across the globe and repackaged by savvy marketers. She is putting a fine point on what has changed in the last 20 years, and while I still rely on cookbooks form my recipes, the breadth of those has also exploded, and the food we eat has changed in many ways worth thinking about.

Children Of The Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick

A little over a year ago China quietly ended its three decades of international adoptions. This cessation came almost a decade after China—again quietly—put an end to its one-child policy, which also lasted more than three decades. While reporting from China for the LA Times, the author uncovered some difficult truths about international adoptions in a country that was supposed to be the among the most ethical in the world. She weaves the histories of both China’s one-child policy and Chinese international adoptions into the story of a pair of separated twins, making for a thrilling narrative that is hard to put down. Identical twins Fangfang and Shuangjie were born in a mountainous village in Hunan province, the third and fourth children in their family. Fangfang, the older of the twins, was a healthy baby, but Shuangjie was a little sickly and needed more care. Fearful of the local family planning office, the twins’ parents worried that they would be caught and punished for having more than one child. They already had a second daughter after their first was born, but they worried they would have a difficult time evading attention with twins. So, they sent Fangfang to live with her aunt and uncle. The author writes about two scandals that plagued Chinese adoptions. The first involved individuals trafficking babies and toddlers, taking them from their homes and bringing them to orphanages. The second involved government family planning offices doing the same. Both the individual traffickers and the family planning offices made massive amounts of money “facilitating” these adoptions to foreign parents. It is hard to know how common this was, and with DNA testing a lot more is being uncovered, but this is a fascinating read.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

This is a multi-layered story, where on the one hand it is about dinner parties and petty rivalries, men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. Underneath, it is much much darker. This is a world that hasn’t ended, exactly, but has outlived itself. Civilization persists, thinner and more tentative. The seas have risen, archives have vanished and England has splintered into an archipelago. Yet the survivors remain civil--ignoring the roving gangs that are not the least bit lawful. They read poetry, debate the nuances of a long-ago dinner conversation and stroll through their ruined but beautiful world. It’s a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite. Set in 2120, the novel unfolds in the aftermath of climate and nuclear disasters that reshaped the planet. Civilization has retreated inland; knowledge is fragmentary; universities now study “the literature of the inundation.” The protagonist, Thomas Metcalfe, is a professor of literature—not a soldier or revolutionary—who becomes obsessed with reconstructing a lost poem. In the end, you have to choose what to save, and for him, this is it. It is a puzzling and unsettling read.

We The People by Jill Lepore

This is it, the exhaustive look back at the US Constitution--well, not so exhaustive that it starts with the Magna Carta, and at no point does the author go back to what had happened in England that led up to England's colony rising up and breaking away--she really starts at the post war Constitutional Convention, and how we ended up with the mish mash that we got. The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world—and one of the most difficult to amend. At what cost? In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. Challenging both originalism and the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation, Lepore argues that the framers never intended for the Constitution to be kept, like a butterfly, under glass, but instead expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, improving the machinery of government. The argument against "originalism" is the best part of the book, where she refers to to the writers of the constituion said about it at the time--and that the Federalist Papers were published in a newspaper well after the constitution, and were not even generally available until the last 20th century. These originalists just basically made that all up and nobody fact checked them. At the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding and in an account as radical as Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the United States, Lepore offers a sweeping, lyrical, and democratic constitutional history, telling the stories of generations of Americans who have attempted everything from abolishing the Electoral College to guaranteeing environmental rights, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution.

The Fate Of The Day by Rick Atkinson

I read a review of this book that the writer had been reading this author's military histories for years and years--and maybe that was because they took years and years to come out. I had to laugh because this is meant to be the middle book of a trilopy but took over 5 years to be published after the first, and hope he manages to get through the third! Always seems like you should be pretty close to having it in the bag if tou announce how mant there will ultimately be. In any case, this volume covers 1777 to 1780 and goes through the uncertain future of the Revolution as the American Colonials faced defeat after defeat, super-cold winters (including one that could be said to have almost ended the rebellion at Valley Forge in 1777-78), and an ineffective Congress. In these middle years of the war, only a fateful victory at Saratoga, and the ill-fated occupation (and then withdrawal from) Philadelphia by the British, lifted American hopes that the British could actually be defeated. Otherwise, money shortages, shortages of ammunition and supplies, and deserting troops made American defeat very possible. The reader gets the sense of how back and forth the momentum was, how many mercenary soldiers were employed, and how tenuous the rebel position was. There are no whitewashes, and George Washington is presented as a troubled and flawed figure who wasn’t always the best general but who was doing as much as he could to bring the army together when he didn’t get much support from Congress. Other figures, both American and British, are given fresh looks. Nobody is a complete angel or devil. Instead, these figures are three-dimensional people with their own sides being presented as well as how others viewed them. Atkinson also doesn’t shy away from the darker areas of American history. Slavery and how slaves took part on both the American and British side, are well-represented in a clear fashion. Native Americans mostly fight with the British and the reasons why are fleshed out--and may have fueled future conflicts. Overall, this is very much a military description of this time period, with interesting back stories fleshed out but are not at the center of the story. Brace yourself, there is a lot of carnage.

A Witch's Guide To Magical Inn Keeping by Sangu Mandanna

This is not my typical genre of book, but one of the multiple things that I like to do as a reader is to read somewhere around half of the New York Times 100 Notable Books each year. They are about half fiction and poetry, half non-fiction, and while I mine the list for non-fiction ideas (I need the help in that arena, and try to read at least some no-fiction, even though it is not my first love), I tend to read more fiction. In any case, that is where I found this, which I would call a cosy, romance fanatsy. Sera Swan used to be a magical prodigy—Guild golden girl, full of promise—until she did the unthinkable: resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine (and, accidentally, a rooster). The Guild exiled her, stripped her magic, and left her to piece her life together. Fifteen years later, she’s running a magical inn that only appears to people who need it, surrounded by an oddball mix of humans and magical misfits. Then Luke Larsen, a prickly magical historian, shows up with his little sister Posy. Luke might just have the key to restoring Sera’s magic—if she can convince him to help without attracting the Guild’s attention. What follows is equal parts mystery, magical hijinks, and slow-burn partnership between two stubborn people who are much better at helping others than accepting help themselves. It all works out in the end with a few bumps along the way and while adequately charming, it did not win me over to the genre.

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

This is a very raw memoir written by an author who knows how to tell a story. She left home the moment she reached legal age and never went back. She is here to tell you why. She was born in Shillong in northeastern India to a Bengali Christian father who worked on the tea plantation, and a Malayali mother. Her father was a ne'er do well, and her mother moved to Kerala via Assam and Ooty with her and her older brother, Lalith, when her parents separated. It was a a precarious, nomadic life, living with relatives, and describes taking shelter in her maternal grandfather’s cottage in Tamil Nadu, only to be thrown out because of the property laws of the state, which did not afford daughters inheritance rights. Her mother was a teacher and she demanded even her own children call her Mrs. Roy. She starts a school that grows into a renowned institution where she models her own brand of feminism, unflinchingly confronting matters of gender and sexuality. Mrs Roy challenges the inheritance laws in the Syrian Christian community, suing her brother to obtain an equal share of her father’s estate, and wins the case Mary Roy Etc vs State of Kerala and Others, heard by the Supreme Court of India in 1986. She is sharp, restless and charismatic, a visionary ruling with an iron fist. But in her rage against the patriarchy, she also lashes out at her children. She berates her childrean for the tiniest of foibles and humiliates them in public. She was fearless in her public life but made life miserable for her children, which was confusing and damaging for them. This is unflinching in its subtle but persuasive rant against perpetuating a society that leaves women as second class citizens.

Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza

I am not entirely sure I got this book. It is a New York Times Notable Book from 2025, and I try to read at least a number of them, and while I think this is well written and literary, it is also allegorical and that is not my superpower. It does have elements that remind me of Latin American novels I have loved, and that is a genre I have read deeply in. The story is on the disturbing end, especially if you are not reading murder mysteries routinely, and examines the intrusion of crime into the lives of witnesses and detectives. A wave of men are being discovered, dead and castrated, their corpses accompanied by mysterious poetic allusions and all the marks of a serial killer to-be. The Detective, at a loss, starts enlisting the services of a local professor and writer, Cristina, who found the first body. The violence of the crimes starts a wave of impact that hits the professor, the Detective, her partner, and everyone else in its wake. The murderer appears to be a woman, castrating men, leaving behind poetry using ‘women’s objects,’ such as nail polish or lipstick. This troubles the professor and the detective both. Men start feeling that they have to protect their genitals in public and long for the days when basically women were subjugated to men so they could feel both safer and more powerful. So in the era of the Epstein files, where it it very clear that rich and powerful men like having their way with young women and children, we can see where the rage comes from. Read with caution, the material is gruesome but the emotions are understandable.

Heart The Lover by Lily King

First of all, I loved this book. It is the familiar genre of young love and decisions made that lead to regret later in life. Truely, it does feel like a miracle that the person you love at 20 is the same person you love at 70, and these deeply passionat love stories that harken back to college are part of a classic genre that I enjoy. This one involves a triangle--also a classic. The book opens in the 1980's with three friends, Casey, Yash, and Sam. Casey dates Sam in college and it ends badly, he leaving her and it being the 80's, there is no way to keep in touch. Then Casey and Yash get together, even though it causes issues for Sam and Yash--the whole I don't want her but you can't have her issue that can be so destructive. Suffice it to say that Yash is communication impaired, and Casey is in a bind, and so their relationship, which is full of strong feelings that certainly feel like love to both of them, ruptures. Casey is unable to forgive Yash, but goes on the find love and family and all that is good in middle age. The book ends years later around Yash's hospice bed where all the old secrets and resentments get sorted through if not completely resolved, and there is so much to love about how it all gets sorted, and so many cautionary tales about what not to do in your own love life, but do we ever really heed that advice? Not as often as would be ideal would be my assessment. Well, read this and enjoy. It feels very real to me.

Helm by Sarah Hall

I found this book through the New York Times Notable Book list, and while I enjoyed it, I am not quite sure that I completely go it. One thing is that the main character is wind, Cumbrian wind to be exact. The second is the time span, which is Neolithic times to the present, which is hard to fathom, but again, the wind is timeless. It changes in both quality and quantity over time, it is constant. Every era in the book has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific attributes as well, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behavior to the present with social media, pub menus, emails and the like. There is an undertone of what has changed and a little bit of why that would be, but it is the undercurrent of the story, not the story itself. It is wildly innovative, easy to read, and something to think about.

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

This was long listed for the National Book Award and while I do not 100% read that list, I do pay attention to it. I think if I had read this in one or two settings I would have rated it higher--it was a little confusing in the shifting between time periods if you read it over a longer time interval--I just kept being a little disoriented, but the writing is rock solid and the story is very well constructed. Over several decades, from the early 2000's to the near future, this book follows the lives and evolving friendships of four Black women in America—Desiree, Nakia, January and Monique. We meet the women in their early 20s as they kickstart careers and navigate romantic relationships; we see them through their late 20s and early 30s, reassessing and reconfiguring jobs, values and how to best support each other; we ease with them into midlife, which is at times calmer waters and at others heavy with unforeseen tragedy. Desiree’s sister, Danielle, steps in and out of the narrative as well. The strength of this novel is getting to experiencthe protagonists’ thoughts as they handle problems—social discomfort, jealousy, conflict avoidance—and the minor strains introduced to friendship due to differing sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses and mental health conditions. The novel seems to espouse that friendship is about overcoming and about changing with individuals as they change. It has an ending that is very hard to read in 2026 America where American citizens are being gunned down by the government.

Awake by Jen Hatmaker

I picked this up because it is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books from 2025. It is a memoir about the author's public break up of her marriage in 2020 after she discovered that her spouse of 20 years was having an affair. There are some things that made this a bit different. The first is that Meanwhile, both Jen and Brandon Hatmaker were Christian celebrities. Brandon Hatmaker was a pastor, and Jen Hatmaker was a frequent speaker at the church they planted together. They starred in an HGTV show about their home renovation, and spoke publicly about international adoption (two of their five children were adopted from Ethiopia). Jen Hatmaker became a popular speaker and writer in her own right, as well as her podcast, For the Love. She wrote about the Bible, marriage, and parenting in a breezy, humorous voice. Her books attracted a following among Christian women seeking a faith that was honest and authentic rather than rigid and rules-focused. Jen Hatmaker had a loss of confidence in her faith after a marriage that was very much rooted in the church blew up in a spectacular and unexpected way, but it wasn't her first public struggle. She suffered from backlash within the evangelical world in 2016 when she began publicly questioning the policies of the first Trump administration and speaking out about racism among white American Christians like herself. Her reputation took a further hit when she talked about fully affirming LGBTQ people and relationships. But in return for cancelled speaking engagements and books pulled from the shelves of religious bookstores, she attracted a new audience of people open to a broader, more inclusive vision of Christianity. In this memoir she acknowledges she is no longer engaged in formal religion but chronicles all the way she has grown and recovered from what her husband did. It is an interesting and well written read.

The Containment by Michelle Adams

This is subtitled: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and The Battle For Racial Justice In The North. I was interested in this topic--when I was in 6th grade in the early 1970's my school district in Pasadena, California desegregated, and not without challenges. There was a lot of negative energy around it, but my parents sat me down and asked me what I wanted to do, and we agreed to give it a try. For three years I was bussed to a school that was majority black and brown students and I had a life changing science teacher who lit a fire under me about just how cool the subject was and changed the course os my life. This book takes place years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 and looks at the effort to change Detroit, the first northern locale to be brought to court. The U.S. Supreme Court remained committed to integration in the face of widespread protests, administrative game playing and other forms of resistance deployed throughout the South. Fed up with the region’s intransigence, it unanimously declared, in 1968, that such delays are no longer tolerable. The court went a step further in 1971. Granting federal judges broad discretion to desegregate schools — including busing, if necessary — the justices unanimously affirmed that their support for desegregating schools. The book’s section on institutional racism is most illuminating and paints a telling picture of why, without judicial intervention, integration was out of reach in many metropolitan areas. In contrast to the easily identifiable Jim Crow mandates prevalent in the South, bigotry in the North occurred largely out of sight, where public and private actors fueled the discriminatory housing practices that underpinned educational segregation. Real estate agents concealed listings in White neighborhoods from Black home buyers. Many houses included racial covenants, and federal housing agencies redlined Black neighborhoods. This dynamic hid in the gray areas of law and politics. And most tellingly, all of this seems very relevant and not that different 50 years on.

A Gentlemans's Gentleman by T.J. Alexander

This made it on to the 100 Notable Books of 2025 list by the New York Times--I like this list because it is robust. One hundred books is a lot of books, more than most people read in a year, and so it gets away from being too reductive. This is a romance, but with a few twists. Lord Christopher Eden is a a man of unusual habits for someone of his class: he prefers to live in the countryside, and would rather have the comfortable company of his childhood cook and his aged butler than a swarm of servants. His pleasant, if lonely, life is upended when he receives word from his lawyers that, according to his late father’s will, he must find a wife by his next birthday if he intends to keep his family’s fortune and the Eden estate. Christopher is appalled-- he isn’t attracted to women, his chances of making a wife happy are slim. Furthermore, if his quest to marry has any hope of succeeding, he must move to London posthaste and acquire some more suitable staff. Enter James Harding, Christopher’s new, distractingly handsome—if rigidly traditional—valet. After a rocky start, the two strike up a fragile friendship and make their choices.

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemeri

This book, named one of the five best works of fiction from 2025 by the New York Times, tells two interwoven stories. One is the fictional one that centers on the three titular siblings—Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia Mikkola. They have a Swedish father who is not in the picture and a Tunisian mother who travels a lot and sells rugs. She tells the sisters and they believe they are cursed, and in a lot of ways that drives some of what they do, Anastasia in particular. Then there is the other story, one about a writer named Jonas, who is drawn to these sisters before he eventually meets them, as a child, in a park in Stockholm. In an interview with the writer, who is also a Tunisian Swede who is writing his first book in English, he says that part of the story is his story, the one that he is trying to off load and understand, and part of it is theirs. The sisters grew up speaking English and they are like the proverbial trio of monkeys but with a twist. Ina sees no evil, no matter what kind of trouble her sisters get into she ignores it and figures out how to get them out. Evelyn hears evil but ignores it--she moves forward no matter what, and Anastasia runs headlong into evil, she speaks it freely and tries to unravel the origin of the curse on her family. Set in Sweden, Tunisia, and the United States, the novel follows its viewpoint characters’ interwoven Tunisian-Swedish histories between 2000 and 2035. It is chaotic, meandering and mesmerizing at the same time.

A Marriage At Sea by Sophie Elmhurst

I read this when it was on Obama's reading list, and it is now also on the New York Times 100 Notable books for 2025. This is a story that is almost unbelievable yet true. ​​On June 28, 1972, 40-year-old Maurice and 32-year-old Maralyn Bailey, newly married but with this long held plan, set sail aboard a 30-foot sailboat they named Auralyn on what they hoped would be a yearslong voyage from England to New Zealand. Their plan was to travel across the Bay of Biscay to Spain, then to Madeira and the Canary Islands, then 2,700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Caribbean, Panama Canal, across the Pacific Ocean to the Galapagos. After that, they’d sail to the Marquesas Islands, the Tuamotu Islands and Fiji, and then their final destination. But on March 4, 1973, eight months into their expedition, a disaster happened: a 40-foot sperm whale slammed into their boat, creating a gash in its side. Within minutes — just enough time for the Baileys to grab their passports, a log book, a compass, Maralyn’s diary and a few other essentials, before jumping into their 4.5-foot-in-diameter life boat and attached dinghy — their boat sank about 300 miles from the Galapagos. Of note, they did not have a radio on board, so there was no way for anyone outside them to know where they were. They survived for 4 months and several ships passing by that did not see them before they were rescued. They were emaciated, ill, and in need of long term nursing back to health, he more than she--but then what happened? They set out to do it all over again. It is very reminiscent of the Shackleton story--not only was their marooning of note, their inability to survive on land was also quite impressive and for me, incomprehensible.

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

I read that there was a new biography of Alexander von Humboldt and the reviewer described him as the Father of Botany, and I had never heard of him. More accurately, I did not recall having heard of him, because I read a number of Darwin's writings and writing about him in preparation for my 2023 trip to the Galapagos--Darwin carried von Humboldt's writings with him on The Beagle, and asked his siblings to forward any newer publications to him while he was on that journey. He identified Von Humboldt as influencing his theory of evolution. He traveled widely, collected specimens wherever he went, did detailed drawings, and took copious notes. At a time when botany was all about taxonomy, he saw connections with climate and geography and grouped plants into vegetation zones, giving “western science a new lens through which to view the natural world” (p. 127). As Humboldt collated more data, plants to him “revealed a global force behind nature” (p. 128), whether indicating past human migrations or the movement of landmasses (prefiguring plate tectonics by more than a century). “No one had ever approached botany in this way” (p. 128). Observing Spanish colonial practices, he warned that deforestation and irrigation could affect the climate. Seeing the impacts of other forms of resource extraction, he connected the dots and warned that the action of humankind could affect future generations. His visionary assessment of climate effects of mankind he influenced one of my favorite Vermonters, George Perkins Marsh, who reforested the state after devastating deforestation.