Books Read, January 2026

I started the year finishing off two books that were more demanding, after which I relaxed into mostly cosier, mostly mystery, novels and one very engaging memoir. Looking over the list again, more than halfway through February (coming up to 1/6th of the year behind us already, how did that happen?!) there’s nothing here I wouldn’t recommend quite heartily.

As usual, the numbering in this post comes from my annual handwritten reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). Notes to myself, that is, so that I can remember a book and remember my response to it, rather than any attempt at a more polished, edited review.

I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes. As well, I’ve included links to any posts on my Instagram reading account (to which, by the way, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly — but also considering abandoning. We’ll see. . . )

1. Flashlight, Susan Choi. Literary fiction; Immigrant life; Children of immigrants; American history; Korean history; marriage; bildungsroman-ish.

We begin with young Louisa, sometime in the 1970s, remembering the last time she walked with her father, the last words he’d spoken to her. Then we see her visiting a psychiatrist’s office, referred there after incidents of petty larceny (to which she adds the theft of a flashlight taken from the psychiatrist’s desk and hidden in her room back home.

Next, we see her father, Serk, as a young child striving to fit in, to excel in, his school in Japan, learning to speak the language better than the Korean he hears at home. The story then follows Serk to adulthood, to his eventual refusal to move back to Korea with his family, instead moving to an academic life in the US.

He meets and marries Anne whose pathway from Toledo, Ohio to meeting Serk has been much less direct and involves the charismatic, brilliant (and married) man whom she accompanied to Cairo to Jerusalem to Damascus before he realized he’d impregnated her and flew her back to the States. There, he’d arranged maternity care for her and once her baby was born, the boy was legally adopted by his father, Adrian, and his father’s wife who named “their” son Tobias.

Once these elements have been set out, we eventually read that Serk meets, courts, and marries Anne, and that Louisa is born the year he begins teaching at a state college. He’s a devoted, if over-protective father, an impatient, inattentive, thoughtless, and unkind husband.

And when Louisa is nine, Serk is constrained/obliged to take a temporary-exchange academic position in Japan. Anna is unable to adapt, without any Japanese and conspicuously different in her American whiteness; coincidentally, she’s experiencing an array of mysterious somatic symptoms that compromise her mobility.

Louisa, however, after an initial awkwardness picks up enough language to enjoy and thrive in school and to participate in neighbourhood culture, conversing confidently with vendors at the market, running happily with classmates after school. She enjoys their life in Japan, until the day she is found unconscious on the beach, her father supposedly drowned, his body never recovered.

The novel is dense with detail and by the time we trace Louisa’s path through adolescence, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, remarriage, we’ve also followed Anna’s rather lonely path to life as a disabled senior, with a surprise or two — and contentment, even happiness, in her last decades. Her son, Tobias, becomes an important character as well; it’s through his intervention and persistence that we eventually find what has happened to Louisa’s father (along with many others who disappeared mysteriously from that coastline in that period).

Longing and belonging, absence and presence, communication, searching, immigration. Cold War Korea, nationality, language and family, loneliness, survival. Mothers and daughters. Abduction. . . A big novel with a mystery at its centre, set from Indiana to North Korea with forays to Paris, London, Japan.

Recommended, but leave yourself room to read and digest and think and imagine. I borrowed from the library, and the huge waiting list (123 for the 16 e-books; 249 for the 45 print books) meant no chance to extend the lending period. I’m a fast enough reader that finishing it in that time wasn’t a problem, but I would have liked to press “pause” occasionally. A book with much to chew on — would be good for a book club provided members are willing to commit.

2. La Portalettere, Francesca Giannone. Read in (original) Italian; Historical fiction; Feminist fiction; Domestic fiction; Romance; Family saga; Strong Female Protagonist; Set in Puglia, Italy. Available in English.

Read for Italian book club. Bought this at the Italian bookstore on Rue de la Roi de Sicile in Paris.

Very satisfying to read this in Italian — good level for a fairly advanced Italian student , a blend of genres that’s engaging, enjoyable to read, and substantive enough in content.

Protagonist Anna comes to a small town in Puglia with her husband and son, not so long after the death of an infant daughter/sister. Carlo is happy to be back home, reunited with his beloved older brother Antonio. Anna, however, who is from Liguria (and will always be called La Forestiera by the locals who thus mark her as being from the north, different) resists what she sees as provincialism.

She continues to sprinkle her conversations with French, forbids her son to speak the local dialect, and, before too long, she shocks her husband as much as the locals by applying for the position of letter carrier — portalettere. As Carlo says, Non esistono portalettere donna (They don’t exist, female letter carriers). To which Anna answers succinctly, Finora (Until now).

A character whom author Giannone based on the life of her great-grandmother, Anna makes her delivery rounds on a bicycle, befriends others who are marginalized in this insular community, and also, eventually, she organizes after the war to rally support for women’s franchise.

Besides depicting important historical events from a feminist perspective, the novel also sketches domestic politics and the ways Anna resists (often) and accommodates herself (not so often) to those. It also teases us with several secrets — known to the reader but not to the characters they most impact. Friendships and romances and marriages complicated by secrets guarded over decades.

I very much enjooyed the novel in the reading, although I came to have some reservations about it as I evaluated it later. Many will be frustrated by the ending. As well, I found some of the characters too flattened or bordering on caricature. But overall, I’d recommend it– two others in my book club had similar reservations to mine, but the majority (there were about twelve of us discussing it) liked it very much. It’s available in English as The Letter Carrier, translation by Elettra Pauletto, and it looks as if it will be (or is being) made into a TV series.

Short description and photo of the attractive book cover in my Instagram book account.

3. The Drowned. John Banville. Literary fiction; crime novel; police procedural; historical fiction (1950s Dublin); Quirke/Stafford series.

Another in the Quirke and Strafford series — of the more recent series written under Banville’s own name. I’ve only read Christine Falls, I think, of the earlier books written under Banville’s pseuydonym, Benjamin Black. I do intend to go back and read those in sequence but Paul picked this title up for himself at Christmas. Here we find Quirke still grieving, much unmoored after the tragic events of April in Spain and the failed relationship in The Lock-Up. He’s nettled that his daughter is continuing her affair with still-married (albeit separated) St. John Strafford (with whom Quirke must work regularly and whom he finds insufferable).

A lonely man with a past (that must be guarded for fear of persecution) discovers a strange event that must be reported to police — a car, left running in a field overlooking the sea, the female driver having disappeared, her husband claiming not to know where she is. The socially ill-at-ease man is thus drawn into a complicated situation which — as so often in Banville’s crime novels — involves Ireland’s class structure, the hierarchies enforced by religion, a world of infidelities, of children neglected or unhappy, abused.

So much of the emotional landscape is dismal, but then will break through an instance of startling compassion. . . and then the moral quandary this compassion and its resultant insight presents. As in the empathy a detective surprisingly evinces for an erstwhile (?!) child molester, a pedophile who was himself groomed and abused as a child.

There are crime novels more horrifically graphic, but not many so revelatory of our human weaknesses and profound griefs , ongoing existential melancholy. Honestly, few characters to like in the series, but much to recognize, to meditate over.

I posted a favourite passage from The Drowned over on my Instagram reading account.

4. A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny. Crime Novel; Police Procedural; Inspector Gamache / Three Pines Mystery Series; Set in fictional Quebec village.

And apparently (perhaps because I’ve been struggling through Cory Doctorow’s fascinating but disturbingly spot-on Enshittification, I needed another murder mystery.

In this volume of the series, Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie have managed an anniversary getaway to the luxurious Manoir Bellechasse on the secluded shore of a lake surrounded by woods. The heat of summer is peaking, and unfortunately the inn is also hosting the reunion of a wealthy family — wealthy but decidedly not happy. Secrets and long-harboured enmities simmer and, as it turns out, a first unveiling is that Three Pines residents who have become friends of the Gamaches over the last few years (as Armand solved murders in that ‘cozy’ little village) turn out to be part of the wealthy family.

Which, of course, makes Armand’s task even more complicated when murder — inevitably! — happens.

Penny really does create interesting characters: always multi-layered, flawed, grappling with morality. In this volume we learn more about Gamache’s past, his father’s . . . and his own relationship with his son, his son as father. We also gain some fascinating knowledge about bees and sculpture — cannot say more for fear of spoiling. . . Recommended, but do start at the beginning of the series.

5. Rapture, Emily Maguire. Literary fiction; historical fiction; feminist theology; medieval europe; religious history; Pope Joan.

A young girl grows up listening to discussions and theological arguments between her father’s learned guests, hiding under the table to do so. Raising her on his own after her mother died in childbirth, her father (a priest until he fell in love with, and impregnated, the girl’s mother) educates her such that she is able to follow their conversations and, gradually, to contribute to them. But circumstances change sharply, and she has to make her own way in 9th century Mainz, a world dangerous for a single woman.

A feminist work of historical fiction that fleshes out (literally!) the life of the apocryphal Pope Joan. Torn between desire and the necessary suppression of any expression of her female body, which she has hidden under the robes of a monk, taking holy orders disguised as a young man, always in danger of discovery and punishment, probably by death. Agnes (who will become Pope) questions why God would have made a body capable of such pleasure if enjoying it should be so sinful.

Adventure, love, romance, much tension as well as engaging interesting characters and a deftly sketched medieval setting. Recommended. (Much more fulsome review here).

6. Shadow Life, Hiromi Goto x Ann Xu. Graphic novel; elderly female protagonist; mother and daughters; end-of-life; comic.

My recently deceased friend, Carol Matthews reviewed this graphic novel a few years ago, and I never got around to reading it then, as I’d intended to. Thinking of her so much in the last several weeks, I remembered that intention and borrowed a copy from the library. Carol’s review — where you will learn the litcrit term vollendungsroman — is much livelier, comprehensive, and insightful than the little summary I jotted down in my reading journal and I don’t mind at all if you pop over and read that instead of mine.

Here’s what I wrote, in case you’ve either stayed here or gone and then come back: 76-year-old widow Kumiko escapes from the assisted-living home where her daughters have placed her. She enjoys her new life in a new home, keeping her whereabouts secret from her daughters. But she’s been followed there from the Assisted-Living home by something weird, mysterious, and threatening — Death is hunting for her. But Death doesn’t quite understand what a cunning opponent the old woman will be. Let the games begin!

Besides the humour and the imaginative portrayal, the narrative made vivid by Ann Xu’s lively graphics, the novel treats aging thoughtfully. It pays attention both to the depredations of old age and the help some of us will consequently need, and it does so while recognizing how important is the drive for some independence.

7. The War Widow, Tara Moss. Historical fiction (set in post-war Australia); Mystery/thriller; Billy Walker series.

I read this on reader Maria’s recommendation, intrigued by the author being both West Coast Canadian and Australian.

In post-war Sydney, the very attractive, very stylish young private detective (former war reporter) Billie Walker is asked to search for the son of European immigrants. Danger, derring-do, and romance, but at the core a horrid confrontation with an evil that the war failed to extinguish. Historical fiction, a feminist protagonist who wields her red lipstick mindfully and sews a mean and stylish seam.

8. Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong, Larry Grant (in conversation with Scott Steedman). Conversational Memoir / Biography; Creative Non-fiction; Elder’s story; Vancouver history; Indigenous (Musqueam) history; Colonization; Chinese-Canadian history.

Larry Grant was born in 1936 to a Musqueam mother and a father who had immigrated to Canada from a village in Guangdong China. His people, through his maternal ancestry, have lived near the mouth of the Fraser River (in what is now Vancouver) “from time immemorial” and he grew up living with his large extended family on the reserve. His mother spoke English well, and she also spoke hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ one of the last really fluent speakers, her son says. He explains that the kids (he and his siblings) focused on learning English, choosing to be/act Canadian, not putting so much effort into learning their father’s Cantonese, nor hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓.

Because Grant’s mother married a non-status man, however, she and her sons were stripped of their status by an “Indian agent” of the Canadian government and no longer allowed to live on the reserve (In 1985, Bill C-31 finally amended this and women who had lost status by “marrying-out” were allowed to apply for reinstatement). Grant’s story is compelling for his drive to fit in , to succeed despite the systemic racism he experienced. He did well at school and had a successful career as a machinist and a longshoreman. And for the last several decades he as worked as a language teacher, and as an elder at UBC.

Caught between his indigenous identity, his Cantonese heritage, racializiation by the dominant Canadian culture, as he says, “I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self. To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that.” And while he recounts this lifetime of reconciliation with himself and with the surrounding social reality, Grant, in conversation with Steedman, traces 90 years of Vancouver history, with a compelling emphasis on the effects of colonialism on the ecosystem that was still relatively healthy in Grant’s earliest memories.

While neither he nor his interlocutor, Steed, holds back from speaking about the racism experienced or the harm such racism did to the Musqueam culture and language, the book also highlights hope, particularly through transmission of cultural values and the teaching of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ to younger generations.

And that’s it for my reading in the first month of 2026. What about you? Did your reading year start well? Any must-reads you’d care to share? Reading goals? (and letting yourself read Only your favourite genre for a month or two or even for the whole year counts as a goal as well!) Something new you’d like to try reading these year? A promise to yourself that you never have to try reading whatever-it-might-be again?

All grist for the reading chat mill. We love to hear from you.

xo,

f