Eli Bendersky's website - "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm.
- "The Pickled City: The Story of New York pickles" by Paul Van Ravenstein and Monique Mulder - yes, a book about pickles, with lots of cool photos! That's what you get while randomly browsing in the local public library while your kids are picking out their books. All you wanted to know about the history of pickles, with particular emphasis on NYC in the early 20th century and the connection to Jewish immigration to that city.
- "Rebel Island: the incredible history of Taiwan" by Jonathan Clements - a detailed history of Taiwan, focusing mostly on the early years (pre-modern times). The writing is a bit academic and dry, but it's very comprehensive. I wish the book spent more time on the modern era, though.
- "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot" by Robert Macfarlane - an ode to taking long walks (from hours to multi-day hikes). The writing is very beautiful, but much of it feels pointless; the author describes friends and obscure historical poets in a lot of detail which has little to do with the main thesis of the book. I'd say the first 1/4 of the good is very good, and the rest is unnecessary.
- "After Rain" by William Trevor - I'm on a quest to find additional authors that write evocative short stories that stay with you, and Trevor was recommended as someone to try since my current favorites are Steinbeck and Lahiri. "After Rain" is a collection of 12 stories, mostly about love and relationships - between partners but also parents and children; the settings are usually in 1980s Ireland or England. Very good stories overall, I'm glad I tried this author and should try something else by him.
- "Spoonhandle" by Ruth Moore - a novel about the lives of Maine natives living through changing times, seeing their picturesque coastal area become a magnet for "summer people" - rich vacationers from the big cities. There's no single protagonist in the book and the writing is very warm and human. I enjoyed it.
- "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money" by Brendan Greeley - a history-oriented exploration of the importance of the dollar in world economy, from its beginnings as the Joachimsthaler in 16th century Bohemia and until modern times. This book has some interesting ideas but I found it to be quite academical and not easy to digest.
- "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by Robert M. Sapolsky - the scope of this (very long) book is huge: explaining how human behavior works starting from basic biological principles. Our understanding of the actual biological underpinnings of behavior is so nascent, however, that the vast majority of the book focuses on the usual things - the psychological studies (including all the well known ones like prisoner's dilemma, the Stanford prison experiment, etc) and comparison with other animals. Having read several other books on this topic in the past, I haven't found much new in this one.
- "Humorous short stories" by Anton Chekhov (read in Russian) - a collection of short stories with a humorous angle. The stories are typically very short, just 2-3 pages each, but the character building is superb. I should try reading something longer by Chekhov.
- "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf - describes a year in the life of several loosely connected people in a remote farm town in eastern Colorado. A wholesome story, without a specific beginning or end - just the lives of ordinary folks.
- "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" by Katherine Boo - investigative journalism of the lives of several connected families in Annawadi - one of Mumbai's most miserable slums - roughly from 2007 to 2010. The only thing more shocking than the squalor in which these people live is the degree of corruption, fraud and exploitation surrounding them. A very poignant read.
- "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin - science fiction only in the sense of 1984; it's always amusing to examine how unambitious the futuristic vision of some authors is. The book was written in the early 1970s, and it presents life thousands of years in the future as one that's pretty much identical to what it was in the early 1970s, except for close-to-speed-of-light travel. But science is not the point of this book anyway; it's more of a political or philosophical fiction, examining an anarchist-communist society and comparing it to a capitalist, "propertarian" one. Overall, this book gave me very strong vibes of the famous Soviet kids story "Dunno on the moon" (Незнайка на Луне), which I recall reading as a kid.
- "The Lion Women of Tehran" by Marjan Kamali - a multi-generational novel focusing on the life of young women in Iran from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, in the context of the various authoritarian governments of those eras (from Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's rule to after the Islamic revolution of 1979). Nice book showing that a good story can be told without too many unnecessary twists and classical attention-grabbing dramas.
Re-reads:
- "The Old Way: A story of the first people" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
- "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
- "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
- "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck