Category Archives: New York Times Notable

April 24, 2026 · 6:55 pm

The Guardian and the Thief

Who knew a book so heartbreaking could be so suspenseful. Maybe there are lots of examples? Well here is one: Megha Majumdar’s The Guardian and the Thief. Set in the near-future of India where the climate catastrophe has brought famine and social/political unrest we follow two families as they try – in their unique ways – to escape the conditions that keep them hungry and suffering.

A terrific book for any course wanting to consider ‘social determinants of health’ the book sets up in stark terms (somehow without being annoying about it) the way class intersects with bodies – where they can go, what they can expect, and how they will thrive or fail.

For this reader it was a sort of awe at the way Majumdar manipulates sympathy – vacillating between Ma and Boomba, but then also for Ma and Boomba amid an environment where they are set up to make – in their various ways – chillingly choices about who and what to prioritize, and at what cost. And while it is meant to be the near future, it feels urgent and present in ways that were/are unsettling and uncomfortable: what are we willing to look away from to prioritize our immediate family, ourselves? What will we hoard – if not food, then land, or transportation, or access – and how much do we need to imagine ourselves safe (and from what, or whom) and for how long?

Over the course of one week we are kept in suspense and agony for what they can each control and what is wrested from them. And beautiful writing that lets the reader slip inside the story and align, betray, align again with characters without noticing that the story is being spun.

Go, go and enjoy, while being prepared to be asked to reckon with what you might give up and what you might take so as to save who you claim as your own.

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April 4, 2026 · 12:51 am

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all.

Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck follows Maurice and Marilyn on their ill-fated sailing trip from one place to another (exact locations are used in the book, but dear reader, this writer does not care enough to look them up).

Before they set out on the journey we figure out the married couple are odd. Odd as individuals; odd as a couple. They decide to sell their house, built a boat over a few years and dedicate their lives to living at sea. Odd as it is to imagine doing such a thing yourself, odder still (to this reader anyway) that fate or fortune would bring together two people so similarly devoted.

But so goes the world, and so goes Maurice and Marilyn off to sea. ONLY TO BE SHIPWRECKED (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title) when a whale bashes up their boat. Honestly many reviews make much of this whale (maybe for the improbability of it?) but the whale did not feature heavily in my read of it, so much as the absolute nuttiness of them having set out without a radio (for the purity!) and working flares (just…. oops).

Of course we know the whole time that things must work out mostly okay because they survive to tell the tale (or at least that was my comfortable read of it until A. suggested that perhaps it was written posthumously based on journal entires and so I spent the rest of the book in gasping suspense worried they’d be eaten by a shark, or let’s be honest, starve/die of dyhydration/exposure etc).

I’ll give you the same gift of suspense and not tell you for sure, except to say that by and large the best parts of the book were not about shipwreck or (possible) survival, but instead were about how these two managed not to eat one another alive (and I don’t mean literally) in the torment of being alone at sea.

I’ve heard – though I am an unreliable narrator on this point – that marriage can be tough and requires Some Work to make it through. One can only guess the kind of fortitude being married while dying at sea requires. Actually, you don’t need to guess. You can read this gripping and engaging book and be reminded – and don’t we all need the reminder right now – of how much hope and love alone can accomplish.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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January 31, 2025 · 1:09 am

Soldiers and Kings: If you can face non-fiction

Since November I’ve taken a bit of a pause from the news. But I had a problem: years of daily politics coverage on podcasts and newspaper replaced with: what? Surely not my own thoughts. And stipulated that music has its time and place, I’ve always been a talk radio person (for the Canadians in the room think of CBC radio one just quietly droning in the background) So. I turned to non-fiction audiobooks.

Any guys, while my first picked knocked it out of the park in terms of an excellent book, it was – far from – the reprieve from our political moment that I’d half-hoped the exercise might be (though I bear some blame as the title does suggest it may not be the lightest of content). Enter Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Snuggling.

A cultural anthropologist, De León’s Soldiers and Kings, covers the years De León spent living with and learning from a group of Honduran human smugglers. Over the chapters the book brings the complexity of their lives and choices alongside the crushing structural impossibilities that make their lives what they are.

As the book follows many years we also see how changes to immigration policies, climate catastrophe, and demands on/for labour change – and worsen – the experience of those trying to find safety and to stay there. Which makes it a particularly hard book to read right now and to be reminded – albeit from the privileged distance from which I read – of the concrete lived suffering and death that recent political changes in the US – and the likely changes within Canada – wreak.

It’s beautifully written – with the men De León meets and works alongside full in their complexity and their dreams. While sharing with the reader the contradictions of their livelihood, De León’s manages to at once also describe and analyze the broader social and political context in a way that never reads as pedantic, only as illuminating.

So while it will not be a cheerful read, it is – I think – an important one.

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