We are only in the second month of the year and my reading stack has grown far to large. Here is what I added to my list in February:
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.
Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk tells the story of Jacob Frank—an eighteenth-century Messianic religious leader around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is. The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
I am a fan of Tokarczuk’s writing but need to postpone reading this 900+ page book until a month or two with more days!
Everybody has regrets, Daniel H. Pink explains in The Power of Regret. They’re a universal and healthy part of being human. And understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives.
Drawing on research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology, Pink debunks the myth of the “no regrets” philosophy of life. And using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own World Regret Survey—which has collected regrets from more than 15,000 people in 105 countries—he lays out the four core regrets that each of us has. These deep regrets offer compelling insights into how we live and how we can find a better path forward.
The purpose of the book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion and to show how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school and bring greater meaning to your life. The three parts of the book are: Regret reclaimed, Regret revealed, Regret remade that explain four core regrets—foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, connection regrets.
Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention—the biggest since the time of Mao.
Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ’reeducation’ camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.
These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.
The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.
This Olympic month may be the perfect time to learn more about the Uyghur controversy.
The Christie Affair is told from the point of view of Miss Nan O'Dea, a fictional character but based on someone real. In 1925, she infiltrated the wealthy, rarified world of author Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie; a world of London townhomes, country houses, shooting parties, and tennis matches. Nan O'Dea became Archie's mistress, luring him away from his devoted wife. In every way, she became a part of their world—first, both Christies. Then, just Archie’s.
The question is, why? And what did it have to do with the mysterious eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing? The answer takes you back in time, to Ireland, to a young girl in love, to a time before The Great War. To a star-crossed couple who were destined to be together—until war and pandemic and shameful secrets tore them apart. What makes a woman desperate enough to destroy another woman's marriage? What makes someone vengeful enough to hatch a plot years in the making? What drives someone to murder? These questions and more are explored in Nina de Gramont's powerful novel.
I devoured Agatha Christie mysteries as a teenager but never knew much about her real life. Never knew her wealthy background and world travels. Now Death on the Nile is on the big screen and a novel reveals an eleven day disappearance and a real mystery in the author’s life.
Celebrate the love of books and reading every day!
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