Five books at a minimum. Every month. A variety of topics from different genres. Here is the list from July 2026.
The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time; A Memoir (2025) by Jane Bertch is a story of reinvention, resilience, and resolve. At the age of seventeen Bertch and her mother travel from their home in Chicago to Paris on a graduation trip, where Jane’s high school French is met with derision and scorn. She vows never to return. Yet ten years later she finds herself back in Paris after a stint in London working for an American bank. She has been transferred and thrown into the deep water of the French financial world. Then as Jane realizes that she can make it in French banking she leaves in 2009 to open—of all things—a cooking school in Paris! Non! This just cannot be done. Except The French Ingredient—through delightful storytelling, astute observational skills, and a willingness to share doubts and failures—shows that not only can it be done, but our author/entrepreneur can thrive in the process.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2011) by Charles King is the story of one of Europe’s most intriguing cities and its “descent into the heart of darkness” during the Holocaust. We discover that unlike many cities in the region, Odessa is relatively young, founded three years after Washington, DC. A wide range of fortune seekers, freedom fighters, Russian bureaucrats, traders, merchants, tavern keepers, poets, writers, and journalists came together to make up the mix of residents in one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities. With scholarly insight, wide-ranging biographical subjects, and crisp writing, King introduces us to the people who came together to shape the dream for a great seaport on the Black Sea, but who also put the city in a perpetual balance between greatness and suicide.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) by Laila Lalami is a story of dreams, determination, displacement, heartbreak, and perseverance. It captivates the reader and leads us to care about these four characters who find themselves on a small, inflatable boat headed for Spain. With spare prose, sharp insight, and a sympathetic gaze, Lalami begins with the harrowing crossing of the Mediterranean by illegal migrants. Crowded into the boat, they are taken only to where they could swim to shore before being deposited in the rough waters to fend for themselves. Lalami then returns to the time before the trip, to help us see what would drive them to such desperate measures. The book’s second half picks up their journey after they reach the Spanish coast. There is a vibrancy and a sympathetic ear in Lalami’s storytelling. She has provided us with a thoughtful, timely, and empathetic look into people—not very different from you and me except for the circumstances of their birth—who dared to hope. These characters have stayed with me even after I finished this impressive debut novel.
Fatal Remedies (1999) by Donna Leon is the eighth in what is now a 33-installment series about the Venetian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti. A late night call alerts the Commissario to a sudden act of vandalism. Brunetti soon learns that the culprit who may be arrested is a member of his family. A travel agency has been targeted for the vandalism, he discovers, because of possible involvement in sex tourism and pedophilia. The press learns soon enough of Brunetti’s delicate situation, other officers in the force who do not like the Commissario are circling, and his difficult superior has been pressuring him to solve a daring robbery with a link to a suspicious accidental death. Such things in Italy always suggest possible Mafia involvement. It is a thorny and winding path that Brunetti must follow to get to the ultimate truth.
Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) by Yiyun Li, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, is one of the most difficult, unsettling, and yet moving books I have ever read. “There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” After that straightforward, painful opening, Li continues in austere and unsparing prose through what one reviewer correctly names a meditation on living and radical acceptance. “The death of a child realigns time and space,” she notes. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.” Yet life grows alongside the scars. Children die and parents go on living. Yiyun Li’s words are not comforting, but they open a way of approaching life and death and life with honesty. Things in nature merely grow until it’s time for them to die.
The Baseball 100 (2021) by Joe Posnanski—the self-described “writer of sports and other nonsense”—is characterized by the publisher as “a magnum opus . . . an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write.” It is pure baseball bliss. Posnanski originally wrote this over a 100-day stretch for the web pages of The Athletic. But the compendium is much more satisfying. First, the rankings are important—and instantly give the reader a chance to argue with Joe, which he encourages. But they serve the larger purpose of providing this talented writer and lifelong fan with a chance to explore baseball’s rich, deep, diverse, and at times challenging history. A history that—like all history—is under construction. I’ve been re-reading this work on what is, in some instances, my fourth pass through this work. It is a gift that keeps on giving.
WHAT’S ON THE NIGHTSTAND FOR AUGUST (Subject to change at the whims of the reader)
- So You Want to Own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump by Elizabeth Buchanan
- The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
- So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan
- The Moor’s Account: A Novel by Laila Lalami
- The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon
Keep reading!
More to come . . .
DJB
NOTE: Click to see the books I read in June of 2026 and to see the books I read in 2025.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
MORE TO COME... 