“In the new science, the new worldviews, we are not nouns, we are verbs.”

Rebecca Solnit’s book “The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change” (Haymarket Books, 2026, 149 pages) is something of a scholarly study and a personal prophesy. Is Solnit’s title for her book right that there may be a new beginning following a time of cataclysm, or are we at the beginning of the “end times” as prophesied in the Bible?

One May evening in Holt, Colorado, septuagenarian and widow Addie Moore makes her way to the home of Louis Waters, a widower also in his 70s. They’ve lived within a block of each other for decades, and Addie had always admired Louis’ wife. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Addie says she has a proposal for Louis.

“Some historians would say that ‘thinkers’ are behind the ideas and mythologies people live by. I think it also goes back to maize, reindeer, squash, sweet potatoes, and rice.”
— Gary Snyder

If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to live a self-sufficient lifestyle and largely off-the-grid, then “Lambs in Winter” (Bright Leaf Press, 2024, 215 pages) by Alexis Lathem might be the book for you, especially if you are a woman.  

Sometimes a book appears which changes the course of our nation’s history and culture. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” gave a face to slavery and helped bring on the Civil War. Now rarely read, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle” exposed the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry and so repulsed the American people that it brought about federal reforms regarding food safety.

When I was growing up, my father had a bookshelf with glass doors. Behind the delicate handles were elegant hardcovers, fairy tale collections with beautiful illustrations and sentimental classics, like “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy he had bought and read back in the 1970s. But he had another bookshelf, a doorless one, that made all its books far more accessible, attainable, but in some ways slightly less alluring.

I find that more often than not, you don’t find the books you need to read, they find you. A few months ago, a work acquaintance suggested “Healing Back Pain” by John E. Sarno, M.D. (Warner Books, 1991, 193 pages) and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. 

“On the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Ronald Truluck drove the long way to work so he could smoke a celebratory joint.”

So begins Ralph Ellis’s comic novel “The Accident Report” (Black Rose Writing, 2025, 223 pages). A recent graduate of Chapel Hill, Ronald Truluck is a reporter for “The Eagle,” a local paper which only reports the news of the fictional Millerton, North Carolina.

In January, in the middle of the week-long subfreezing temps and the snow that froze into ice, one of my sons gave me a belated Christmas gift, Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Basic Books, 2015, 416 pages). Originally published in 1959, this account of explorer Ernest Shackleton and his 27-man crew and their long battle for survival in Antarctica sold moderately well, then took off with the public after its reappearance in the late 1980s. Many of you readers have likely read this tale of heroism and resilience, but I was a come-lately to its pages. 

Thomas Schlesser’s “Mona’s Eyes” is a slow motion read that will baffle readers looking for a conventional pathway to storytelling. 

Ten-year-old Mona lives with her parents, Camille and Paul, in Paris. One day, she inexplicably goes blind. Her worried parents rush her off to the doctor, but on their arrival Mona regains her vision. The doctor and staff of the hospital are baffled; the parents and Mona are terrified.

“I wanna know what love is/
I want you to show me.”
— Foreigner

There’s love and then there’s Love. In Glenn Aparicio Parry’s book “Original Love: A Timeless Source of Wholeness” (SelectBooks Inc., New York, 2026), he gives us the full monty of what this means, as if looking at the Earth from outer space through enlightened eyes.