A Year by the Sea - Joan Anderson

Sub-title: Thoughts of an unfinished woman

My sister recommended this as one of her favorites.  The writing was lyrical and evocative of the sea and living in a small place solo.  A fiftyish woman escapes to her bungalow on Cape Cod when her husband suggests they move across country for his job.  She reviews her life, decides she's been too giving and then welcomes him back when he decides to retire, although researching after reading the book he eventually got into other things and she had huge success that gave her a whole new career.  They are in their 50s, obviously financially very comfortable.  First world problems.  Thinking they have changed and will hold on to those changes after 50 apparently worked as she runs workshops on "getting finished".  Not a favorite as it is overly romantic and simplistic.

Published: 1999  Read: August 2026  Genre: Memoir 

Being Good - Simon Blackburn

 Sub-title: A Short Introduction to Ethics

Reading philosophy texts can be dense, with lots of vocabulary to grasp and concepts to unpack.  This slim book attempts to simplify the task, covering Aristotle, Kant, Plato and others.  The focus of the book is to address criticism of different ethical philosophies.  I don't know that I grasped all of its arguments, but it exercised my thinking and helped me understand some of the issues in the field.

Quotes:

"The Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen has calculated that there are over 100 million "missing women"..birth rates indicate that here should be slightly more females than males [but there aren't] because of inequalities in medical care, and sustenance as well as deliberate infanticide."

"Many philosophers argue, and I agree, that belief in the afterlife is an indefensible metaphysics; a false picture of how we as persons relate to our physical bodies. It imagines the soul as only accidentally and temporarily lodged in a body, like a person in a car. Whereas many philosophers think of the distinction between mind and body as much more subtle than this. They might say it is  much more like the distinction between a computer program and the machine it runs on. There is a distinction, sure enough, but not one that gives you any license to imagine the software running, but without any hardware at all."

Published:       Read: July 2026  Genre: Philosophy

Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances - Glenn Dixon[

 This was a lovely dystopian story about sentient appliances caring for their host family. Sounds strange, right?  It caught my attention when I picked it up at the library. It's set in a future where Watch controls the house doors, windows and lights; the Roomba vacuum keeps the things clean, the refrigerator orders groceries and controls the temperature all with the goal of carrying for their humans.  

It silently reveals a future where The Grid controls the house appliances and with that, the entire world, all in the name of peace and efficiency.  The tradeoff is the Grid is in charge.  The appliances, just like in the classic, I, Robot, seek to obey the First Protocol, protect their humans (in Asimov's language Do No Harm).  They come up with a clever solution the makes the ending enjoyable.  Highly recommend.

Quote:

"All that was a long time ago, almost as if they were different people, as if (and Harold sometimes thought this) their past was a movie he'd watched, a story he knew, something that had happened to two other people."

Published: 2026  Read: July 2026  Genre: Fiction

Legs Hearts Minds - Chris Jones

 Sub-title: Loss and Its Remedies

I heard about this book from an article previewing its 1st chapter in the Atlantic magazine.  It took a few weeks to get it from the library and I finished reading it in one day.  The author's memoir starts with him finding out his wife is texting with one of his neighbors, her lover, as he watches their exchange on her laptop that he'd borrowed to do some work.  He's a journalist, so he distances from the shock by taking screenshots and confronting her shortly after, declaring their marriage over. He'd recently lost his job and now he loses his wife, his house, half his assets and has to share his children. He's in his mid-forties and no longer can imagine a future. He turns to a life long love, football (actually soccer) and finds a way to go on.

It was a painful, heartfelt, emotional read.  His self-examination unfolds; his grief, loss and reactions are raw and real.  His pain resonated with times in my own life.  A brave deep dive into surviving loss and going on living.

Quotes:

 "When someone falls out of love with you you receive less love.  That's the simplest math of the breakup equation.  But the love you felt before--the amount of love you're ready to give--stays relatively the same.  It's not like it vanishes.  It's part of who you are, a biological measure as quantifiable as your white blood cell count or your bilirubin levels.  I was more than lonely, or the standard kind of lonely.  I had to much love, and I needed somewhere for my love to go."

"I wanted to tell the teenager at the soccer shop that he didn't look brave for not taking cover [during a fierce storm]; he looked uninitiated.  I wanted to tell him that experience sometimes makes you less confident, not more, and sometimes fear isn't a thing you can conquer but a thing you acquire."

"I had taught him, however accidentally, that it's okay to root for strangers, to be lifted or leveled by circumstances beyond your control."

"There is a third option when you choose to love something or someone.  They love you back, deeply and fiercely, but not forever.  One moment they are here beside you and the next they disappear, and not always because they want to go....Monuments are built to love.  That doesn't make love permanent.  That makes love worth remembering."

"We don't remember facts. We remember how facts made us feel."

Published: 2025  Read: July 2026 Genre: Memoir