2024 books we love

Thanksgiving thoughts

I wish you a happy and healthy Thanksgiving!

I’m headed to Philadelphia for our wonderful gathering of extended family and friends. It evokes feelings, that’s for sure.

As I wrote on an earlier Thanksgiving:

We hear our elders’ laughter and wisdom reaching from beyond the grave, the relentlessness of time, the memories that overwhelm. I could be crushed beneath those memories, but decide instead that they’re meant to buoy and bind us to one another.

Thanksgiving is family at its best, full of love, generosity, unflinching moral compasses, integrity up the wazoo, boundless curiosity, and mouth watering food. It is not about religion or ethnicity or anything else. It is about family. It is about love.

I am so grateful.

It’s no suprise that our Thanksgiving mythology doesn’t square with reality. Here’s a gripping history that may rewire your understanding: AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

And, of course, Thanksgiving points toward the end of the year. I’m thinking about the characters in my new novel, DUET FOR ONE, arriving on May 6, 2025. I can’t wait for you to meet Adam and Dara, as well as Adam’s piano playing parents, Victor and Adele Pearl. I’ve been hanging out with them for about 20 years and now it’s time for them to venture into the world.

I was honored to be a nominator once again for NPR’s Books We Love, a terrific end- of-the-year list.

Links to my write-ups:

SMALL RAIN, THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY, FORGOTTENNESS, HOMBRECITO, FOR THE BLESSINGS OF JUPITER AND VENUS, THE PHYSICS OF SORROW, and THE SWANS OF HARLEM.

Wishing you happy reading and only good things.

With love,
Martha

P.S. ICYMI, here is last week’s newsletter: “Instruments of protest”

P.P.S.

Sharing my Thanksgiving apple cakes with you.