The Things We Never Say (2026) - Elizabeth Strout

 

The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.

“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything - everything - looked different."

Artie Dam is the kind of high school history teacher who is remembered by former students for decades. Artie has everything going for him. On the surface at least, Artie has settled down into the kind of steady life that others can only aspire to. He’s been married to the same woman for decades, loves his teaching job and his students, has a grown son who seems to be doing well, and is often found solo-sailing his own boat out on the bay near his home. 

But Artie Dam, surrounded by friends and family though he might be, is a deeply lonely man who feels that he really doesn’t know even the people closest to him, and truth be known, Artie even feels a little bit suicidal at times. Then even that uncomfortable world gets turned upside down on Artie after he learns a deeply buried family secret that further convinces him that no one ever really knows anyone else. The final straw for Artie comes with the 2024 election. He dreads the election as it approaches, and when it’s over he’s left with the feeling that everything familiar to him is slipping away.

In the end, Artie figures out that being alive is a “private thing” for all of us, that our real pains, truths, and thoughts are things that no one else will ever fully be able to understand or even have access to. This is a novel about loneliness, communication, and connection, and Strout leaves the reader with a lot to think about despite how short, at only 220 pages, The Things We Never Say is. 

This is another beautifully written Elizabeth Strout novel, but it is not destined to be one of my favorites of hers mainly, I suppose, because the way that Artie and, with one exception, everyone around him reacts to the 2024 election does not feel realistic to me. I found it hard to believe how deeply obsessed and self-destructive the people in Artie’s life allowed themselves to become immediately upon announcement of the official results. For me, it feels a little heavy handed even as a literary device. That said, The Things We Never Say is an Elizabeth Strout novel, and Elizabeth Strout proved a long time ago that she is incapable of writing a bad novel.  

Abandoned Books - Jan thru May 2026

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.

In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:

This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I really had high hopes for it since it was a National Book Award semi-finalist at one point. But I found Chain Gang All-Stars extremely difficult to read because its author decided to go all “pronoun crazy” on me. This is a “woke” book by any definition, but my only problem with it was tying to figure out if “they” and “them” were supposed to be singular or plural. The plot was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me working so hard to figure out what easily could have been made obvious by simply using pronouns the way they were meant to be used. I got tired of re-reading whole paragraphs just to be sure that the author was only talking about one person instead of multiple ones.

I was looking for an Australian novel when I started reading A Hundred Small Lessons, and was drawn to this story about an elderly woman forced to leave her family for health reasons. Unfortunately/fortunately, the home she’s placed in is within walking distance of her old house, and she keeps coming back even though a young family has moved in. It’s probably me on this one, but it just became too much of a “Hallmark movie” to keep me turning pages…too predictable.

This one seemed like a natural fit for me, so I have now given its second, and final chance. Turns out that I don’t get much of a sense of the author’s “passion” from this collection of bookish essays he’s written over the years. Frankly, I found them to be very dryly written, and a little bit dull if read as a steady diet. I’m sure that many people have loved this one, and can tell me that I’m wrong about it. I’ll grant them that. Just not for me.  

I abandoned Every Day I Read for exactly the opposite reason that I quit on A Passion for Books. The South Korean author of this one took such an overwhelming cutesy approach here that I quickly realized I am not even remotely close to being part of her intended audience. I imagine this one got a big push on BookTock, exactly where its intended audience hangs out for a good time. For me, it was just too simplistic and obvious to get me past the book’s first few pages.

The Black Wolf is, by far, my biggest disappointment of the year. (Maybe it started with what I consider to be a pretty horrible cover.) I made it all the way through Penny’s 50-page recap of her previous book (barely), and then waded right in to her preachy anti-business, anti-American diatribe on global warming and Canadian sellouts willing to ruin Canada in order to enrich themselves. This one is a real downer of a story.

Rule of the Bone is my other big regret for 2026. I’ve had a copy of this one around the house for years, and this was my second attempt at reading it. I was surprised, or maybe not really all that surprised, I suppose, to end up quitting on it this second time around just a few pages past where I quit on it the first time I tried to read it. Russell Banks manages the near impossible here: a particularly repulsive storyline that still manages to be boring as heck.

I really didn’t get very far into this one. I will probably catch some flak for saying this, but I’ve grown weary about every book, movie, or television show being required for political correctness reasons to have at least one, or maybe a handful of LGBQT characters at the forefront. I’ve nothing against anyone’s personal life, not my business, but I think the group is overrepresented now to the point of ridiculousness - and, in the long run, that’s to the detriment of the very population being highlighted. Call it LGBQT fatigue, if you will. 

That’s it, so far. Looks like I’ll probably come in around 15 abandoned books again this year, right on schedule. How many do you guys give up on each year on average? I used to force myself, when I was much younger and had way more reading years still ahead of me than behind me, to finish every book that I began, but those days are long gone.

The Little Liar (2023) - Mitch Albom

I’m really not all that much into audiobooks these days, but I do still enjoy them anytime I’m driving alone for more than just a few minutes at a time. The extra focus that audiobooks demand keeps me more aware and alert than I otherwise would be by just listening to music while I drive. So I put Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar to good use last month. I chose an Albom book mainly because he is one of those writers whose stories are sraightforward enough that they don’t require a focus level that might be dangerous at 75 miles per hour. That he does such a wonderful job narrating The Little Liar himself was a bonus I didn’t expect.

Mitch Albom books tend to be a little gimmicky, and this one is no exception. This is a story about an eleven-year-old boy in Salonika, Greece, who has never in his life told a lie. We know this to be true because the book’s narrator is none other than Truth itself, and Truth tells us that young Nico Krispis is simply incapable of telling a lie. We, as readers, believe it - and so does everyone in Nico’s Salonika community.

But Nico’s determination never to lie backfires on him when the Nazis invade Greece and a devious German officer exploits Nico’s reputation for unfailing honesty to trick the boy’s fellow Jews into calmly boarding the trains that are to take them to faraway concentration camps. Nico believes that the families are being relocated to new towns and jobs where they can safely ride out the war, and that’s what they believe when he tells them it’s true. He’s believes what he’s been told by the German he’s befriended, and that’s what he tells everyone at the train station. It’s only when Salonika has largely been cleared of its Jewish population that Nico figures out the truth. And when he does, he is so horrified that he never tells the truth again.

There are four main characters in The Little Liar: Nico; his older brother Sebastian; Fannie, the little girl both boys are in love with; and the German officer. The four characters go their separate ways after leaving Salonika for the camps, but they are far from done with each other. Albom tells their stories in rotating segments focused on each's post-war life until the moment forty years later that they finally meet again for their final confrontation.   

The Little Liar is a story about lies, devastating guilt, reluctant forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and hard-earned redemption. It reads like a deceptively simple parable requiring a fairly strong suspension of disbelief at times, but it still manages to pack a surprising punch. 

Godfall (2023) - Van Jensen

 

“No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"

But that’s not really what happens.

Instead, as it approaches rural Nebraska, what turns out to be an alien corpse falls slower and slower before rather gently landing just outside Little Springs, Nebraska. No one dies. No one is even injured. But almost immediately, a swarm of military personnel, FBI agents, scientists, cultists, foreign spies, and conspiracy theorists hits Little Springs - and Sheriff David Blunt’s problems are just about to begin. In the end, the Sheriff will be lucky to survive the invasion of his little town, because almost immediately people start to die - and it looks like the string of murders is directly connected to the massive, supposedly dead, alien.

Godfall is not as much of a science fiction novel as its title and basic plot might lead readers to believe it to be. It is much more a solidly crafted police procedural in which the Sheriff, with a mixed bag of help and opposition from the FBI and the military, tries to catch a serial killer who is relentlessly picking off his victims one by one. That so many of the killer’s victims are townspeople personally closest to Sheriff Blunt makes it all the more urgent that the killer be stopped quickly. The job would be a lot easier, though, if Blunt could tell the difference between those he can trust and those who are lying to him.

This is a well done mashup of the science fiction and murder mystery genres that will probably please fans of the mystery genre a bit more than it will please science fiction fans. In truth, the scifi here is really rather limited in comparison to the space given to catching the town’s serial killer. It helps that the novel’s characters are distinctive enough to keep them all straight, with Sheriff Blunt and his journalist cousin being particularly well developed ones.

If you are a fan of both science fiction and of mysteries, Godfall is definitely one you should take a look at, but even non-scifi fans will enjoy this one.

A Brief Visit to College Station Pays Off

College Station, home to Texas A&M University, is only about 75 miles from my front door, so I enjoy driving up there every few months to see what might turn up in the city’s bookstores. Even though I ended up doing more selling (I hope) than buying this time around, I did come home with five additions to my home library. I’ve decided to begin selling off my collection of Civil War books, nonfiction and fiction alike, and a little indie bookstore in Bryan (College Station’s neighbor) has shown some interest in those. So there’s that.

The new book I’m most tickled about is the 1943 wartime edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Buried Clock, shown above. Despite its age, there is no spotting or discoloration on any of the book’s 250 pages. Considering that this Grosset & Dunlap edition is just a cheaper edition of the William Morrow "Victory Edition"of the book, that’s a pleasant surprise. The inside flap of the book jacket says this in red letters:

This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.

The book’s copyright page adds this:

* VICTORY EDITION*

 The typographical size and format of this book are in accordance with the paper conservation orders of the War Production Board.

I saw almost a dozen other Perry Mason books from the same era today, but the pages in all of them were so discolored that I passed on buying any but this one. From the drastic difference in its condition compared to the others on the same shelf, I don’t think it was acquired by the store from the same seller. 

I also found three Carlos Ruiz Zafón paperbacks published in the UK. Two of them The Prisoner of Heaven and The Angel’s Game are part of Zafón’s well known “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series, a series you should definitely try if you haven’t already done so. Because I’ve not read any of Zafón’s shorter work, I’m particularly looking forward to the third, The City of Mist, a slim collection of eleven of the author's short stories. The covers of the three are very similar, so I’ll just share this one to give you an idea of what they look like:

And finally, there’s this collection of critical essays by Harold Bloom on the key works of novelists ranging from Cervantes to Amy Tan. If I’ve counted correctly, there are 77 essays, sorted by birth year, with Cervantes being the oldest and Tan the youngest. I’m really curious to see what Bloom had to say about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian because I’m still very underwhelmed by it at the 60% mark. I can tell that the collection's previous owner, a female with beautiful handwriting, started reading the collection with great intentions - but she seems to have lost interest pretty quickly. I hope I use the book more than she did.

I really enjoyed the day, so much in fact, that I plan to make a similar trip up to Huntsville sometime in June or July. Sam Houston University is the school in that town, and Sam Houston is very much a part of that city’s history. I haven’t visited for a couple of years, so it will be fun to visit Sam’s gravesite and the spectacular museum dedicated to his memory again. And maybe they have a bookstore worth visiting now…who knows?

What I’m Reading This Week (5/26/26)

 While I did finish two books last week, Godfall by Van Jensen and The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, it seems like I’ve been doing way more " book grazing” than I usually do. When I grow temporarily weary of a book, instead of just picking up another book I have already invested a lot of reading time into, I find myself reading the first chapters of  random books or maybe a short story or two from some anthology I have on hand. So this week calls for a little regrouping on my part.

I’m almost 500 pages into the Twain bio, but the steam has kind of gone out of that one for now, so it’s slow going. And to one degree or another, I’m also struggling with Blood Meridian and The Camp of the Saints. On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say is going well, especially as I get deeper into the family dynamics of that one, and it’s the one I hate to put down right now. 

My book grazing, though, has given me some options for what I will be turning to next:

Future Boy is a relatively brief memoir from Canadian actor Michael J. Fox. This is not anything approaching an autobiographical length memoir; rather, it primarily covers the months at the beginning of Fox’s Hollywood career during which he was simultaneously working on the first Back to the Future movie at night and finishing up the third season of his very popular television series, Family Ties, during the day. Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, and Fox has such a natural, likable screen personality that my curiosity about how he managed to pull this off at such a young age made Future Boy impossible to resist for very long. 

I am a total sucker when it comes to books about books, especially the kind written by people who turn them into mini-memoirs along the way. That seems to be what Lucy Mangan has done with Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. To this point, I’ve only read the Introduction to the book, but I’m finding it almost conversational in style, and I have high hopes for it. I particularly like this quote from the intro, “…if you read without self-consciousness or snobbery, you are liberated: free to enjoy whatever comes your way and makes you happy…” That is exactly the reading philosophy I’ve employed most of my life, and I recommend it to all new readers - or light readers - I run across.

I’ve been on a time travel novel kick lately, so A Rip in Time easily caught my eye. It’s not the most “serious” take on the subject, but I’m definitely having fun with it so far. The basic premise is that a young detective from the US goes to Scotland to be with her dying grandmother, but while there she is targeted by a serial killer and nearly strangled to death. She survives, but wakes up in 1850s Scotland inside the body of another young woman from that time period who was strangled by the same man in the same place. It’s been fun watching her figure out how to adapt to her new circumstances while trying to come up with a way to travel back to the present. Of course, she’s going to try to catch the killer. That’s just who she is despite the new body she’s wearing. 

I have quite a few short story anthologies like The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2022) around, but I tend to forget that I have them. In an attempt to force myself finally to pay some attention to books like this one, I’ve placed it prominently on top of my desk. I plan to dip into it when the short story mood strikes me - and I hope to find some “new” mystery writers to explore further that way. There are 21 stories in the collection, so that seems likely. 

That’s the plan for this holiday-shortened week. I hope that you all had a great Memorial Day celebration, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say this week.