This year’s reading felt less like a sprint and more like a long, deliberate walk—through history, conscience, exile, law, love, and the quiet corners of human fragility.

I moved from the moral and legal claustrophobia of The Trial to the aching tenderness of a lost child’s story in Foster; from the grand sweep of American history in These Truths and—arguably—the most accessible telling of world history in A Little History of the World, to the intimate reckonings of Salman Rushdie’s tumultuous, exhilarating life in Joseph Anton and Arundhati Roy’s luminous memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

There was dislocation, exile, and the uneasy tension of migration and morality in Small Boat; dark satire and moral blindness in Laughter in the Dark; and a quiet, unsettling modern loneliness in the bare-bones, sparsely written Flesh.
Something maddening and warm arrived with All My Friends Are Superheroes.

As a lawyer, I was especially shaped by books that interrogated responsibility and justice—Culpability, Tareekh Pe Justice, and the sobering moral questions raised in Israel. Presiding over all of it, like a vanished Europe speaking softly across time, was The World of Yesterday—a book that paired uncannily well with my travels.

Those travels themselves became part of the reading life: wandering through bookstores across ten countries, lingering in quiet aisles, discovering unfamiliar voices, and reaffirming that bookstores remain among the most reliable sanctuaries of curiosity and calm.

Looking back, the common thread wasn’t answers—it was better questions. About power and vulnerability. Memory and forgetting. Law and conscience. Belonging and exile.

Grateful for a year where books slowed me down, unsettled me when needed, and reminded me—again—that reading can be both escape and a deeper form of attention, depending on what one needs in the moment. Balancing the desire to be lost with the longing to be found (as Billy Collins so beautifully puts it).

Here’s to another year of deliberate reading, dog-eared pages, and conversations that begin with:
“Have you read this?”