The Book of Records

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien is the best book I have read this year. 

A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door.

Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.

Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. Through the guidance of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family’s tragic past.

As Lina confronts her father’s troubling admissions, she begins to reconceptualize the world around her, gaining a deeper understanding of how our individual futures are shaped by our political circumstances, and she relies on the collective joy of art and intellectual endeavors to carry her through difficulty. A novel that voyages between centuries, generations, and ideas, The Book of Records is an indelible testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for a home—in the physical world, in cyberspace, in history, and in the imagination—in the wake of catastrophe.

Thien is a beautiful writer who pulls readers into the story. She must have a brilliant mind to be able to wrestle the time periods, philosophy, and poetry into a truly amazing book. Buy this book today.

Thien, Madeleine. (2025). The Book of Records. New York: WW Norton & Co.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize winning title about black lives in the United States.

Starting around 1915 during World War I and going until 1970, more than six million black Americans moved from the South either north or west. An often overlooked factor in the history of the US, this migration influenced everything about our world today.

Following three people who represent some of the common stories of migration, Wilkerson tells of the reasons why people left the South and why they chose where to settle. 

In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. 

In 1945 George Starling left the orange fields of Florida for Harlem.

In 1957 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster left Louisiana for California.

These and many others, including the author's own mother, left the South to make a better life for themselves, to (hopefully) be treated like human being and citizens in their own country. The slow but huge exodus forced the South to address laws like Jim Crow that were causing people to flee. In the North, blacks were not welcomed with open arms - being forced into specific neighborhoods and jobs - creating tensions between them and European immigrants they were competing with for space and livelihood. 

This fascination part of our history should be taught in school. This book fills in the gaps in our education system. 

Wilkerson, Isabel. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns. New York: Random House.