Two young women in Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch (2021; Trans. Christina MacSweeney) find a list of the books their friend had planned to read and the copies of them she had gathered, after she has died. They “divvy up the books and tear the reading list in two. We agree to swap when we’ve read everything on our halves.”

This year I decided to be more deliberate about reading in remembrance, and planned for November and December; I made a list—pulled some from my shelves (Paula had been waiting longest) and placed some orders. And I expanded to include not only book-friends, a long-time habit, but also authors who have died this year.

Here’s a glimpse: three book-friends and seven writers. Some today, the rest tomorrow: then I’ll look back on last year’s reading and ahead to next year’s plans.

Isabel Allende’s Paula (1994) has been in my stack since my friend M gave it to me nearly two decades ago. This mother-daughter story—written by Isabel while her daughter was in a coma—seemed overwhelmingly sad. “…I trusted those people in white; I handed over my daughter without hesitation. It isn’t possible to go back in time. I must not keep looking back, yet I can’t stop doing it, it’s an obsession.” But, as M protested, there is also joy in looking back. To memories of Isabel’s Uncle Pablo, for instance: “a brooding, solitary young man with dark skin, passionate eyes, flashing teeth, and stiff black hair he combed straight back” who was “never without his overcoat with huge pockets in which he hid books he stole from public libraries and the homes of friends.” He taught her to read beneath the bedcovers, and convinced her that “in the dark the characters escaped and roamed through the house”. (Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

M and I didn’t always enjoy the same books—she had no time for “our” Canadian writers (“too provincial”)—but we bonded over Pym, Brookner, and the three Penelopes. She had many favourites but was always willing to try a new writer whose worldview appealed to her on a talk-show or international radio: open-minded ‘til the end.

Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys (2013) is the fourth of her books I’ve read since my friend B died: three rereads and this, a fresh, read. Strout reminds me of Carol Shields for her use of detail, of Louise Erdrich for her cross-book universe, and of Julia Glass for the value placed on comfort and connection. She possesses remarkable authority in knowing just what to say and how, using both long phrases and fragments in dialogue, so that we imagine she has collected every word as an eavesdropper and onlooker. “‘So you remember the Burgess father?’ I had asked her this before. We did this kind of thing, repeated the stuff we knew.” Even a simple description offers a granule of information that we can use to understand her characters and their relationships. Her characters are always believable and often unlikeable at times (which adds to their credibility), and I’m convinced she is always writing about grief and mourning, one way or another. The Burgess Boys opens with a woman packing her suitcase, but almost immediately an act of violence derails holiday plans when a nephew’s accused of a hate-crime.

B anticipated books by her favourite writers with verve but was just as enthusiastic about delving into a fresh backlist. She was quick to share which she thought best suited for my taste—everything from novels about slavery and Indigenous residential schools, to cosy mysteries and pageturners—and we both loved Strout’s debut.

The book I ordered with my friend M in mind, a collection of works by Chava Rosenfarb, was backordered the year that we’d discussed rereading it together so, when I saw it relisted this year, I was excited; for weeks I received updates about a shipping delay, and it seemed to magnify the space where our shared reading once resided. When my second order was cancelled, I ordered Letters from the Afterlife, her correspondence with Zenia Larsson instead (edited by CR’s daughter Goldie Morgentaler and published this year). The letters are written after the women have settled in Canada and Sweden respectively, and the first one is dated December 1945; I imagined that CR’s view from her window would have been something like mine, even eighty years after she wrote it. Both women published fiction, so there’s talk of their craft and pursuits of publication alongside daily life. Some of these letters were previously published in Swedish in 1972. This read will linger well into January and will probably comprise the first of the non-fiction I’ll read this year, with Bron’s #ReadingNonFiction2026 in mind. (Translated by Krzysztof Majer and Slyvia Soderlind)

Whenever I come across news of fiction originally published in Yiddish but recently translated into English, I wish I could email M about them. He loyally followed the new work that appears on Words Without Borders, but was just as dedicated to reading western canonical classics, the longer the better. Quite a few books on my shelves are there because he insisted.

Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) died on October 13th this year (Joburg Review of Books obituary), which finally prompted me to read her 1987 collection of linked stories You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. As #420 in the Virago Modern Classics series, it’s been nestled on my shelf for years; now I would like to read her more recent novel from 2020, Still Life (a fictionalised biography of Thomas Pringle, about one colonial Englishman’s impact on poetry in South Africa). Most of the stories circle around Frieda (I thought of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions) and how her reading (Thomas Hardy is huge) and writing bring her closer to her home and, simultaneously, farther away. Blurbed by Toni Morrison and reviewed by Bharati Mukherjee, Wicomb told stories often overlooked in the publishing industry, and also like those writers, she made thoughtful political choices about not only the content of her stories, but the structure and publishing of them. Not everyone, including the mother in these stories found her work comfortable:

“But you’ve used the real. If I can recognise places and people, so can others, and if you want to play around like that why don’t you have the courage to tell the whole truth? Ask me for stories with neat endings and you won’t have to invent my death? What do you know about things, about people, this place where you were born? About your ancestors who roamed these hills?”

More remembrance reading chatter tomorrow, seeing the “old” year out and welcoming the “new” year in.