Nancy L. Bartley's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I love poignant, well-told stories about topics I can identify with. I come from immigrants who believed in the American Dream. Don’t many of us?

This is the story of a couple from Cameroon who moved to New York City, hoping for a better life. As the book begins, Jende is preparing for a job interview, dressed in his first suit ever, holding his first resume, and heading for Lehman Brothers, where he’ll meet Clark Edwards, executive, in a highrise with a view of Manhattan.

Cultures are clashing, and I’m holding my breath and worried about Jende. Will Clark be rude and dismissive? Jende wants to be his chauffeur. Clark snickers. The whole concept of America as a land of opportunity is at the heart of the book. Both Jende’s dreams–and Clark’s are on the line.

Jende and Neni are easy to love as their lives become intertwined with that of Clark and Cindy Edwards and their son, Mighty–yes, they named their offspring a name destined to rule. But fate has other plans, which is what I love about this book.

Cindy comes from a very poor family and fears what a loss of status will bring when it looks like Clark’s fortunes are turning. Jende and Neni receive terrible advice from a Cameroonian lawyer, and it complicates their dreams. The couples’ lives become intertwined as they must reevaluate their American Dream and determine what is most important.

To me, Jende is an Everyman or an every cab driver who has ever politely smiled and driven me through busy city streets, leaving me to wonder about his family, his past, and if he makes enough driving to earn a living. I’ve read this book many times and assigned it to my class. It’s destined to become a classic for our times.

Writing is part of living for me, and I see that same spirit in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s prose, which was created during her solitary time in a beach cottage on Captiva Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The first week is solitude and collapse, emptying out of the stress and thoughts of the city. Then, in the second week, she slowly returns to life and lies in wait. One must not rush or dig for inspiration. The sea, she says, will bring it.

This book is a simple meditation on being in touch with a place and its gifts. She writes only about being at the sea, of moon shells and whelks, of an oyster bed and an Argonauta. They are metaphors and lead into discussions of the role of women. It is magical. And 50 years since she first wrote it, Lindbergh’s words are still fresh and musical. They still speak to the heart, and I long to recreate the setting.

Perhaps her words are more important than ever now in an ever increasingly stressful world when we need to appreciate simplicity in life–rolling waves tumbling onto the shore, gulls diving and calling, long walks, sand-caked bare feet, and wind-tangled hair. This book seems to be natural for anyone interested in the “mindfulness” movement. It simply beckons us to be in the moment.

Lindbergh’s book is short, under 100 pages. I bought the Audible and Kindle versions because I wanted to savor both reading the words and being read to like a child. “Tell me a story,” I remember asking my grandmother. If she only had this book. We would both have been enchanted.

Writers know the importance of stories. So did Albert Camus. And so does Robert Emmett Meagher.

The setting of Meagher’s book on Camus mesmerized me because it was true. In 1946, Albert Camus, 32, sailed into the New York harbor on the freighter Oregon. He was sick with the flu and looked younger than his age but already was known as the “conscience of Europe.”

J. Edgar Hoover had been surveilling him for months because Camus once belonged to the Communist Party and the French Resistance. So when the writer applied to enter the United States, U.S. Immigration wasn’t going to make it easy. He was detained. Questioned. And faced deportation. So much for a welcome for one of Europe’s greatest intellectuals, a young writer whose focus was on peace.

With help, Camus was finally allowed into the country and gave an historic speech at Columbia University’s McMillin’s Theater, telling stories, which the book details, to convince the audience of a human crisis, urging people to care about others. Seventy years later, that speech was reenacted at the same theater by actor Viggo Mortensen. Its power resonated more than ever.

Among all the writings from that era, Meagher’s book underscores Camus’ importance as one of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century. Camus published anti-Nazi newspapers and survived the Nazi regime but emerged with a grave concern for the future of human beings. His writings are especially pertinent today. “Camus’s voice speaks like few others to the core of the cancer that infects our country and our world, a world divided against itself,” Meagher wrote. But in Camus’ words, we find the language “of our common humanity.”

I find optimism in this book that I don’t find in others. “Dialogue, friendship, and community begin with stories,” Meagher writes. And I would agree that there can be no hope without dialogue and shared stories. No peace. An enemy, he notes, is someone whose story has not been told. All I can say is, let’s be ready to listen.