The cold wave has given me some time and an excuse for not working harder to do some reading. It’s been a good couple of days for reading.

Here are the three books I’d like to mention for readers looking for ideas. And thanks for yours.

First off is one of the best books I can ever remember reading. It’s called Solito, the story of Javier Zamora, an American poet born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country for the United States when he was one, and his mother when he was five. When he was nine, his parents decided he should come to California and join them.

Javier began an epic journey over three thousand miles to be with his parents again. What a great eye he has for detail.

The book is stunning and powerful. Zamora writes it from a child’s perspective on a  frightening, exhausting, and transformative trek, a story that says more about immigration and the new cruel and heartless America than all of the stories about illegal immigrants and our immigration system paralysis, moral and literal.

This is a beautifully written and epic journey on the scale of Ulysses told through the eyes of an innocent but observant child desperate to be with his parents. He writes in the simple and clear vernacular of the nine-year-old. It’s a fresh and very gripping perspective.

I can’t imagine anyone with anything resembling a heart not being in awe of Zamora and his courage, love, and struggle to understand an impossible and chaotic, and corrupt world.  Almost daily, he is asked to grasp and cope with challenges very few adults could handle.

Accompanied only by his fellow illegals, and at the mercy of strugglers called Coyotes, he migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert.

Zamora made it to America and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the  Poetry Foundation.

Zamora is wise to skip the political harangues that characterize many books about immigrating illegally to America. His story is inherently political in what is says about poverty and violence and about modern-day America. But most importantly, it’s the story of a remarkable child who would never have been left alone in a just world to make a trek like that.

I’m interested in the refugee crisis and have read a lot about it, but I’ve never read anything that captures the modern immigration experience better than Solito.

Zamora describes his journey and its incredible challenges from beginning to end. It’s a beautiful book; it is the story of the struggle of many poor and endangered people to get themselves and their families to what they believe is a haven for the beleaguered. At least, it was once.

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I just finished a creative and fascinating mystery called The Cloisters by Katy Hays. Set in the beautiful but often overshadowed Cloisters Museum on a hill by the Hudson River Parkway. Ann Stillwell comes to New York City from Walla, Walla, Washington, to work as a summer intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself transferred abruptly to the Cloisters Museum. There, she encounters some enigmatic and mysterious researchers obsessed with divination history and Tarot Cards.

The Cloisters are used significantly here; the museum is beautiful, creepy, and rarely written about.

Katy is a surprising and compelling character working hard to survive in Manhattan’s expensive, high-powered world. Who finds herself way over her head. When the inevitable murder occurs, she has to decide who she is and what she does. This book was original and exciting; the Cloisters seemed the perfect place for a murder mystery. I love how Katy worked things out.

The next mystery on my table is Exiles by Jane Harper, author of the Aaron Falk series. It’s set in an Australian Festival. Harper is known for her intelligent and well-written mysteries. I’m eager to read her for the first time.