This summer was a roller coaster – three surgeries, a rebuilt foot, an amputated toe, an infected foot, a week-long hospital stay, a wonderful and life-saving new foot brace, a giant kidney stone, a tooth implant, hives, and dozens of doctor visits and appointments to deal with all of it.

Maria put antibiotics on my foot for two straight years; she no longer has to do it. Looking back, it was a bittersweet success.

A lot to deal with, but all of it was successful. If I complained about that, I would be a fool and an ingrate. No one my age is free of health care concerns, but I feel that I got ahead of things by dealing with them all at once.

It was, in so many ways, a time of love and commitment.

This is my way of segueing to two beautiful books, one of which I read a few weeks ago (Shark Heart) by Emily Halbeck and one of which I expect to finish tonight or tomorrow (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store) by James McBride.)

I wanted to share with you the news that these two books are my choices for the best books of 2023, at least for me and so far. The year isn’t over, but there isn’t much time left, and I don’t see much ahead to make me think my choices are in danger. Publishing is alive and well, after all.

The Emily Halbeck book was one of the most imaginative, touching, and beautifully written books I can ever recall reading. The book is a simple love story in many ways: the boy meets a girl, falls in love, and marries happily, and suddenly, he learns that he has a genetic disease and will mutate into a great white shark.

The plot line seemed bizarre, even horrific, to me, and at first, I balked at buying the book. But I read the reviews and realized it was a tour de force by a young first novelist, and despite the storyline, it was a brilliant study of commitment, love, and faithfulness. Anyone married or in love will have to look inside themselves to wonder what they might do in that situation.

Halbeck writes with the wisdom of a much older and experienced writer, but she never loses the focus of the book, which is love:

“Angel had been grieving Marcos almost as long as she’d known him, and finally, like a rainbow against a bruise-hued cloud, she saw the real Marcos – not as an idea, dream,  hope, or possibility, but as he was. Marcos outlined a generous, wise, and kind person, and Angela’s longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real. Yet the heartbreak was not for nothing. Angela would be left with a gift, a life...”

I can’t recall ever reading a more beautiful and insightful description of love, the joy and pain of it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime book, at least for me. I  highly recommend reading it; don’t fear the plot. It is the sweetest book you might ever read.

Because I was laid up so often this Spring and Summer, I had more time to read than I had had in a long while. I’m on a roll. I started the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store last Friday and am about 3/4 through it. It is a beautiful book, not as simple and direct as Shark Heart, but vibrant, intelligent, funny, and moving all at once.

The book focuses on a tiny neighbor in a fictional Pennsylvania Town called Pittsdown, where Jews, Blacks, Italians, Romanians, and immigrants from other European countries are all thrown together. There is a murder and a mystery the book opens with, but this book is much more than a mystery. It is a great American novel I haven’t read or discovered for many years.

I thought the genre was dead.

Chona Ludlow lived in Chicken Hill and ran the Heaven &Earth Grocery Store, which never earned a dime in profit because she never insisted that people pay their bills. She was an American-born Polio survivor with a big heart and couldn’t say no to anyone. Her husband Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner madly in love with his wife, opened the town’s first dance hall and was one of the first theater owners in the country to book black singers and dances.

The heart of the story is the town’s united struggle to save a young deaf black child when the state is looking for him to force him into an institution known to be brutal and violent. As the story unfolds, it becomes wrenchingly clear to see how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive on the margins of white Christian America and how cruel and damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and lies can be to a community fighting to save a child, and to save themselves.

It is as timely a book as I have read, even though it kicks off in 1972 and goes back and forth. It is wonderfully written. McBride’s eye for dialogue and detail is incredible. The book is, in fact, a great American novel, and I am excited to zero in on the end. Every page was rich and wonderful in its way.

I’m fortunate to have read these two books one after the other; they somehow remind me that America is a rich, complex, wonderful, and distraught country all at the same time. It sometimes feels like all of us are struggling to survive on the margins and the wicked history of white Christian America, the one so many politicians are trying to wipe out our memories and history and hide it from our children.

They’ll never be able to do it. McBride is showing us the way, entertaining us, and making us laugh and cry, all simultaneously.