A year-end grab bag of bookish articles and interviews for your reading pleasure

Dec 31, 2023

As I go through the month, I find lots of book-related articles that I think readers of this newsletter would enjoy. Since not everybody reads The New York Times, Lit Hub, Electric Literature and other book-oriented websites, or follows the many book prize announcements, I thought I’d share this collection of pieces that might interest you.

Lauren Grodstein’s We Must Not Think of Ourselves is Read With Jenna’s December 2023 pick

Read With Jenna’s final pick of 2023 is a historical novel Jenna Bush Hager calls “moving.”

“I read this book about a year ago and it took my breath away. It is a little piece of history,” Jenna says.

“We Must Not Think of Ourselves” by Lauren Grodstein is set in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII, a region of the city Jews were forced to relocate in 1940. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazis’ ghettos in Europe, where Jews were segregated and lived in terrible conditions, replete with overcrowding and starvation.

The book follows “an archivist who was writing the stories of people living in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II so that their stories would not be lost,” Jenna says.

“It is a book about love and resilience, about hope, even in the darkest moments. It’s timely and powerful, and it proves that even in the darkest corners, love still remains.”

This is Grodstein‘s sixth book, but her first historical novel. Grodstein tells TODAY.com she was inspired to write the book after taking a family trip to Poland, where her family lived before emigrating to the U.S. in the early 1900s.

Nearly half a million Jews lived in the Warsaw Ghetto starting in 1940. The Nazis began deporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp in 1942, where 300,000 former deportees were killed. In 1943, members of underground resistance groups staged a monthlong uprising. The Germans burned the ghetto down in retaliation, crushing the uprising and destroying the ghetto.