And so we start another year. I do hope it’s a good one for us all. I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I am, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if leaders around the world cared about their people and made the right decisions to keep us all safe and healthy. Meanwhile, I’ll just wish you all the best for 2026, including some great reading that feeds all of our hearts and minds. And with that, I will get onto the meme. As always, if you don’t know how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she did that sneaky thing she’s done at least once before which is that she has told us to start our first chain of the year with the book on which we ended our December chain. For me, that’s Biff Ward’s memoir, The third chopstick (my review). As I wrote in December, it’s about how Ward, a pacifist and anti-Vietnam War activist, decided later in life to revisit her actions during those emotional times. She sought out, met and interviewed some of the soldiers who fought in the war she’d demonstrated against.

So the obvious thing is for me to link to a book about that war. Trouble is, I have read a few. I did think of linking to one written from a Vietnamese perspective. However, in the end I decided to choose another one that looks at the aftermath for soldiers, Josephine Rowe’s A loving faithful animal (my review), in which she tells of a family broken by the father’s ongoing trauma (PTSD) following his Vietnam War experience. In her book, Biff Ward calls PTSD the Vietnam vets’ gift to the world, which, as many of you will know, is because it was largely through the Vietnam vets that PTSD became a recognised condition.

Rowe’s novel is told through multiple voices, with each chapter (or story) told from a different character’s point of view. Another novel about a family struggling with trauma – in this case the accidental death of a baby – and told through the different characters’ points of view is Melanie Cheng’s The burrow (my review).

In The burrow, the struggling little family’s life is disturbed by two new additions, a pet rabbit bought for Lucie and Amy’s mother Pauline who has broken her wrist and cannot live alone for a while. These two offer potential catalysts for change. I wrote in my post that it reminded me a little of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotional (my review), where three visitations threaten the peace of a quiet little religious community in an abbey on the Monaro.

One of the visitations to that abbey is a mouse plague, so my next link is to one of my favourite novels of all time, Albert Camus’ La peste/The plague (my review), about a community on the Algerian coast that closes itself off when it is visited by the bubonic plague in the 1940s.

I wrote in my post on The plague that it can be read on different levels, one of which is a metaphorical story about how to live in an “absurd” (that is, inherently irrational) world. This is a bit of a loose link, but Tom Gauld’s graphic novel Goliath (my review) is specifically about the absurdity of war. It presents a Goliath who just wants to spend his time quietly doing admin work, not being an aggressor.

My final book is about a character who, like Goliath, lives in a world that can be confusing, if not sometimes downright hostile. As I wrote in my post, the overall theme seems to be: How do you live in this world? The novel is Uruguayan writer Ida Vitale’s Byobu (my review). Byobu is a more complex work to read than Goliath, but there are similarities in the description of a world where, for example, “supervision and compliance” are expected, but where defiance and imagination might be better.

Many of this month’s books, including Biff Ward’s opening one, encourage us to rethink our world view, in some way or another, to consider how much we align with “the plague” and how much we defy it. I rather enjoyed putting this together, particularly because it reminded me of some books I’ve not thought about for a while.

Have you read The third chopstick and, regardless, what would you link to?