Girls at War - Chinua Achebe

A collection of short stories set in Biafra, Nigeria.  Some are centred on the Nigeria Biafra War, some simply portray the lives of people in that society.  The stories seem very light, but they raise issues around power, corruption, ignorance, superstition, and how they hold things back.  Politicians and the ruling elites come off particularly badly in many of the stories.  The narration, though, is light and very matter-of-fact, which in a way gives you a sense of how hard these things will be to change.
The sexist nature of society there is abundantly apparent. 

Incidents in the Life of Marcus Paul - David Adams Richards

The novel centres around a native reserve near the mouth of the Miramichi.  There is an unexplained death and conflict around a piece of property beside the reserve.   Markus Paul, a native from the reserve who later becomes an RCMP officer, solves the death/murder many years later, but not until an innocent man is killed and several other people's lives are ruined.
Richards explores many hard questions and issues around this storyline.  Some of the more obvious are native issues around poverty, disenfranchisement, reserve governance, relations between police and natives.  Through the story he is also harshly critical of both sides of the media and how they play to prejudice and public expectations.  As the conflict unfolds, he also exposes the uglier side of reserve politics with lying, corruption and theft hiding beside a facade of aggrieved indignity.  Politician, both at the provincial level and on the reserve, are portrayed as self-serving actors with little regard for anything except personal advantage.
In a nutshell, Richard explores how everyone's actions - politicians, journalists, individuals, business people, community leaders - is motivated by naive ideology, prejudice, personal advantage and a desire for power and action.  They all use this death of an upstanding, innocent native boy to further their own agenda. 
Richards is especially harsh on socially left media - it is the journalist's preconceived ideas of race relations and reserve politics that leads to the ugliest events of the story.  An examination of how you can be trapped in your own ideological narrative to the point where you are unable to see what is happening, and if you do, you are unable to write it, to express it.  Liberal "bleeding heart" ideology opens the journalist to being manipulated by the worst elements on the reserve.

The only sympathetic character in the book is the old chief, who is sidelined by all the other scrabblers.  He is the only fully human character in the book.  He sees, not symbols and ideas, but the real people and their real actions and tries to find a way through all these complex threads.

Worth a reread.

L'altro capo del filo - Andrea Camilleri

Ancora un romanzo nel dialetto siciliano con Ispettore Montalbano.  Un'altro occasione per godersi della cultura e del cibo della Sicilia.  Storie sempre con fine imprevisto, e investigatore che non mena affatto la sua investigazione alla sua fine finale....

The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

I was curious about his other work after reading Farenheit 451.  Bradbury seems to be quite good at the craft of writing.
The premise of this books, with stories embedded in animated tatoos on a man who lives as a social outcast, is brilliant.  At the beginning of the book, Bradbury exploits it well but it deteriorates into a loose framework for binding together a collection of disparate short stories - many of which are quite short.
Some of the short stories are interestingly bizarre in themselves.  Many of them blend a bizarre mix of science fiction and 1950s American T.V. culture à la "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver".
Entertaining reading but not gripping enough to wade through in one go.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Madeleine Thien

Brilliant, delicately written book set chronicling a group of intertwined Chinese families during and following the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.   The book takes place both in locations in China and in Vancouver. 
In part, the book offers a look at the Cultural Revolution from a human, personal point of view.  I had no idea it was a violent and destructive as it is portrayed in the book.  Thien offers a clear look at the culturally destructive power of this revolution on the arts, educational institutions and cultural traditions of China.  (Mao was unusual in that he managed to enact two horrendously destructive movements in his country - the famine that accompanied the Great Leap Forward, and then this Cultural Revolution.)  You also get a sense of how these type of movements or catastrophes are actually the shadows of struggles for power and dominance in the political elites of dictatorial or oligarchic societies.  Their seeming logic or justification is all afterthought or window dressing for power politics.
Another theme that runs through the book is the power, role and nature of art as a form of resistance and as a support for maintaining personal identity and meaning in mass societies.
Worth checking out more...

Being Mortal - Atul Gawande

An interesting read for anyone who is getting older.  He really shift the focus from extending life to extending quality of life for the time that you have.  From the book, you get a number of things to think about before you get to those last stages of your life.  The most important is to think about what are the things in your daily life that you want to maintain the most, and then build your life around supporting these things as much as possible.  This thinking involves planning where and in what sort of situation you will live, what your goals will be as you lose abilities or become ill.
Worth revisiting every so often.