Me, checking my list and panic-buying books as holiday presents? Nah, it's Parker Posey in "Party Girl."
If you are dealing with specific readers, persnickety readers, the type of person with definite notions about what they will or will not want to read (someone, perhaps, ahem, like me), here are some tailored recommendations. Some are books I read this year. Those I have written about in my newsletter; I've radically condensed reviews from there here, as I've spent the better part of the last month recovering from surgery, and the prospect of a shortcut was too tempting to resist. My apologies if it feels duplicative—hopefully, there is enough of the fresh mixed in!
Ounce, Dice, Trice by Alastair Reid. A poet's compendium of strange, beguiling, silly, and delightful words (and the first book that made Hugh laugh when he was a baby).
For the macabre:
The Skull by John Klassen. In this droll and deadpan tale, Ottilla is on the run; from what, who can say? She finds a house inhabited by a skull; it is chased nightly by a headless skeleton. With a bucket, a rolling pin, some tea, and some nerve, she finds her way to a happy—or happy enough—ever after. (E*C Digest, 7.21.2023)
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. Structure is everything in this amazingly gonzo and wickedly entertaining collection of found "historical" documents, including the Frankenstein tale of Bella Baxter, a dead woman brought back to life implanted with the brain from her fetus. Who gets to tell a woman's story? And why is it so much easier to believe a man's lies over a woman's truth?
For readers of The Wager craving additional harrowing shipwreck narratives:
You think crashing on a remote South American island in the 1700s is bad? Ha! Have I got two books for you: Joan Druett's The Island of the Lost (which I am sure I have recommended before but will continue to recommend all of my days) is an eye-popping tale of two shipwrecks on the same Auckland Island. Survivors from each were on the island at the same time, and while one group managed a Crusoe-esque living situation of enviable discipline, startling ingenuity, and ultimately, escape, the others ... did not. If you yearn for even more severe cold and misery, Hampton Sides' In The Kingdom of Ice tells the spine-chilling story of the Arctic-bound Jeannette expedition. The ship was crushed after two years in the pack ice, and the survivors made a bananas thousand-mile journey over the ice to Siberia.
For letter readers:
Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. Reading Paul's series of personal letters to her favorite artist, Gwen John, is lulling, almost like ASMR, but there is something formidable beneath the gentleness—the testimony and truth of two women who built their lives around making art and what it cost them to do it.
For amateur mathematicians:
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. A beautiful and idiosyncratic story about numbers creating a pathway to something incalculable between a housekeeper, her ten-year-old son, and a professor whose short-term memory lasts only 8o minutes. (More here: E*C Digest, 2.16.2023)
For small and persistent questioners:
The Little Island, Margaret Wise Brown. This is the picture book we've read more than any other in our family; why this one, I could not tell you exactly. It is a strange and gnomic book about the passage of time and a kitten reaching the limit of what he can know and the place where faith comes in. Leon Wiesgard's beautiful illustrations feel like a time capsule, too; a lost way of seeing and depicting the world.
For the precociously wordy:
Ounce, Dice, Trice by Alastair Reid. A poet's compendium of strange, beguiling, silly, and delightful words (and the first book that made Hugh laugh when he was a baby).
The Swifts, a Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln. A wordy, witty, mordantly clever whodunit for the 8-12 set about escaping the ways your family defines you—in this case, literally, as each Swift is given a name from the family dictionary and expected to live up to it, a prospect that fills Shenanigan Swift with some trepidation. Can she be more than a troublemaker, especially when mysterious accidents begin befalling her kin?
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente. Twelve-year-old September is whisked away from Omaha to Fairyland on the back of Imogen, Leopard of Little Breezes, by the Green Wind. If that is the sort of sentence that thrills you to your toes, you will love Valente's Fairyland books, rococo narrative confections resplendent with inventive imagination.
For the defiantly young:
Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith, illustrated by Boulet. I have read many versions of Beowulf through the years, and none is more delightful than this one, where the tale is recast into an epic confrontation between anarchic childhood and grim age. An absolute pleasure.
For the growing pained:
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey are the youngest of the seven famous Glass children, who were trotted out to perform on the "It's a Wise Child" radio program. Now Franny is in college, and Zooey is an actor on the rise. In these two short stories, Salinger outlines the spiritual crisis that crashes in on Franny—what, exactly, is she supposed to do? And in a world of cruelty, falseness, pomposity, and greed—and Zooey's attempt to help her out. It's maddening, funny, irritating writing that suddenly catches you—well, me at least—up short with heartbreaking wisdom.
For people who get a little too lost in books:
Henry Brocken by Walter de la Mare. One day, riding on his uncle’s horse, Dulcinea, Henry Broken finds himself in a subtly sinister realm beyond the reaches of the ordinary where Jane Eyre and Rochester, Sleeping Beauty and Gulliver, not to mention the peoples of Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream live in a sort of suspended reality, leaving the reader to question whether knowing how the story ends is really a gift after all. (More here: E*C Digest 5/1/2023.)
For middle-aged witches:
Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner. After spending the first part of her life as a resident spinster aunt, Laura Willowes decides to make a change, sparked by a bundle of greenery she picks up in a shop. To the confusion of her staid family, she ups sticks and moves to a remote English village, where she makes a deal with the devil to finally have the life she wants.
For the macabre:
The Skull by John Klassen. In this droll and deadpan tale, Ottilla is on the run; from what, who can say? She finds a house inhabited by a skull; it is chased nightly by a headless skeleton. With a bucket, a rolling pin, some tea, and some nerve, she finds her way to a happy—or happy enough—ever after. (E*C Digest, 7.21.2023)
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. A teacher visiting his dying brother in a New York City hospice goes home to discover his ex, a therapy clown, has committed suicide and been buried; not what she would have wanted. Naturally, he goes to her grave, where there she is, slightly decayed and waiting for him to take her to a forensic cadaver farm. The story of their road trip is interspersed with dispatches from a woman running a boarding house just after the Civil War. Moore, acidly witty, is always ready with one-liners that slap.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. Structure is everything in this amazingly gonzo and wickedly entertaining collection of found "historical" documents, including the Frankenstein tale of Bella Baxter, a dead woman brought back to life implanted with the brain from her fetus. Who gets to tell a woman's story? And why is it so much easier to believe a man's lies over a woman's truth?
For the wryly empathetic:
The Unfortunate Life of Earthworms by Noemi Vola. Vola opens this book by recommending against writing a book about earthworms because no one cares about earthworms. But you will, after you read this.
For armchair time-travelers:
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday. An absolutely exhilarating, mind-melting trip back through the history of the Earth that meticulously reconstructs specific ecosystems from different epochs, revealing that everything in our ordinary world is actually a marvelous compendium of time. Watch for the giant penguins!
Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton. Perhaps the most beautiful and breathtaking picture book about how we got here, charmingly framed as an epic play tracing existence from the birth of the sun to the moment you sit, holding this book in your hands. Sarah Larson wrote a lovely review of it in The New Yorker in 2015; a beloved favorite.
For readers of The Wager craving additional harrowing shipwreck narratives:
You think crashing on a remote South American island in the 1700s is bad? Ha! Have I got two books for you: Joan Druett's The Island of the Lost (which I am sure I have recommended before but will continue to recommend all of my days) is an eye-popping tale of two shipwrecks on the same Auckland Island. Survivors from each were on the island at the same time, and while one group managed a Crusoe-esque living situation of enviable discipline, startling ingenuity, and ultimately, escape, the others ... did not. If you yearn for even more severe cold and misery, Hampton Sides' In The Kingdom of Ice tells the spine-chilling story of the Arctic-bound Jeannette expedition. The ship was crushed after two years in the pack ice, and the survivors made a bananas thousand-mile journey over the ice to Siberia.
For letter readers:
Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. Reading Paul's series of personal letters to her favorite artist, Gwen John, is lulling, almost like ASMR, but there is something formidable beneath the gentleness—the testimony and truth of two women who built their lives around making art and what it cost them to do it.
Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal. De Waal wrote an absolutely extraordinary memoir of his family through the history of a collection of netsuke in The Hare With Amber Eyes. Here, in a series of poignant and shattering letters addressed to Moise Camondo, a banker and collector whose only son died for France in WWI and whose family was murdered by Nazis in WWII, de Waal grapples with the limits of the storytelling and the ways that stories and memoirs fail.
For mycophile wellness hustlers:
The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham. Diana Brackley is a brainy, beautiful, pragmatic biochemist who discovers the remarkable property of a rare lichen, and then uses a wellness empire (ha) to set in motion a long-range plan to empower women to reshape their lives—and the world. (More here: E*C Digest, 1.15.2023)
For people contemplating a run for city council:
South Riding by Winifred Holtby. Based on Holtby's mother's experiences in local British government circa 1920-1930, this quietly engrossing book depicts the turbulent flow of ordinary lives with a capacious, unsentimental generosity. It's similar to the magic of Middlemarch but less about the unseen good of individual acts than the imperfect but essential good of community. (More here: 5/2/2022 blog post)
For amateur mathematicians:
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. A beautiful and idiosyncratic story about numbers creating a pathway to something incalculable between a housekeeper, her ten-year-old son, and a professor whose short-term memory lasts only 8o minutes. (More here: E*C Digest, 2.16.2023)
For people interested in AI's roots:
The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut. In three mesmeric stories, Labatut outlines the costs technology can extract. In the first, Paul Ehrehfest, a physicist driven to despair by developments in the field and the rise of Nazism, takes his own life and the life of a beloved son who was disabled, believing there was no more room in the world for them; in the second, a chorus of voices tells the story of John Von Neumann, the Hungarian-American genius who, perhaps more than anyone else, created the world of computers that we live with now, a world that grew directly out of the development of atomic bombs; the third recounts the defeat of the Go master Lee Sedol by AlphaGo, an AI program. I found it harrowing and absolutely fascinating. Pair it with Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, the book Labatut cites as an inspiration, which delves more deeply into von Neumann's startling story and the startling stories of the many, many genius minds around him as they played around and developed new tools and methodologies of doom.
For everyone reading the news:
Minor Detail by Adiana Shibli. Two stories of Palestinian women: One in 1949, one sometime in the 21st century, that illuminate with shattering clarity that violence never ends—its aftershocks always reverberate through time, leading to damage and tragedy. (Originally blogged about here on 5.2.2022)
For marveling in humble wonder at the indomitable human spirit and what can be done with words:
The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz Bart. One of the most wondrous books I have read in a long, long time. It tells the story of Telumee Lougandor and the women in her family and their lives in Guadeloupe in the aftermath of slavery. It lifted me right out of my own life and way of thinking, like someone opeing a hidden door and saying, see? Here is a whole other world, and whole new ways of using words. The way that Schwarz-Bart shows the depths of the resilience, community, and joy in the Lougandor women’s lives is awesome, in the sense of an encounter with something sublime. (More here: E*C Digest, 1.25.2023)
Lois Lenski with the last word:
