A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Told from the first-person perspective of young Patroclus, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012) reanimates the classical story of famous Achilles for today’s reader.
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (originally published in 1927) is the story of Fathers Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant as they arrive in the New Mexican dioceses in 1851 as its new, young Bishop and Vicar respectively. The novel follows their lives as they grow to love and respect the land and its people: the various indigenous groups with their many ways of life, the Mexican families who settled the land generations before, and the newly arrived Euro-American settlers.
Thomas Hardy is famous for his later novels like Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, but this winter I decided to pick up one of his early works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (originally published in 1873) and I did not regret it. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel (published serially) and the first he published under his own name.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is at once startlingly gritty and wildly sci-fi. Somehow it is both a critical response to the wartime atrocity of Dresden’s bombing, and also a trippy, ironic, even disturbing thought-experiment about the nature of nonlinear time. Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse 5 looks back at the end of WWII’s European conflict from the perspective of a handful of American prisoners of war held in Dresden (in slaughterhouse building 5 or, in German, Sclachthof-funf).
One of José Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness.
After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
Alexis Coe’s You Never Forget Your First (2020)b was a fast read and an enjoyable refresher of eighteenth-century American history. Coe humanizes Washington, acknowledging the ways in which he positioned himself to become a prominent citizen, a revolutionary and a leader among men while recognizing the avenues in which his greatness fell short.
As historical fiction, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) transports its reader to late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Italy as it follows the creative and personal life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Set predominately in the far northern town of Vardø, in Finnmark, Norway from 1617-1621, this is a novel punctuated by the harshness of both the natural world and human viciousness. The Mercies fictionalizes historical events. A devastating storm on Christmas Eve of 1617 killed nearly all of the town’s men; Hargrave begins her novel on that day. In the pages that follow she weaves two women’s stories together and The Mercies builds toward brutal witch trials in the years after the great storm.
From its dedication page on, it is clear that Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop (2013) addresses grief and mortality. Yet themes of love, human connection and self-healing percolate as the adventures of George’s protagonist bookseller, middle-aged Jean Perdu, develop.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) is a beautiful novel about two Nigerian kids who fall in love but whom life separates as young adults. Adichie’s novel follows the young adult lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, as they grow up in Nigeria, study at Nigerian university, and ultimately find ways to leave Nigeria in the hope of making a better life. Their love story, coupled with their individual experiences maneuvering new cultures and countries, make this novel compelling and illuminating.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.
Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel The Far Field (2019) transports its reader to modern day India. This novel is a confession by thirty-year-old Shalini. She self-consciously tells her story as she leaves her native Bangalore in search of one man from Kashmir who touched her childhood. Her journey is a sort of coming-of-age even though she is in her mid-twenties when she sets off. Intertwined with her travels, Shalini reflects on her childhood and the lives of her mother and father. Ultimately her trip leads Shalini to the poverty, community, and brutality found in conflict-rife Kashmir.
Reading The Call of the Wild, originally published in 1903, is fast. The novella is only 164 (in the edition I read), and yet, its brevity is part of its magic. Jack London follows the life of Buck, his canine protagonist, from a life of luxury in sunny California, to one of toil in the harsh world of the Alaskan Klondike.
Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016) is a beautiful, and at times heartbreaking, ode to the meaning of life. At the age of 36 and as the final year of his neurosurgical residency began, Kalanithi faced a terminal cancer diagnosis. His response, as embodied by this book, is both brave and thoughtful.
Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012) brings a Russian fairytale amidst the Alaskan wilderness. The novel begins in the 1920s when Mabel and Jack, recently transplanted from their native Pennsylvania, face their second winter on their Alaskan homestead.
In Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), British naturalist writer Michael McCarthy mixes memoir and nature writing to present a stimulating, beautiful expose on the link between human joy and the natural world. The book evolves from McCarthy’s environmental argument that nature is the one place in which humans may truly find joy. Looking back at his 1950s childhood in northern England and the ways communing with nature soothed the traumas and chaos of human existence, McCarthy begins this work of nonfiction through memory and memoir.
