Under the lamp (1906) oil painting by Paul Sérusier. Original public domain image from The Finnish National Gallery.
Yes, the right book can work better than a pill
Bibliotherapy is the practice of mining literature for its therapeutic effects. Sometimes reading the right book or passage helps you gain perspective and feel less battered by life. When you are facing trauma, anxiety, depression, stress, and other troublesome things, books can help you escape, stabilize, heal, and feel better.
Though I’m not a licensed therapist, my training is in health and creative writing. I’ve chosen books for this site that have spoken to me at different times and places in life, and I’m hoping you find a book here that speaks to you, too.
5 strategies for getting the most from bibliotherapy
Ask what questions the author is trying to answer
Notice characters’ motivations and actions (are they like yours?)
Ask yourself what stands out
Search for instructive parallels
Pay attention to tone
Questions are often what push an author to write in the first place. Maybe the writer is struggling with grief or is fascinated by the question of how to live a meaningful life. As you read, ask yourself what questions prompted the author to start writing in the first place. If you have similar questions, maybe you can benefit from witnessing the writer try to work out answers to these questions on the page.
Character motivations and actions are crucial, often driving the plot forward. By tracking other characters’ reasons for doing what they do, you can better notice similar motivations in yourself or can glean insight into why people around you may be acting the way they are.
What resonates incredibly deeply for you in a book may leave a fellow reader numb; what stands out for someone else may ring false to you. To better understand what appeals to you in life, what “catches” you and what kind of person you are, notice the elements that appeal to you most in a particular story. Is it a character’s honesty? Their idiosyncrasies? The steadiness they show when handling a challenge?
It can also help to seek out parallels. The way a particular character acts or reacts may guide you through a similar situation. On the other hand, you may learn from certain characters how not to act. As characters work out their challenges and observe life unfolding around them, you may be able to empathize and learn along with them.
Tone is also instructive. Are you attracted to a brisk, daring tone? Do you prefer something that sounds warm and comforting? Or sharp and incisive? Why is that? (Or why do certain tones turn you off?) Being aware of how a book’s tone attracts or repels you can cast light on what kinds of people and surroundings may be the best fit for you.
The narrator doesn’t temper her bitterness one iota. Those gripped between the relentless pincers of abandonment can empathize with that urge to burn connections that don’t bear much fruit.
Sometimes, you’re the one doing the abandoning, as you contemplate what values to uphold and which to betray. Here is a striking example of just that kind of dilemma.
You need to break a rule or a relationship, but you’re not sure which one.
The straightforward humanness conveyed in this story, cool as hand-pumped water on a scratchy plains day, can refresh. This is one of those books about “small” places that isn’t small.
Your heart aches and you’d like to witness heartbreak and dignity happening in the same place.
The college years can be fraught ones. Unhealthy urges and the everyday longing to find acceptance swirl in this novel that details how toxic attachments can work on multiple levels.
You’d like to trust the people around you and the person you see in the mirror…you just don’t know if you can.
One of life’s most sickening twists is how it can make us want to hurt ourselves. That urge is on vivid display in Russell’s novel about a student and her teacher.
You’re having trouble extricating yourself from a sticky, not-altogether-awful yet very undermining situation.
Trauma can become very deeply imprinted on the clay-like minds and bodies of the young. Here we read about how abuse can stunt us early on, and yet how we can also grow with and through the trauma.
You’d like to glimpse a path out of the trauma thicket that may have trapped you when you were young.
Reading that healing is possible is one thing; actively healing another. Sometimes that more active, effortful healing requires a set of guiding steps.
You’ve been abused and are ready to digest what happened.
When I was feeling deeply stung by people’s willingness to inflict sexual trauma on others, this book gave me a peek at what is going on. Not an easy read, but an illuminating one.
When you can’t comprehend why people are willing to hurt others for their own gratification.
A classic story about what happens when a man is accused of a crime no one will even name. Confusion, resignation, and absurdity mingle here to darkly comedic and chilling effect..
Sometimes it’s your circumstances that are absurd; sometimes it’s what’s going on inside you. For O’Briens war-cracked characters, it’s both. His novels asks when war in all its precise horribleness is not absurd.
The world weighs heavy and seeing how other characters try to carry the load might prove helpful.
We humans can be exceedingly petty, and life can hinge on this pettiness, which is both absurd and utterly relatable. Here Gogol pokes fun at our idiosyncrasies, even when they’re not always so very funny.
You just can’t seem to catch a break and prefer to see someone else mired in strange life issues for a change.
Visiting aliens leave mounds of junk human raiders risk their lives to retrieve in this existential thriller. But to what purpose? No matter how hard they try, they seem no closer to understanding.
You feel forced to spend your precious energy on stuff that just doesn’t compute; you’re being smothered by a fog of stomach-churning ambiguity.
Absurdism has its lighter side, too. Here, Link puts absurdity through its paces, cracking a whip of fairytale logic while beaming a klieg light on our all too human foibles.
We adopt all kinds of coping mechanisms to ward off our absurd insecurities, as DeWitt illuminates in this novel about characters sheltering within their self-constructed bunker of knowledge.
You, too, are a fact-hoarder but can’t jam the bits of knowledge together in a way that makes satisfying enough sense.
How much compromise can you accept to secure what you thought you wanted? Dangarembga pits her young narrator against this question, as she tries to wrest a decent education from a flawed situation.
You know you’re going to hurt yourself chasing what you think is best for you.
Haunting and disturbingly given over to memories, Ishiguro’s novel pokes at whether or not hope and care can upend rotten circumstances. Does your life matter if it was never really yours at all?
You’re feeling short-changed or forced to betray your own hard-beating heart.
Birth, we sometimes forget, is a roll of the dice, and family is a complicated mish-mash of chance and genes. What happens when your child isn’t who you thought they would be?
You feel you don’t belong or you’re struggling to love people who are close but nonetheless seem strange.
Pointed straight toward a future in the coal mines, Hine’s narrator turns momentarily toward wilder things instead, if only in the margins and sidelines of his short, brutal years.
You need a dose of feral things to counteract the quiet desperation.
Here we are plunged in the risibly boring obsessiveness that marks an addicted person’s days. Strive for transcendence as he will, Lowry’s narrator is always just doubling back for yet another sneaky drink.
When you’re in the mood for weighty language whose fireworks mostly light up the sad confines of an excuse-making mind.
Still unsettling years later, this novel imagines the world of addiction knocking on the doors of multiple generations, only to blow everyone down one by one.
You could use a reminder of how addiction spirals.
Here Maté draws on his extensive experiences assisting people struggling with addiction to remind us where addictions start and how the addicted are so persistently let down by the very policies that are supposed to help.
You’d like to understand how addiction is the outcome of an entire system.
After months or years of crushing disappointment, the friends and family of an addicted person can lose heart. For those who crave supportive direction on what to do when you care about someone mired in addiction, here’s help.
When anger or sorrow over someone else’s addiction threaten to swamp you.
Yes, problems plague us all, but admiration is one way to peer through problematic thickets, Abdurraqib hints. His paeans to pop masters celebrate how music cements us together even when we’re only dancing in a room alone.
You need a jolt of joy or maybe just some new songs celebrated with language that is just so good.
In the hands of Hansen, admiration isn’t always a healthy thing. Watch fanboy urges manipulate his narrator into serious consequences and ask yourself how you act towards the things you admire most.
If a historical novel tip-toeing through the shadow side of adulation appeals.
Sarton admires a day emptied of everything but sunlight. Life’s chaos isn’t going to let her get away with too much of that, but we benefit from absorbing her sometimes calm, sometimes spiky musings on balance.
You crave connection with your closest friends at the same time you would love to just be left alone.
Frequently admired and just as frequently under-supported, teachers shoulder so much of the work of raising well-educated children and citizens. Here’s a chance to watch an especially dedicated teacher at work.
You’d like to remind yourself that some of the most important tasks and callings aren’t always the most high-profile ones.
The flip side of admiration, disgust also reveals much about our characters. In this academic, yet amusing treatment of disgust, Miller excavates what makes us say ‘ick.’
It seems like every third book sports a Rumi epigraph these days. I suppose that’s due to how these lush, evocative poems continue to encapsulate our most elusive passions.
Here’s a primer on a monk who has just as much room in his heart for the wonders of archeology and clouds as he does for God. These quietly ecstatic meditations show us how to care deeply for many things at once.
You’d like to feel suffused with wonder for sand and many other things.
Not all of us can build such a lasting memorial to love, but Shah Jahan could, and now the rest of us can plumb the architecture of love by discovering more about how this building came to be.
You’d like to see adoration delineated in architectural terms.
Maybe we let our loves stumble across us as they will. Or maybe we are intentional about what we chose to honor. Rinpoche offers a graceful example of the latter course.
You’d like to be reminded that mortal concerns can snap the objects of your adoration into clearer focus.
Here’s a novel with a reputation for being about adoration. Or love. Or something significantly more yucky and pedophilic. I suggest it for the way it reveals the pitifulness of “loving” inappropriate beings, thereby missing out on bigger and more nuanced loves.
You need a reminder that each of us can develop in full and complex ways…but that we may not if we fall prey to overruling obsessions. Or you need to seriously hold back from Lolita-ing others in your life.
Proulx gives us a narrator baffled by how to run a household, drifting on frigid waves of incompetent uncertainty. Yet her language glows enough to cast an aura, as though sheer, attentive expressiveness can claw survival from life’s storms.
The world abounds in jobs that don’t always get much scrutiny (and yet makes things tick). As au courant as it may seem to be an heiress or a marketer, some of us are waitresses, ones not entirely sure about fork placement or what to do next in life. This book’s for us.
Your “dead end” job is really making you question things.
When you’re not sure what else to do with your life, you can always manipulate others. That’s the game afoot in Highsmith’s classic, reminding us to be careful about those charismatic slackers who seem to have things figured out.
You like your psychological horror sun-drenched and grinning.
To this day, rabies exacts an absolutely terrifying toll. Knowledge, however, can help counter the fear, or at least it did for me. Sometimes dwelling deeply but productively on fears undermines their dominion.
You want to know more than you ever realized you did about a still rampaging disease. Or you can see rabies as the personification of other terrifying fears.
Porter’s slender but potent book addresses one of our primary fears, that of abruptly losing a beloved, not to mention a whole swath of society overnight. Her portrayal of loss is both clear-eyed and devastating.
You could benefit from confronting a very particular kind of mortality that is still breathing down our necks.
Hour to hour, we grapple with individualistic fears. There is an entire empire to fear out there, however, and it’s largely composed of our larger societal policies and decisions, which proves fertile ground for Nussbaum’s insightful inquiries.
You want to learn how to deal with systematic fear instead of feeling held captive to it.
Slam your whole body straight into what terrifies you most? No thanks. The subjects of Holland’s fascinating treatise on facing fear often do precisely that, however, proving how we can all more greatly learn how to expose ourselves to fears.
When you’re ready to hold your hand out so the spider of fear can crawl over it.
Aging: inevitable, yet often dreaded beyond measure
Sometimes you get to age on your own front porch. Sometimes you’re struggling to light a fire in an Arctic winter, like the two women left for dead in this story. Read it to feel inspired by the indomitability on display.
Others are passing you by or even hinting you’re no longer relevant.
Carter dedicated his long and fruitful golden years to peacekeeping, education, woodworking, and a whole slew of other pursuits that showcase aging’s many opportunities.
You’re seeking a sage elder to illuminate the years ahead with pragmatic optimism.
In the midst of crisis and tribulation exists enough room to sustain hope, which is what Kim’s characters manage to do, despite the ravages of accelerated aging.
Life has you clutched so hard all you can do is wonder how to ride it out.
Sometimes perceived as extraneous in today’s sadly consumerist times, the elderly, Thomas argues, merit more respect for their achievements and more recognition for the generative life stage they are entering.
You, too, wish agism would age itself into obsolescence.
Thomas doesn’t hold back here on how it feels to be yourself but also subtly not. Aging, she hints, forces you to adjust to sometimes cramping rhythms. Hers is a restless voice, one I value for its honesty.
You know aging is a privilege, but not a gilded one.
Agitation: a whisk churning the egg whites of your being
Like the sound of hissing sand, this is a book that grits up your world slowly but insistently. As a strange situation continues to unfold, the sense of agitation rises.
This isn’t a nice book, but neither is agitation nice. Read it to wonder at what happens when we suppress (or feed) some of our deepest, most ineluctable urges.
When you want a dose of wicked prose and beguilingly strong emotion to sweep you along.
Little heightens agitation like our relationships with our family members and closest friends. Here Zauner grieves for her mother, trying to reach back toward her through shared recipes while wrestling the agitation of not feeling enough.
You, too, feel cast back in time and aren’t sure you can or want to make your parents proud.
We’re all feeling mired in the stickiness of a rising existential anxiety we just can’t seem to shake, no? Maybe it’s time to inquire about what anxiety can teach us.
You’re ready for your anxiety to serve your most closely-held goals rather than continuing to get in your way.
Yanagihara does not spare her characters. To what end? Perhaps, as Aristotle has mentioned, so that we, the audience can feel more closely knit together and prepared for tragedy. Or perhaps simply to show us survival through anguish.
Rarely do I find such devastating writing, much less writing that so powerfully indicates how to travel through immense agony and transgression. And somehow Levi remains so warmly, achingly human.
You cannot afford to let hatred slowly smolder in your soul for the rest of your years.
These poems capture the imagined voices and impressions of patients consigned to a mental institution. Agony here is mixed with insight, as Brown refuses to let her subjects become only suffering victims, but rather insists on their full representation.
You want to see how the fresh air of empathy can sweep away some of the prejudice and tarnish of a difficult place.
Arguably Job, through tortured, comes off better than God here, who is apparently willing to put Job through a bizarre amount of painful nonsense to prove a weird bet. So pity Job, but learn from him, too, or at least toe the canyon of his despair.
When the beliefs that buttress your core start to break into bits.
Awe, as I know from studying pain for years, is one of the few things that can offset agony. Here Dilllard’s awe is in full swing: a kaleidoscopic display of precise, yet wide-eyed wonder that could dispel all kinds of pain.
When undermining agony by magnifying wonder seems advisable.
Do you dare to undergo the gauntlet of girls’ worst aggressions? Me neither. What I can do is admire Abbott’s ability to showcase both the glitter and the viciousness of being young enough to do a backflip but old enough to crave full control.
Even when you see these short stories’ points coming from miles away, they still land with the explosive internal thump of a Tyson roundhouse. Read them to witness aggression wielded inventively and even with care.
This work gives us shard-like meditations on art, war, and the aggression that crackles to some extent in us all. Both generative and unsettling, it shows how great beauty and great violence both have much to say to and about us.
When a wide-ranging and collage-like treatment of how we both create and destroy sounds up your alley.
What are the effects of a consumer mindset spread over a lifetime? And what are the subtle side effects of satisfied desire? Here Biss digs into the trash heap of all our longings.
You feel everything pile up around you, and it’s all becoming a bit much.
Barricaded opportunities and years of tough work could’ve turned Parks bitter, but he chose to thoughtfully document humanity’s most stringent and soothing moments instead.
You want to watch how one determined person channels potential aggression into an enduring record of the years.
Things aren’t going quite right for Orange’s characters. Is that just life as usual or something to get worked up over? Read this to find out, and notice along the way how Orange uses community to buffer life’s blunter forces.
When you have a sinking suspicion about so many things.
You know that moment in a horror movie when vague alarm tips into full-blown terror? Here Jackson mines our own sense of alarm to magnify her characters’ terrors. It’s that moment, but sustained.
Pirates, storms, smuggling – the high seas are heady and often surprisingly oppressive places to be. Urbina chronicles much of the abuse and buffeting weirdness that tends to happen there.
You see the seas as unexplored territory, with all the peril and shock that entails.
Even during cataclysms, we don’t tend to sink to the abysmal depths apocalyptic movies would have us believe. To counter cynicism, savor this record of how humans work together to lessen disasters.
You’re not sure anyone would pull you from a burning building. (They would).
Logic doesn’t always work against anxiety. But good dirt can, especially when that dirt is discussed by the ever-supportive Don and his firm belief in how gardens make things better for us all.
You have a wee patch of land and want to know what to do with it.
Alienated: not sure of much except that you do not belong
I’ll always have a soft spot for characters who must split themselves between multiple worlds, finding themselves strangely comfortable with alienation while never quite fitting in. Nguyen’s main character certainly delivers in that sense.
You can see multiple sides to a subject (and may also feel battered due to that capability).
Read enough Enriquez, and you’ll notice characters trying to deny the need to conform, plus a fair amount of psychological and sometimes literal mutilation due to individual urges and to the whims of Argentina’s dictatorship.
Dryly biting prose about haunted misfits floats your boat.
Continuing in the vein of stubborn rebels comes Kōno’s offering about forbidden urges and subversive deeds. You may not always be on board with these characters’ wants, but I for one found them liberating.
You’re tired of pretending you actually want what society says you should.
Here’s a wistful take on alienation as two drifting souls brush in the psychological fog. Lacking anchors, we become alienated, and yet in Ali’s gentle tale, that may prove more affecting than awful.
You wish just one person would want to understand you.
As someone who shares some of Westover’s seminal experiences, I’m thankful for the chance to encounter her grit in going up against indifferent circumstances to become someone different.
You don’t have a map but you want to be somewhere else.
A stripped-down survival story, Houshofer’s protagonist gets stuck in a simple, yet daunting world. Adjusting to the simple repetitiveness of her days, she’s able to experience the balm, banality, and vulnerability of being alone.
You might crave more human companionship…or you might not.
The classic “man ventures to Alaska” story, but told a little differently. In this case, it’s more of a painting residency than a survival quest, more of an experience bonding with a son than the ego flying solo.
You want to see how withdrawing from the world can be generative, not just eccentric.
Can’t trust a loner. Introverts are broken. So many assumptions casually mentioned; so much emphasis placed on social skills. So it’s refreshing to encounter an intellectual defense of solitude from someone who gets it.
Here’s a narrator far more necessary than the flood of socially insecure young things it’s so easy to find in today’s contemporary pages. Necessary because she’s cranky, mature, opinionated, and totally devoted to the splendid solitude of literature.
You’re longing for a book about books and the personalities determined to love them.
Are you in solitude or in loneliness? Here researchers dedicated to studying the state of being alone delve into its dangers and the real impacts of unwanted loneliness.
You’d like someone to acknowledge the deep wound of having no one else around.
Too often, I think, we focus our binoculars and microscopes on various pains and traumas, leaving counterbalancing joys and triumphs outside the lens. Of course, it doesn’t always balance, but tasting joy, for a change, is both refreshing and reaffirming.
You know what? It’s OK to be serious, intellectual, to care about our world and think deeply about it. It’s also OK – maybe even imperative – to delight in the world, including even its smallest pleasures. It’s OK to delight in this book.
You need a little cheering up or want to balance all the woe.
Montgomery gives us a twist on Thomas Nagel’s “what’s it like to be a bat?” question, and in doing so, provides a glimpse into the glowing, eight-limbed world of octopus consciousness.
You want to escape human consciousness and marvel at how it works for a different kind of animal.
You can be amazed by Obreht’s vivacious prose, by her command of Balkan myth, or by the way she–with apparent delight–weaves together reminisces, current-day concerns, and totemic animals. This is tough to classify, but pulls you straight in.
You want to marvel at a different place seen through a different mentality.
The chronicles of climate change often come across as dampeningly depressing. Not so here, where Wohlforth shows us in icily pleasurable prose how scientists and technologists track our changing world.
The details of how we observe and draw conclusions, along with the humanity of our sciences, brings you amazement.
Ambiguity: when it’s not clear what to think or feel
As readers, it’s easy to expect narrative clarity by the end of a novel. And although some writers are comfortable upending that expectation, rarely do they do it with Lindsay’s eerie charm.
Schaitkin’s characters are pinned by their own uncertainties, unable to progress without clawing for answers that may (they believe) unstick them, but that, like so much else, may prove insubstantial as smoke. Maybe not having an answer is an answer?
It’s proving outrageously difficult to stop sifting a series of events for meaning.
Not at all for everyone, Nakamura’s novel resists being pinned down by piling up facts and psychological puzzles. Confusing for some, others appreciate its strange take on deconstructing a mind (or several).
You like your ambiguity bleak, bitter, and bracing.
What appeals to me here is how Vandermeer lets his characters feel lured into an alternate existence. Rather than always striving to “keep” themselves, survival sometimes takes on a different, no less interesting, meaning.
Reeling with loss, Van Den Berg’s protagonist can’t seem to determine if what she’s experiencing is real or not (or if it even matters). She may not find answers, but she does describe a state of being many of us have stumbled through.
It’s becoming increasingly less important for reality to hew to your expectations.
Intertwined identities, relationship shifts, reflections on art – this novel manages a host of ambivalent topics with poise and lively viewpoints. Many readers feel ambivalent about it as well, amplifying the meta-ness?
You want to juggle viewpoints, periods in history…everything.
Among many accounts of war, Klay’s stands out for its acuity, its psychological insightfulness, and its diffuse air of dread. These short stories linger like cordite.
You crave exposure to ambivalences beyond everyday emotions.
Another short selection, McCarthy’s stripped-down post-apocalyptic road-trip story dispenses with most hope, plunking instead for certainty (the certainty that we’re doomed, essentially). Not much ambiguity.
You need a break from ambivalence and would prefer things harshly straightforward for a change.
Amused: chuckling despite yourself (what a relief!)
Is it even possible to write about depression in a side-splitting way? If you are Allie Brosh, it absolutely is. Reading this, you find it is also possible to roar with laughter while simultaneously badly needing a tissue.
You can dig a blend of insight, hilarity, and serious subjects.
For salty essays about how life can sting, we need reach no further than Irby’s essay collections. This one blends raw reminiscences with wry humor that helps the rest of us see our angst as, maybe, just a little bit more laughable.
Gombrowicz’s central character is forced back into a child’s body and required to repeat primary school. Is this a nightmare? Liberating? An existential parable? You can decide; you may decide while laughing.
Wry, sarcastic, puncturing – these stories are funny in a twisted, sinking-gut kind of way. Some of them are beginning to seem more true than not, distressingly enough. No matter – just let these stories get their funny little claws in you.
Is death funny? Hard to say, but Roach’s treatise on corpses certainly makes it more entertaining. Perhaps it’s cathartic to laugh at something so grave?
You’d like to laugh, for a change, at the scary or gross things that are going to happen to us all.
You could shelve this in ‘Revenge,’ but it’s a bit more complicated than that, incorporating a little bit of bonding along with the body horror. Horror is a potent way to handle what feels violating, which Kirino does adeptly.
There are so many ways to be hungry in this world. If those hungers go unfulfilled too long, however, you get the emotional starvation and caustic anger of Messud’s Nora. You also get hints of how anger can hold you together when sorrow might tear you to shreds.
You want to see anger go a bit incandescent, hot and alive.
Yes, this one gets written about a lot, still. Probably because it still hits a white-hot nerve: the drive to channel rage through your body with the satisfaction of a fist against the face of someone just as miserable as you.
You want a furiously seething version of Alice in Wonderland.
Unfortunately rage doesn’t just stay between the pages. When it’s wild-firing inside, sometimes you need an even-voiced guide to help you purge and control it.
Aggression can feel so threatening, we rush to bottle it up or deny it. This book proved useful for me, however, when I needed to better understand why hurting people can in turn be so hurtful.
You’re ready for useful perspectives on why loving, troubled people can struggle so deeply with anger and aversion.
Decades later this book is still a probing strobe-light, an explosion of anguish neon-bright and striking as Cherenkov’s radiation. Read it to see how the mind harrows itself and how that harrowing scrapes everything in its proximity.
You’re ready to feel the anguish of a nation personified in one unforgettable person.
It should never stop surprising us: the incredible way entire societies can accept codified abuse and all the smothered anguish that entails. This is a shattering read that intimates what happens behind doors we tend to walk past.
You can be both heartened and wrung by how resistance, even when systematically futile, still holds meaning.
I touched this book’s spine in a New York library and things were never the same. Here is some of the worst of what we do to each other along with how an entire nation responds. This is indelible.
Just read it. Because this is not casual, not academic, not a good way to “win.”
Here’s counsel from a grief counselor who has been deeply shaken by grief herself–it may not address systematic anguish, but this book does gently glow with empathy and understanding: grief cannot be fixed.
You wish there were better words for being anguished.
Another portrayal of sorrow – this time of post-9/11 grief–that pulls your heart out like taffy until you hear a soft but decisive snap. Senior is a masterful writer whose words are both vibratory and kinetic.
You’re braced to acknowledge how grief ripples through the decades and the ages.
This is one I return to over and over. For the melodic tenderness. For the unrivered-fish throb at its core. For the love suffusing MacLean’s torrent of grief and reminiscence.
When you want to see grief contextualized, yet still beyond ken.
Anxious: a ticking in the brain the heart cannot soothe
Anxiety isn’t the only condition addressed by Emezi in this novel, but the characters’ anxiousness does pervade, partly as a result of trying to contain so many thoughts and identities.
Chest-tightening for some but immensely relatable for others, Stern excavates a life gripped by rattling nerves. If you wonder how it feels to be fear’s burrow, here’s your book.
This novel is more commonly called phlegmatic than anxious. Yet how could life not provoke intense anxieties, given the conditions Laxness describes? Under the stoicism bleats a stony sort of anxiety that belies how easy survivors make it seem to live alone.
Snow, stone, and human intransigence might soothe the storm inside.
Appreciative: a warm ‘thank you’ to the peculiar things you love
Reichl’s drive to find good food stands out; this is a bit of a soul-warming read, in that it feels like taking care of yourself while also getting to watch someone wield both her fork and her pen.
Ever wished you had a more acute nose? Here Turin breaks down the components of scent in lucid prose that will soon have you pawing through the bottles at your local perfume counter.
You’d like to grow your scent vocabulary while also appreciating the enormous chemical and psychological impact of smell.
Here Sacks leaves us one of his final gifts: a concise collection of essays on nearing the end of life. As gracious and warm as ever, Sacks prompts us to weave threads of gratitude all through our lives.
What’s not appreciated in McCarthy’s harsh fable is human life itself. You find this appalling or amusing, depending on your mood, but if you’d like to explore an alternate morality, here it is.
Life hasn’t touched you deeply in a while and you’re wondering how you would react if you needed to risk the rest of your years on a coin flip.
So many trigger warnings with this one. But such a compelling narrator, too (multiple narrators, actually), soaked in an other-worldly atmosphere of mounting dread. It’s long; it’s strange; I for one will be reading it again.
You feel…not quite yourself. In an unsettling way.
Hailed as a welcome update, Treuer’s book continues the saga of Native American history past Wounded Knee to demonstrate how yes, this saga is a narrative of dread, but also of vibrant, resistant life.
You need to see how to buck a prevailing narrative of doom with complexity and celebration.
We all know how dystopian novels go, just as we all hope the rebels yearning for truth prevail. What then, however? This first in a series of three books kicks off an intriguing quest to figure out what’s really going on.
You’d like a slightly lighter version of power struggles and cover-ups.
Corruption and cover-ups can be great, stomach-churning fun to consume. What about the disturbing realities of our own finances, however? Whately is here for those of us who need to set a few things straight before we tip into the red.
When thinking about your money makes you want to gag or stuff your head under a pillow.
Combat apprehension with this account of the famed Durrells and their spirited run at making a home on Corfu. Haag doesn’t mask all the seams of that endeavor, but the family ebullience seeps through to defy dread.
It’s time for a little sun.
Arrogance: caustic, simultaneous too-muchness and too-littleness
Whispered, screamed, told in fragments or asides – Brown’s debut novel orbits the arrogance of the oblivious and hints at how relieving it would be to puncture that arrogance.
You wish others would just pay a little more attention, dammit.
History, logging practices, hubris, and Haida culture swirl within the fog-ridden hills of the Pacific Northwest. Come for the mystery of the vanished kayaker; stay for the incredible account that unfolds after that.
You’d like to put forests into perspective and perhaps feel smaller and less arrogant in doing so.
Based on remorselessly dreadful history, Flanagan’s novel orbits a “skull researcher” and colossally icky colonial. While also being a carnival of words, a record of fanciful fish, and a playful account of how to undermine the arrogant.
It’s a dated book, a problematic book, a book I still rifle through for the gleeful banality of its complicit amorality. Narrator Patrick Bateman is arrogance personified. He’s also sick, cold, and maniacally deadpan.
You, like I, get a thrill from trotting through the strange brains of twisted fictional characters (or you want to bone up on major red flags).
There’s garden-variety arrogance, and then there’s arrogance on the level of a dictator. Here we catch a glimpse of how deeply a dictator can wreak his own people.
You need to marvel at how much leeway hubris permits and how damaging giving in to arrogance can be.
I can’t read my daily news feed without stubbing my eyes on yet another article on narcissism. I think we’re all trying to protect ourselves – heaven knows narcissism is like black mold on the soul – but we want to understand this trait, too.
You need to know why narcissism is cropping up everywhere.
Assertiveness: how to leave your mark if even in a subdued way
Sometimes you want to dance. Sometimes you want to play the music the dancers pin themselves to. De Robertis’s narrator practices a stubbornly quiet assertiveness, whether she’s practicing tango violin or learning to pass as a man.
This is a striking novel, one that pushes its protagonist mercilessly, though with a harsh and measured dignity as well. Read it for its Ozark musicality as well as for the dogged staunchness of its characters.
To remind yourself assertiveness can be adamantine, too, not just shock and awe.
Quiet voice, fear of ridicule, drive to just be left alone…there are a thousand reasons to be reticent rather than kindly assertive. Vingelli’s exploration of assertiveness emphasizes the importance of relationships and, too, of having boundaries.
Mandela’s life story is a powerful testament to the patient kind of assertiveness that dares to keep going, day after day without flashy results, not knowing where the persistence will lead. It’s a reminder that assertiveness contains uncertainty, too.
Now for a study in the opposite of assertiveness. The passivity of Ishiguro’s main character drives home the futility of regrets, relating a punctilious man’s failures to devastating effect.
You need to be scared into making some life changes.
Attentiveness: slowing yourself down to yield the stage
I wish more readers would pounce on Passarello’s work. Brio, a masterful command of facts, esoteric, deeply interesting subjects–it’s all here, testifying to how Passarello pays attention to voice, to bodies, and to culture.
You want to hear good writing at work, both in the finest details and in the overall construction.
McPhee, it’s clear, is a noticer. Someone who probably carries a notebook everywhere. How else, however, could he cram his books with as much carefully observed, brimming-over detail? The devil is there, true, but also often the delight.
You’d like a peek into how it feels to exercise heightened awareness.
Though Jensen’s world deals with abysmally sad events, it’s difficult not to notice the diligence he brings to tragedy, down to the precision with which his team labels the tiniest of things left at an accident site. If you cannot fix a tragedy, he hints, you can pad it with care.
It might be therapeutic to notice how much thought goes into the aftermath of disasters.
On the flip side of attentiveness lies voyeurism, idle curiosity, even exploitive interest. Schweblin roams that territory here, where being attentive can lead to connection or to corruption.
You know it’s creepy to stare but you want to do it anyway.
Stark and pessimistic, Saramago’s novel asks how we might behave if we suddenly could no longer see. Doubtless other senses would work harder, but would that be enough? On many levels, this is about obliviousness.
When you might appreciate a parable about paying attention.
Exquisitely sensitive to body language, Enia somehow combines a memoir about sonhood with observations on how refugees and would-be rescuers impact tiny Lampedusa. A wrench of a read.
You need to see how observation breaks you but lets you connect, too.
I read this book repeatedly, for the luscious language, yes, but also for the character Kit, who defuses bombs with immense attunement. Most of Ondaatje’s characters make me wish we paid more attention to one another.
You, like me, are vulnerable to the ‘strange characters trying to connect’ plot.
Can we claim we know what’s going on if we don’t truly listen? Coral reefs, among many other organisms, communicate with sound, it’s just that we don’t always realize it. Thankfully, Bakker helps us feel more attuned to what we can barely hear.
You’d like to learn something new that puts a little twist in how you view the world.
A mordantly amusing read, Daniel sets his characters in an urgent situation, but then lets them tune into all kinds of other thoughts in their heads. We pay attention, in other words, to what matters to us personally.
No secret here: advertisers want your eyeballs, if not your entire brain, as Wu details. Still, it helps to keep reminding yourself that your attention is precious and that you can choose what is meaningful to you.
You want to scare yourself into paying less attention to silly stuff.
Balked: stuck in existential mud, nothing but thunderheads around
It doesn’t appear much is happening in the Polish borderlands of Tokarczuk’s novel. Then the deaths start. And the animals might be to blame? You can unstick yourself from a stagnant life in many ways, turns out, even if nobody else knows.
You’d like to snicker along with a protagonist who finds liberation in human superfluity.
“Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him.” That’s the spirit of this collection, where people get stuck in horrendous circumstances. Is there any escape? Maybe not, or maybe only through pitch-black humor.
You can manage to see the twisted meaningfulness in being so stuck, or are curious about desperate measures.
This is dense, wrist-straining, and heart-wringing. Read it to witness how to navigate terror; read it to see normal life regain its luster and sheen. If you can walk, if you can think, are not those amazing enough abilities?
Seeing how others coped with tyranny inspires you to dig into what’s fulfilling about your own life.
Alright, so these shorts are not calculated to uplift you or make you feel better about how humans think in the private dark. They’re also piercing and quietly lovely, revealing everyday mystery and mundanity.
You want bite-sized pieces of “normal” life–that remind you none of us is so normal after all.
Admirers of literary mysteries often love French’s work. Among her books, this one hinges on one of our most powerful drives: the longing to belong. What if, French asks, we could trade our random, splintered lives for ones that are warmer and more insular?
You want the comfort of a detective novel strung with a keening draw to feel at home.
A quote: “He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person’s unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.” Haslett’s short stories crack hearts while healing minds. Broken, dealing with mental illness, simmering with care–these are such human characters.
You know pain can be a home–and that there’s more to life than pain.
We can lose a lot, but facial disfiguration can launch us out of community into the no-man’s land of being perceived as monstrous. Restoring a face, as Fitzharris shows in this account of WWI plastic surgery, can restore much more than mere tissue.
You know how devastating a wound can be–and, even worse, how hurtful rejection from the rest of us is.
Adoption adds another level to the complicated layer cake that is feeling at home with one’s family. And when that adoption occurs across races, it can be difficult to determine what home could even be.
You feel that acceptance tends to also involve dislocation.
Sometimes, you know you don’t belong at all. Not with those around you, not with your restless self, maybe not even with God. Such is the case with Greene’s chased and self-critical Whiskey Priest, who shows us how it looks to long for acceptance while on the run.
Failures seem to run so deep, but there has to be more than failure, right?
Bitter: a feeling you want to scrape off your tongue and innards
King gives us two odd characters pitted against each other in a spiral of, yes, misery. One of them, the bitter one, is a study in being overlooked and deciding not to let it go, even if that longing leads to some horrendous places.
You feel like being chilled by how bitterness can slowly contort your innards.
Bitter the first time around, Olive Kitteridge still exhibits streaks of acidic outbursts and caustic emotional surges. In between, however, surges her subsumed warmth and wit, which colors her entire community.
You crave a reminder: it’s not a crime to be bitter now and then.
One of the exonerated Central Park Five speaks about how he made it through all the betrayal, disbelief, and very public injustice. What do you do when your life cracks in half for reasons outside your control?
You need to know how to traverse seemingly senseless travesty.
There’s a lushness to Lloyd Banwo’s prose that counters bitterness. Life gives us so much that threatens to warp or founder us–and it gives us our own imaginations, too. That, I think, can be enough.
A slow burn of magical realism can offset the seething in your soul.
Vasquez is a careful chronicler, both sharp-eyed and dedicated to determining what lies submerged beneath our surfaces. These stories testify to the many hurts Colombia has undergone just as they celebrate its people’s ability to keep caring.
Based on the life of Billy Bolden, elusive and ebullient trumpeter, this slim and lyrical book portrays a life lived calloused and yet still sensitive to every bent note or blade of grass. It’s both strident and nearly intolerably tender.
All around us are prickly, perplexing situations. We can collapse into the confusion or, as McBride’s characters do, reach for some sense of humor and grace, despite the weirdness of it all.
Reading Kierkegaard, you can nearly hear the busyness of his brain, all click and whir as the world stamps itself on him and he tries to digest it all in response. Reading his digestions can be thrilling, just as they can also tug one toward being morose.
You’d like to consider things from multiple angles in a prismatic, shifting whirl of consciousness.
In the world of writing, anything smacking of sentimentality can be suspect. Easier, one suspects, to write about angst. So sometimes a book like Sloan’s, which unapologetically offers a slice of buttery comfort, is welcome.
Simplicity and comfort are what’s needed.
Bored: rip out your hair or roll over and keep staring at the wall?
Quietly strange, Oyamada’s novel follows a young professional freshly stranded in the countryside, where it seems there’s little to do and much to regret, a kind of grass-closing-in feeling. Then things turn.
A novel about an Everyman, Stoner’s work asks if leading an apparently mediocre life is a matter of resignation, boredom, subsumed satisfactions, or more.
Here’s a book like a glass dropped on the floor. A child needs care. A spouse cheats. The wheel turns. It happens every day; there’s even a degree of boredom inherent to these kinds of struggles, which are nonetheless very real.
You want little prose needles to pierce all the tedium.
What could be more tedious than walling yourself up inside a tiny cell? Medieval anchoresses did just that, however, resorting to faith and the life of the mind to get by, as Cadwallader shows in this historic novel.
You’re ready for something even more claustrophobic than COVID.
This is the story of a researcher trying to untangle both human and chimpanzee behavior. Why are both violent? What makes them break? It’s a lot to consider, but Boyd is a skillful weaver of both narrative and concept.
Human behavior just doesn’t make much sense, no matter how closely observed.
This is one of the most stifling books I’ve ever read: an account of a man with locked-in syndrome slowly losing his ability to blink messages. All the more horrifying in that it’s a memoir, one shot through with an electric wire of keen determination.
Feel that? It’s Pettersen’s calmly insistent words eroding your resistance until you slip completely into the thrall of this terse, gorgeous book on the meaning of trying to relate to one another.
You want a spare yet biting book that will dig itself a burrow in your brain.
A thrum of mounting menace distinguishes Faber’s tale about an odd hitchhiker soliciting rides for purposes her marks never suspect. This is sleety, strange, and grim, though also very, very satisfying.
You wonder how much of human interaction is based on assumption.
Here’s a manual for how to break rumination and other forms of stuck thinking, when you feel doomed to trudge through the same thought loops over and over, ad nauseum.
You’re ready to chase some unhelpful thoughts from your head.
A carnival of froth and bustle, Waters’ protagonist grows from oyster shucker to demimondaine to activist, all while strutting her gay tom stuff through Victorian England. It’s a breathless whirl of a life that’s anything but brooding.
You want to shake your head hard and dislodge a bunch of lesbian glitter that will add a bubbly shine to the next few hours.
Calm: the water smoothies itself after the pebble is flung
Subtle, sparkling meditations. Immaculately observed details. Simple, luminescent prose. And an incorrigible cat. It’s time to give in to the boundless charm of this furry little book.
An entire city can sometimes fit on a pedestal. So it is with Matar’s account of losing his father, loving the Sienese School of painting, and finally walking the streets of this loved-from-afar town. This is a quiet and resonant look at art and grief.
You’re ready for a gently uplifting, yet intense read suffused with both color and calm.
So sprawling and playful, it can have a lulling effect on your brain. Step into Marquez’s epic and get swept up. It’s OK; you don’t need to track everything, don’t need to know every minutiae. It’s enough to simply wander through this echoing mansion of family history.
When you’re a little jangly and need to take a step sideways.
Anxiety can be a disordering force that can drive you into exhaustion. Here, Australian therapist Dr. Weeks offers guidance grounded in her many years of practice teaching people why anxiety rears its head and what to do about it.
You can’t get anything done because there’s too much to worry about.
This is a funhouse mirrors kind of book some readers find not so fun. For others, it’s a mind-shaking vortex whirl of text; it’s a possessed house story that remains impenetrable, yet compelling. Not calm, in other words.
Diving into flurry could be just the distraction you need.
Here’s a slow, foggy crackle of a book that asks its characters what it means to truly care. Do you do the right thing if no one else is watching? Care is also evident in Guterson’s measured prose and rich imagining of Pacific Northwest island life.
You’re a little moody and wish for a sort of wistful, jazz-like read.
A bituminous Swedish horror in which the most chilling elements concern desperate human behavior (despite some gut-twisting young vampire behavior, too). It’s eerily gritty, but granules of care stud it as well.
When you like your doses of care to be cold and stomach-turning.
I fall easy for closed-world books where care has been professionalized but common people still do their best. In this long Sovet tale, Solznenitsyn’s characters struggle against their cancer and the enforced bleakness both. Sometimes it’s even funny.
You fear the debilitating vulnerability of disease or of dictatorship and would like to see how people continue to cope.
Life loves to throw role reversals at us, and for those of us fortunate to have elderly parents, we may need to assume responsibility for a deeper level of care. Caring for her own parents, Mosse chronicles this duty gorgeously.
You find care and obligation intimidating, and wonder what might be fulfilling about it.
How far should we go to care for others, especially when so many others are struggling desperately? MacFarquhar’s exploration of care ethics and relentless”‘saints” can be both inspiring and unsettling. Either way, it lingers.
You sometimes feel yourself being tugged apart by others’ misery, yet fear drowning in it, too.
Doing their best to navigate South Korea’s punishing standards and expectations, Cha’s characters rely on one another for the warmth to keep going. This is both prickly and gracious, an absorbing look at the modern way of “making it.”
You feel for your friends and yourself, when success (or even survival) is so fraught.
Sometimes you make the wrong choice. Or life feels full only of wrong choices. What then? For Diop’s characters, Senegalese soldiers in WWI, perhaps the only refuge is a madness that taints them and those around them in turn.
You want to reflect on how harrowing humans can become in truly grim situations.
Cantu is sometimes criticized for becoming a U.S. border agent. I found much to ponder and appreciate, however, in his self-doubt and struggle to “do the right thing.” Here, human compassion and institutional pitilessness collide, no winners.
You know that as a society we create crushing systems and wonder what an individual can do about it.
You get older and hopefully wiser. The challenges, however, do not end. In some ways, impending loss only sharpens them, as Haruf shows movingly in his novel on trying to connect in old age.
You feel buffeted and wistful but willing to try again.
No single piece of life advice or philosophy seems adequate to me, but Stoicism does offer a bit more than usual, instructing us to temper our emotions, practice equanimity, and take everything in context.
Challenge has you by the throat and you’d like to know what to tell it.
Change: inevitable, yet often so bewildering and unwelcome
Things persistently change, dammit. In a world of shifting sands and unpredictable winds, we can try to think our way through change, but we have to act, too. Cusk’s characters, it turns out, do both, to lingering and lovely effect.
You feel mournful and shaken, in need of sharp, clean language to move you forward.
Sometimes you can be the agent of change. Alison does that here, pushing us to question dominant narrative tropes – do we really have to keep telling stories the same way? Or can we intentionally change?
We love big, dramatic shifts, or at least love reading about them, right? The sweeping move, the flight in the night. What about all the baggage that inevitably hitches along and presents messy problems afterwards, however? That’s what Prcic explores in his story about a Bosnian seizing the moment.
You crave a propulsive, yet reflective, novel on big changes.
Changes can be little, too, and a bunch of them bundled together often creates a more powerful impact than one huge shift. Start to notice and practice the art of influential micro-change with this thoughtful manual.
You want to change something, you just aren’t quite sure what or how.
One of life’s most feared changes, at least for me, is serious or chronic illness. Here Bauer-Wu gently instructs us on how to use compassion and acceptance to ease through this feared and often mortal change.
You just got a shattering diagnosis, or you truly fear one.
We change, but things around us change, too, governing our lives more than might be apparent. Track some of our biggest societal changes with Smil’s history of changes and their sometimes unanticipated effects.
You’d savor a big-picture look at the nature of change.
Claustrophobic: when it’s too tight to catch a decent breath
Imprisonment has marked the lives of so many people around the world. In this case, Gruenwald addresses how it felt to be a Japanese- American girl locked in a US internment camp during WWII, shut away from how she thought her life would turn out.
Entrapment and making someone else feel out of existential air is such a cruelty. Read this for hints on how to cope.
Ward’s world here is doubly closed-in, first by the poverty and necessity of scrapping to get by, second by the panic-inducing weather. It’s a tense read threaded through with the many ways family tries to make things turn out right.
You’re ready for rising apprehension driven by immaculate pacing.
It’s an overlooked, marvel, I think, that so much of what we consume travels across oceans in carefully choreographed shipping containers. Expand your awareness of how, exactly, this occurs, for an unexpectedly intriguing read.
You have always been curious about what goes on in our busy, mysterious ports.
Just as a brain can be a cell, it can also be a playground. Treat yourself to a saunter through an imaginative depiction of Einstein’s mind to feel a little more playful in your own brain.
Oh, mothers, mothers. A fraught topic, but who else can truly comfort us the same way a mother can? This classic of intergenerational story-telling shows the support mothering relationships provide without shying away from the cracks.
You need to remind yourself that comfort spills over from grandmothers, adopted mothers, friends… all kinds of found relationships of varying ages, in other words.
This is a twice-baked potato, a chunk of gooey butter cake, a mug of hot chocolate – whatever you find inherently soothing. So strange how much comfort we take in the tiny variations of murder mysteries! A strange human quirk, but I don’t turn Sayers down.
You like your comfort delivered in sharp, fun little shots.
Some consider it akin to a soap opera, but if comforting sweetness is up your alley, the cheery whirl described by Maupin could be the prescription you need.
You’d like to enter a light, supportive world for a while.
For history buffs, poke around the concept of comfort. It wasn’t always such a part of our lives, after all, but had to be designed from our buildings on down.
Historical details soothe you.
Connection: vital whether it’s a spiderweb or a steel cable
Featuring a donor heart, this book is very literally about connection. It’s also a multi-perspective meditation on what moves us and makes us feel closer together.
You’re wistful and would like to be shaken in a beautiful way.
This literary mystery relates how an entire community holds bits of knowledge about the girls who have gone missing. It’s a keen and vivid story-in-shorts set in a brightly memorable place.
A novel of masterfully told linked stories interests you.
Connections are happening all around us, including in the earth. As these characters discover, there are many different ways to be linked throughout space and time.
You like sprawling, multi-character epics with space to get down into the details.
Lyrical, insightful, and intriguing, Kimmerer’s book is everything you’d want from combining nature, human psychology, and the need to acknowledge even unsung connections.
Part of community building is making it possible to connect in the first place. Public transportation may not sound like the most gripping topic, yet it daily shapes our environment and interactions.
You’d like insight into why cities end up the way they do.
Among us walk those who want to dispense with community altogether. Here Krakauer profiles a man who wanted to get away in an account that may, depending on your perspective, be intriguing or infuriating.
You want to watch someone walk farther and farther away from connection.
Courageous: not always what’s shown in Marvel movies
In this novel, Butler pushes her characters hard. It’s a wrenching situation, one that reminds us of how truly close and entangled the past truly is and how little we can afford complacency.
You want to be shaken and to wonder what your own ancestors have kept close.
Heroic tales are often popular ones – after all, they show us that at least one person can figure it out; they give us hope we may be the one who triumphs. That, I would argue, can be a cheap thrill, but it’s not cheap here in Weir’s blow-by-blow survival narrative.
We tend to turn our epic achievers into symbols, flattening them and somehow reducing them in the process. That’s why I appreciate this human-centered biography of Marie Curie, obsessiveness, genius, flaws, and all.
You want to admire a complicated person whose life hewed to high ideals, yet was as human as anyone else’s.
It’s not just individuals who are courageous – teams matter, too, even team members working across time and space who may never meet each other in real life, yet collaborate to give the rest of us longer and perhaps richer lives.
You’d like to marvel at the understated courageousness of public health measures.
Why, why, why do we do what we do at our worst? It’s a dogged and sharp-toothed question, one I wish we could all answer with more acuity. Here is Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Study fame, to take a stab at an answer.
You need to be reminded that, sadly, much of human behavior seems to be quite contextual.
Achingly short, these pages are packed with the terse cruelty of the paperwork Luiselli deals with while interviewing undocumented children. Short of complete (and impossible) understanding, it seems we cannot escape these spiderwebs of bureaucratic cruelty.
You want to be reminded of what you’re not necessarily hearing.
A problematic rebel, a gay icon, a spy and intrepid documenter of imperialism cover-ups and exploitation in rubber jungles around the world – Roger Casement is a complex and fascinating figure sadly familiar with colonial cruelty.
You want to remember that one individual can, in fact, change much, but may also pay much. Or when you cannot grasp how cruel countries can be.
What does war mean? We may understand that it’s cruel, often pointless or about the “wrong” things, often unspeakable. Marlantes makes us feel that, not letting us escape how war is a microcosm of us, what we do and yet cannot comprehend.
You want to be disturbed all over again by how this never ends.
Piercing and prodding, Nelson interrogates objectionable or “difficult” art, juxtaposing her observations with reveries on cruelty itself and what it can teach us.
You want to tangle with a relentlessly curious mind that sees ourselves in our cruelty.
Industrial farming rests on a great many cruelties (and hurts you, too). Shifting toward plant-based eating reduces that cruelty, and ATK makes it fairly easy without compromising flavor.
Meatless Mondays are starting to sound appetizing.
A stand-out blend of memoir and fiction, Levi’s general curiosity and love for life burn bright here. It’s hard not to admire his fascination with chemistry and how it underlies so much of our everyday lives.
You want to be caught up in the infectious alchemy of Levi’s words.
Maybe I’m the only one here obsessed with fossils, but to this day I find these rocky hunks scintillating. In this quietly comforting novel, they serve as touchstones for friendship and a way out of ossified social mores.
You, too, fancy sifting a beach to see what washed up.
Maybe you’re curious about…curiosity itself. If so, Leslie is here to give you an overview. Find out about different kinds of curiosity, consider its pluses and minuses, and more.
This classic holds up, in that it showcases Orlean’s gently relentless curiosity alongside her subjects’ passionate interest in (yes) orchids. One of the gleaming advantages of curiosity is finding out things you never knew you wanted to.
You love a complicated, multi-threaded narrative whose humans are always front and center.
Often, if you get curious about one thing, that leads to getting intrigued by another thing…and then yet another. Such is the case for Bryson–might as well buckle up and ride along.
You’re capable of finding pretty much anything compelling.
For those not in it, depression does not always make sense. It’s not a rational condition; it’s more perverse than that, attacking the core of who you thought you were. Li relates this wrenchingly and without trying to present falsely cheery answers.
It feels as though you’re slipping; you don’t know how people are doing this.
For the depressed, therapy is often the go-to. What if, however, that therapy proves unsatisfactory; what if you’re still not sure why you cannot settle into a sureness about the world and your place in it? This is what Se-hee captures.
Things are off, maybe only vaguely so, but still. It’s unnerving.
How can wrenching music help us recover? That’s a question Johnson answers with piercing clarity in this unassuming account of how Shostakovich composed his world-shaking music during the era of Stalin; it’s also a moving portrayal of how music helps us make sense of things.
Sobering and severe, but comforting in a strange way, too, since to see your own depths echoed by another is sometimes to feel more real. If others feel this, too, It might be survivable.
Much less of a philosophical or social treatment than a focused guide on how to build a solid anti-depression foundation, this is not magic, but it does have research backing it, and it is a place to start.
Something I appreciate about Dillard’s writing is how she doesn’t soft-pedal herself. It’s difficult for her, I think, to understand why others do not always feel the reverent, spilling-over joy of existing that she does. And this heightened awareness is a counterweight to depression.
You want to be swept away by someone else’s capacity for wonder, even if you’re currently in a murky place.
Desire: not always docile or comprehensible, yet persistent
I’ve already returned multiple times to Gainza’s richly textured blend of autofiction and art commentary. When we speak of desire, we often reference romance or lust, yet there is a huge opportunity to discuss our desire for art, understanding, closeness, and more.
You sizzle on multiple fronts, with life coming at you vivid and full-force.
The scenario Leilani conjuries up here may not happen that often in “real life,” but it is fun and fraught to read about. You can also revel in the sparkling language.
A powerhouse of understatement, Munro paints her characters with a fine brush and devastating insight that slices, more scalpel than saw. Desire is one of her favorite themes, and I enjoy watching her work it in.
Some desires we simply cannot escape for long, including the desire to eat. A basic urge, but it’s not at all basic how these eating urges get satisfied by current food shipping and stocking practices.
You’re up for a few ins and outs of our fascinating, frustrating food system.
Ancient Icelanders had strong desires and urges, too. What I find intriguing is how matter-of-factly they express these urges, often stripping any frills from their passions to get down to bedrock.
You’re ready for a blunt treatment of our strange desires.
Here Britsch depicts a character in deep despair, attendant with the frustration the desperate can bring to those around them. You almost want to shake the narrator. In any case, here is a novel not afraid to show the exasperation as well as the existential angst.
Many Western writers, I think, focus on the individualistic nature of emotion: how it arises and is processed by a single body and mind. That’s not the whole situation, suggests Vazquez, whose characters acknowledge how much of their lives’ despair is wrought by political and social circumstances.
Strikingly detailed prose about a complicated state of existence is for you.
It’s been some time since Kaysen’s memoir was published, yet it still reads as raw and urgent. It’s also a gleaming portrait of group dynamics and of wondering whether or not understanding the roots of your despair will help.
You’d like to fall into shimmering language about a muddy state.
Despair has a way of making us cling white-knuuckled to things we should perhaps let go in favor of letting in fresh air and new opportunities. Happily, life pivots do not always summon yet more despair.
Well, dying can truly be cause for despair. Or, as is the case here, it can be the stage for an elegantly-told series of shining memories – a life, in other words, that was not a reason to despair.
You’re prepared for recollections of clock-repairing to make you cry.
What can ease absolutely devastating grief? Not money or social status; not skill or even, necessarily, continued opportunities. It stays open and throbbing; it doesn’t become hopeful or redeeming. It is.
You want to put the absolute mercilessness of life in context.
Here’s a gentle dissection of group disaster and of how tragedy ricochets through a community. Here there is beauty coated in pain, too, but it goes down hard.
You, too, may have lost ties that made you who you were.
Loss and disaster leave us marked for life – yet crisis is a crucible for hot, essential change, too. Here Cullen follows the aftermath of Columbine to trace how it drove anti-violence activism.
There’s room for in you for something to sprout among the ashes.
Ever want to peer into a therapist’s mind? I do, continually. In this book, Gottlieb develops therapy notes into fully developed treatment arcs that walk us through how therapy works and why it can be so helpful.
You feel inspired by watching others figure things out.
Throughout history people have labored in the shadows, working despite the devastations affecting them. Collectively, what this amounts to is amazing, and reading about it can also be healing.
You want to wander the centuries as generation after generation works to get things done.
An atmospheric plunge into a bizarre but historically grounded phenomenon, dread keeps building throughout this story as the Welsh girl somehow keeps abstaining from food.
Set during Ukraine’s Euromaiden protests starting in 2013, this book follows four people reaching for solace in tremendous confusion. This is a wringing book made even more wrenching by Ukraine’s current upheaval.
You need to witness connection in the midst of shattering.
You know those people who always “had a feeling” before something bad happened? This is a book about those types, and about a researcher who tried to delve more deeply into our ability to predict catastrophe.
Absorbing reads about weird real things make you happy.
We all know where this existential journey we’re on ends. Along the way, many of us will need to ease others into as peaceful a death as possible. This guidebook gives practical advice on how to do this.
You’re searching for ways to render death and its many complications a little less fearsome.
Loosely based on what occurred in the rubber plantation mindset during Belgian’s colonization of the Congo, Conrad’s classic exudes a creeping, fungal kind of dread.
You haven’t yet read this.
Eeriness: something cold is crawling through your backbone
This is a nasty book for people who find a humid pleasure in nastiness. You know going into it that so much of it is “off,” yet treading that offness transports you to some intriguing psychological vistas beset by pitfalls.
For creepiness, I enjoy how Evenson braids horror with uncertainty. As readers, we’re not always sure what’s real, or whether the horrific elements in these short stories are meant to shock, make us laugh, or get under our skin.
Imagine the distinct horrors of the pre-anesthetic world. But contemplate, too, how little we still know of anesthesia, why it works, or why some of us find it so troubling.
You’re drawn to medical unknowns and creeped out by being comotose.
Here Macfarlane plunges below the surface of the earth to explore all manner of caves, passageways, tunnels, and their associated myths and histories. It’s an absorbing trip, thought-provoking and delightful by turn.
Poetry is a kind of enchantment for sure. This collection showcases Wright’s mastery of rhythm, tone and that mystical “something else” that marks strong language.
Here’s a joyful story about wandering slanted realms where things are just a little different. Much beloved by young readers, it combines exploits, numbers, wordplay and more into a tumbling bundle of warm literary laundry to make you smile.
Strange adventures masquerading as real life while commenting on the ick-mess of Russian politics…this is not the smoothest read, but it is a rusty, clawing, amusing one that continues to enchant readers to this day.
One of the more chilling survival books, Krakauuer relates not only the events that lead to so many climbers’ deaths, but interrogates the concept of responsibility when you’re trying to survive your own adventures.
You wonder how it feels to slip so close to dying…or to causing others to die.
This book made me a manic fact-spouting machine. But. I love facts; I love finding books that tug on history’s threads to weave a compelling narrative. Here is the story of an element that remains, one we may not be able to trust ourselves to handle.
You want to follow a fearsomely persistent element around the globe.
Pynchon is very Pynchonesque here, puns and asides, tangents and heaps of fantastical narrative, all whirled up into a great, Tesla-like ball of energy fizzing and dripping like a sno-cone down your mental elbows.
You’d like to be swept up, down, sideways, and around.
If you haven’t read it, perhaps it’s time to try. Big, sprawly, and having fun with itself, this is the satire equivalent of a box of puppies. Some of them with teeth. The energy is tough to deny, particularly when it comes to indefatigable Becky Sharp.
So many pages. On oil. And yet not boring. It’s easy to fall into the beckoning worlds of novels, which are often human-scale, and tough to remember to take in the big-picture global sweep of affairs, too, including our love affair with energy.
You realize your life requires not just love, but oil, too.
It’s not natural or necessary to stop moving your body as you age. Here, Tharp testifies to the benefits of regular movement and of aging well in general.
How many of us wish to step away from all the churn of productivity and hustle culture? Mann’s protagonist gets to do just that and finds it…surprisingly invigorating.
You want a many-paged break from routine to imagine a more leisurely life.
I was struck here by the loaded atmosphere Towes constructs from spiraling dialogue and the foreboding sense that something has to happen.This is artful and uneasy at the same time.
You know decisions must be made, but not exactly how that’s going to happen.
Based on a real incident, this novel hinges on the narrator’s expectations and training. It’s also a book about the dangers of setting sinister things in motion without a thorough plan. And it’s just heartsnappingly powerful.
You’d like a fresh perspective on the same old terrible. Told from the viewpoint of a dog.
Despite being a loner, Hall’s main character is pressed into a tangle of expectations. She is pregnant, reintroducing wolves to an old habitat, and unsure in general about what might be coming next.
You’d like to witness someone stepping into a different life.
The way each of us grow up instills certain expectations we normalize, but that aren’t necessarily universal. Learn more about your silent expectations and how they might be tripping you up with this manual.
Things stubbornly refuse to go the way you expect.
To what extent does heredity determine who you are and who you become? Dive into all sorts of genetics-related questions with science writer Zimmer for an illuminating look at genetic closeness.
You wonder about the science of being (predictably) related.
Here’s an understated ode to the kind of friendships that blossom between unlikely people. Who can comprehend the alchemy of friendship? Ogawa can, and enriches the rest of us in doing so.
Keane’s novel gives us various friendships and family relationships working in tangled, touching ways across the years. There’s a complexity to friendship here and a refusal to make things easy.
Friendships matter – I believe most of us are convinced of that by now. But what kind of friendships, and why? With its stream of touching facts and anecdotes. Densworth’s study of friendship helped me make making and keeping friends more of a priority.
You’d like to peruse the science of friendship and why it matters.
As I hope we all realize by now, a friend does not always have to be a human. Here, Raven details a friendship with a fox, with nature, and with the desire to be left largely alone.
You, too, would like to read a book out loud to a fox.
What this book helped me realize about friendships that fail: it happens. Despite our best efforts and often for puzzlingly trivial-seeming reasons, ties we hold dear can still snap in hours or in months.
You don’t understand why the distance between you and someone you thought was dear keeps growing.
Focus: elusive, obsidian-sharp, an oddly fulfilling experience
Raising a child alone isn’t easy, and here Tsushima’s characters let themselves feel some of the burden – but the dappled lightness, too – of getting by, day by day, with focus and effort.
You feel wistful and somehow still responsible for things.
Who knew table forks and butter knives were so compelling? They are when Wilson is writing about them. It would be sad for you to miss this absorbing history of humble cooking implements, which puts your focus on overlooked things here made fresh.
You’re curious about the scientifically perfect cooking pan.
Deeply contemplative prose marks this effort from Fosse, who tells the tales of two painters with very similar names living in the same area while experiencing very different realities. There’s a resonant sense of focus running throughout this.
Nasar profiles mathematician John Nash along with the workings of his brilliant but baffled mind. It’s not easy reading about people “losing their place” or focus in life, and yet Nash’s story compels.
You want to wrestle with the difficulties of sustaining focus.
A counterweight to focus, play settles our mind and inspires us in its own way. Here Ackerman skips through the topic, showing us the many benefits of play along the way.
You’re feeling worn out or over-focused.
Furious: sometimes inexplicable, sometimes a conflagration
Euripedes’s play compresses fury into a seething bundle of betrayal. Unlike many characters, Medea does not accept what’s dealt her way in this dark and smoldering drama.
When the apocalypse tumbles onto your doorstep, it would be easy to despair, give up, or go along with it. Butler’s narrator picks a different path, one no less driven by fury, but more generative.
When people desperately need explanations, they can become quite strange indeed. Ronson goes gonzo here to investigate what the story is behind conspiracy theorists. It’s enough to enrage a reader, but for some, this is real.
Less rage-filled than woven through with gossip and insider details, Shonagon’s laughing-beyond-her-hand account of high court life in Japan is a balm of sorts, reminding us that everyday matters linger as well as battles.
You would like to be gently transported and amused.
Gentle: a different and no less insistent kind of strength
There’s a gentle sadness running through this collection, a kind of gleaming ache as people try to connect, yet somehow fall short. Despite her characters’ shortcomings – or perhaps because of them – you feel Lahiri’s care shining through.
Wistful stories of longing and displacement help you feel more at home.
Marooned in a hotel in Moscow, Towles’s narrator adopts a gently observational perspective rather than bitterness. As his days roll past, he witnesses how times are changing in Moscow, even in the midst of his small routines.
You’d like to be held captive to a quietly unfolding narrative.
Haslett does not hold back in this novel about a family dealing with hereditary mental illness. The setbacks, privations, unmarked sacrifices and shining moments are all on display in Haslett’s usual phosphorescent prose.
Falling apart feels like watching the moon shine through widening cracks.
A classic epic poem, the gentleness here doesn’t lie in the bloodiness of the narrative, but in the care Heaney took in its translation. Read it for its poeticism and its air of flinty resignation.
You want to see the monster narrative go beyond the killing.
Few books have followed me throughout life with as much relevance and warmth as James Herriot’s. What I admire is Herriot’s persistent optimism and graceful insistence on seeing the possibility in people and animals both.
Here’s a coming-of-age novel that’s gracefully deft with the typical themes of awkwardness, uncertainty, and, in this case grief. Brunt keeps the focus on the warmth of caring for one another, however.
This Stoppard play isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It is mine though. Please, bring on the math talk, the skating repartee, the crystalline word-choice…for me, it’s fun, graceful, full of movement and whirl.
Drawing room comedies (about physics) make you grin.
Theme upon theme pile up in this deeply thoughtful meditation by Griffith on war, gender, and how a single individual can change the lives of so many others. It’s a fragmentary but deeply satisfying read from an unusual perspective.
You admire the grace of thought in full bore flight.
For people with pronounced reluctance to be around others or who deeply feel the blows of too much stimulus, Aron offers graceful direction on how to cope and make the most of your strengths.
It’s all too loud, too fast, too…much
Grief: inevitable, often awkwardly avoided, yet necessary
Grief is resonant here, even when Barnes is speaking of balloons. The tissue of life is tenuous, one feels, as are life’s connections, though certain patterns repeat.
You fancy a melancholy meditation on profound loss.
Among life’s chaos and obfuscations, narratives die, too. Here Shibli tries to unearth details about a war crime that happened decades ago, conveying the grinding violence of occupation and the loss aggression brings.
You want to catch a glimpse of how countries and cultures grieve.
Life falls apart in some way or other for us regularly. And then we fall apart, to a greater or lesser degree. Here, Herzog’s narrator envies his previous life at length, providing a picture of the sharpness of loss and what never was.
One terribly huge grief of our lives is learning to grieve our own ends. Mannix shows us more about that process in this narrative of caring for patients in palliative care.
You keenly feel the bittersweet pinch of being human.
Here clinical psychologist Gobodo-Madikizela interviews a man who committed heinous crimes during apartheid. The subject is riveting; even more so is Gobodo-Madikizela’s willingness to listen.
You want to know how things that are beyond bad happen.
McEwan gives us a scene of teenage guilt that still rankles today, so mean-spirited is her act of betrayal, at least to me. In any case, guilt can fester, which is perhaps what McEwan showcases best here.
You’re into psychological blood on the grass books.
Conover goes undercover in this nonfiction to experience the life of a prison guard. Turns out to be a complicated and hardening life, told here with grit and self-awareness, though guilt as well.
You like insider narratives, especially of worlds most of us never get to experience.
Here we map the development of the Haber-Bosch process, which both saved millions from famine and prolonged one of our bloodiest wars immeasurably. A trove of untold information, this is a richly informative read about unanticipated consequences.
You’re curious about the people and facts behind one of the biggest, quietest revolutions of our modern lives.
Angola Prison, and murderer Rideau is trying to make it through the next 44 years – this is a difficult memoir for many reasons, but also a riveting look at how prisons operate.
You wonder if you could survive being locked up.
Happiness: that single-horned creature both here and not
Like water, happiness so often slips between our fingers. We can’t help trying for it though, just as Okparanta’s characters do in all their striving, whether to fulfill Nigerian ideals or to simply carve out a tiny sliver of home.
You feel tumbled and are wondering if flashes of happiness are all you get or if it might linger.
Rubbing right up against really rough elements of human behavior, Berlin somehow finds luminous ways to love people anyway, peccadillos, serious flaws, and all. A glowing happiness and vibrancy infuses her work, even the heartbreaking parts.
You want to witness the warmth of acceptance and of somehow creating happiness from scraps in action.
A psychology book that might make you laugh at yourself? Indeed. For we, as Gilbert addresses, do not always perceive ourselves clearly – we excel at self-deceptions that render it tricky to understand our own happinesses. Which is funny, in a way.
Chasing a particular kind of marble through bristling hillsides and following cooking methods from the 1700s does not sound happy-making. Gray will persuade you otherwise, however, in this warm song to cooking, culture, and the other things that hold us in place.
You wonder what used to make people happy and if it still does.
Happiness is not a surface matter, and though Herriott’s animal stories can appear simple, they often strike at the very heart of human needs. They’re also marvelous accounts of someone who finds immense purpose in what he does, a surefire happiness of sorts.
This guide to happiness bundles much of positive psychology and “hot” psychology studies into one place. For those seeking practical things to do, it can be a good starting-off point.
You don’t know where to begin; you only know you’d like a bit more happiness saturating your days.
Is hate inborn or cultivated? In this account of going undercover to monitor “patriots” planning dire violence on U.S. soil, Lehr tracks their unfolding plot while mapping how they whip up their own hatred. Frightening, but prescient.
You want to get an inkling of why so many hateful incidents happen.
A teacher’s whose daughter has died delivers a last lecture to her students, with sobering results. This is a thriller, one that questions hatred, revenge, and the drive to balance the score.
It’s difficult to imagine the heights of forgiveness and forbearance Abuelaish is able to attain in this searing memoir. Yet, however, he does. Somehow. To our humblement and inspiration.
You can’t bear to walk on the coals of your own hatred much longer.
In this collection of 26 essays, a spectrum of various writers reflect on what it means to be an immigrant in Britain (and elsewhere as well). Read it for the panoply of perspectives and to better understand what people go through to make it.
You’ve wondered what it entails to need to create a new home elsewhere, whether you wish to or not.
It’s so easy to overlook the thousands of details, from the very existence of a second floor down to the design of a doorknob, and yet Bryson insists on showing us our homes anew.
You’re curious about your most intimate surroundings.
Sometimes home slips right out from under your feet. That feeling is what Soileau tackles in this collection of short stories about climate anxiety, disaster, and the erosion of everything familiar in Louisiana.
You can handle a reminder that we’re not necessarily always long for this world.
Set firmly on the rocky, sea-sprayed coast of Jutland, Nors’s insistently thoughtful essays on home and place wade through questions about belonging and being ‘in’ or ‘out.’
You enjoy a strong sense of place to anchor an author’s thoughts.
Hopeful: holding a space for more than one possibility
A unique mother-daughter memoir, this book relates how Grodin finally gained a way to express herself despite the autism that had long cut her off from communicating with others.
An oddly comforting piece of science fiction, Chambers’s novel tells the story of how a monk and a robot relate, connecting over the question of what humans actually need. Do we even know?
You want a break from apocalypse negativity and want to picture a rosier way to proceed.
Follow along with Maathai’s journey to promote education, start the Green Belt movement, and shape Kenya’s ongoing development in this testament to how hope and persistence can, in fact, bring about significant change.
You are starting to believe an individual cannot make enough of a difference.
Tightrope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Yamhill, Oregon features large here, as the authors use it as a lens to examine what’s been happening in rural areas of the US, where both desperation and hope can unfold, largely, they explain, depending on one’s environment.
You’d like to consider where there is room for hope in the interstices between The System and the individual.
When the dominos fall and keep on falling, solace can be difficult to grip among all the crashing. Here Chodron offers simple-seeming but insightful advice on how to ride the waves, endure the buffeting, and find equilibrium somewhere out there.
You need a warm, callused hand to grip yours in the murk.
Another novel I return to over and over, this book gives us a doomed set of sisters surveilled from afar by the neighborhood boys in a blend of fascination and captivated horror. In the midst of the eeriness and longing, this one haunts with a rare bittersweetness.
You’re alive to every cut while still feeling headed toward a black hole.
Joukhadar offers a narrative-within-a-narrative about two girls separated by 800 years, yet traveling the same refugee route. Yes, there is some hopelessness, but also a lot of glimmer.
A touch of magical realism salting reality helps you trudge through the worst of things.
The details of the Palestinian occupation and of the difficulty of surviving in Palestine do not always make the front page. Here, Ehrenreich spends years getting to know Palestinians who speak to the realities of their lives.
You’d like to see how people live in a place often called hopeless.
Going undercover in a sense, Enrenreich tries to make it in modern blue-collar America…and finds herself failing. Imagine how much worse it is now. At least you have this detailed explanation of what’s been going so wrong for so long.
It’s time to ransack the couch cushions for runaway change again.
These short stories are like bursts from a telegraph, terse and otherworldly. The meat is cut off the bone, and you get the flayed weirdness of human interactions in all their horror.
If you fancy literary, existential weirdness with substantial lashings of body horror, Evenson’s short stories might be your darling monsters that go bump in the night. These stories cast the eerie impression that something else is just beyond the frame.
As long as we’ve gathered around campfires, I’m convinced we’ve tried to unsettle each other…and then gone too far and felt the need to cast out demons. Here is a historic account of that parade of angst.
You need to purge, or at least watch others doing so.
This is a long and detailed telling of how, exactly, Jim Jones and his congregation went wrong. The chilling part, as with many cults, is that it started with good intentions.
You want to poke at the dark lining of grace.
Hospitable: a pineapple sliced in anticipation of better times
This is a rich stew of a book, short on pages but long on musings about setting the table for others, sharing food, and generally providing a place or at least a plate in welcome.
You wonder if you could set one more seat at your table for someone you don’t yet know.
These letters crack open a window onto others’ lives, the might-have-been musings along with the quick stabs of insight that happen as we jostle past each other in our busy lives.
What’s the ultimate way to get to know the world and its people? Sit down to a meal with them. That’s what Bourdain seems to believe, and it’s clear in this opinionated, brash, touching account that food does indeed bring us so close together.
The story of the rugby team stranded in the Andes rattles around our minds mostly for the cannibalism. There is so much more to tell, however, including the teamwork and graciousness that kept the survivors alive.
You’re ready for hospitality lived on the severest edge.
Humble: more than a pie that sticks in your throat
Life is replete with “the bit players,” those who seem familiar, yet aren’t at all stars. Davies’ novel concerns one such man, an observant Canadian wondering how much he belongs on the sidelines.
You want to shine the spotlight elsewhere for just a few seconds.
Look around you and it’s plain we’re not alone on this planet. How much do animals and insects really apprehend, however? Yong is eager to enlighten you by shining light on how little we really know about senses that surpass our own.
You want to be reminded that a large brain and two thumbs isn’t the whole story.
Currently standing sentry on every table, salt was once a much more rarified and world-making commodity. Find out more about this not-so-humble condiment in Kurlansky’s compelling account.
You want to savor the wonder behind the commonplace.
Not many of us would envy the work Krasnostein portrays in this intriguing biography of a big-hearted woman who knows both how to clean up after a murder and how to treat a death site with dignity.
You’re curious about chemicals or about what it takes to do real death cleaning.
This is not a perfect primer on communication, but it does underscore the importance, whether you’re managing others or simply trying to edge closer to understanding, of true listening.
You’re willing to ask the right questions.
Hurting: both bodily and mental, the nerves quiver
Pain is a strange, slippery phenomenon that condemns so many of us to mental and physical agony. More knowledge may not help completely, but Lalkhen’s luminous cultural and scientific autopsy of pain is nonetheless richly rewarding.
You’d like to better understand why it hurts so much.
Is the world fair? No, a resounding no, and yet it gives up gleaming moments of gorgeousness among the dislocation and disconnection. These moments stud Limon’s avid poems, giving us tiny links of armor against the pain.
There’s horror and then there’s being completely appalled. By now many of us have heard of the Sacklers, from art patrons to pill pushers. Yet it takes a story this thoroughly told for the horror to fully dawn.
You can’t believe this opioid tsunami that swamps our nation.
In some cases, pain is enjoyment, a Mobius strip of pleasurably painful sensation looping the neurons around and around. In exploration of these loops, Cowart eats insanely hot peppers, undergoes erotic piercing, and much more.
You admit that deep inside certain pains hunker rare and not widely mentioned delights.
To hurt is one of the essences of being human. And when we’re hurting, it often falls to nurses to ease the discomfort. Here DiGregorio details the fascinating history of nursing and how it’s currently practiced in our flawed healthcare system.
You want to feel angry and hopeful at the same time about a profession taxed with so very much.
Talk about work. In this well-written memoir, Gill documents the life of a seasonal tree-planter in all its dirt and glory. There’s a hard-earned satisfaction here among the sheer rigor.
Work rhythms seem somewhat inevitable, yet they were not always as inflexible and demanding as they seem today. With this book, you get a walkthrough of what’s changed and why we often feel so harried at work today.
You want to heighten the grimness of today’s work expectations (but understand them, too).
It’s exciting to watch a writer spin a foreknown conclusion into absorbing prose, which Brown accomplishes deftly in this telling of how the US rowing team farmed, studied, and trained for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hard work indeed.
You need a rousing true-life, getting-it-done kind of story.
What I liked here was how Shaffer lets his main character become “strange,” inventing his own rituals to counter a claustrophobic dominant narrative. It may not work out, but it does ask where we are to get a sense of wildness and deep connection with the unknown.
You’d like to fall into a different, somewhat akimbo mind determined to be as alive as possible.
Dubris layers stories of being a NYC paramedic with poems, scraps, and more to construct a collage that contemplates unwritten rules, demanding expectations, and the odd beauties of a job spent trying to reach out.
You like hard, lyrical language about the things and people often shoved to the shadows.
Calculus intense? Intensely demanding for some, yes, and also intensely interesting in this explanation of how infinity came to be as a concept we cannot fully comprehend, yet which deeply influences our lives.
You want to waltz with the concepts numbers and formulas represent.
In these short stories, Baldwin is working out many of his trademark themes, slowly ratcheting up the intensity of his concern for ethical dilemmas, moral murk, and complicated feelings.
A walk through Seoul becomes increasingly surreal in this novel from Suah, where fact and fiction blend in an uneasy reflection of how quickly we can lose track of what’s “real” and what is merely perception.
Some accuse Percy’s main character of ennui or over-privilege. Yes, to an extent, but I’m also caught by the depiction of someone unwilling to enter a pre-planned life, who dallies, yes, but also tries to devise his own ways to experience the world.
Your apparent dreaminess hides an intense inner life.
Jones gives us a slow burn revenge story here, braided together with a little horror and shape-shifting, a little resilience, and a little insistence on how community holds the line, including on the rez. Both odd and touching, this book definitely intrigues.
You want something both different and deeply familiar.
A tale of two off-kilter individuals with interlocking ideals, this novel about trying to float a glass church up a river is a striking look at how it feels to try to accomplish something different.
If you’ve ever been curious about crimes of passion, this book may be for you. Here Hesse tracks a southern arson case to its conclusion, documenting an entire, close-knit community as well as a weirdly fascinating love story in the process.
You fall fast and hard for the stories about strange things people have actually done.
Termites, shipwreck paintings, the recurrent appearance of Noah’s ark…these short stories and musings orbit odd themes while making for a strangely compelling read that gently mocks our foibles while insisting on alternate perspectives.
Brains – will we ever understand them? Perhaps not, and that might be a good thing. Nevertheless, we keep trying, few of us as brilliantly as neurologist Santiago Ramón Y Cajal, who is profiled in these pages.
You’d like to know more about the neurons that crackle in your mind.
Few books possess the verve and poise of Orlando in full swing–but then again, it’s Woolf, so we should hardly be shocked. Rather, we should simply strap in for the marvelous flight.
You need to imagine being someone different without that setting the world on fire.
This one slaps you like a wave: pure salt and verve, all wet muscle and wind. It’s a pleasure to ride along with how much others enjoy their days, sometimes, and in this book, the days involve surfing.
Lively writing about a much-beloved sport might spirit you away.
This is a terse book of vignettes that throws itself against a wall over and over, trying for language, for understanding, for a claw-hold of joy, in other words. Its aliveness keeps it pelting along.
This is a collection I’ll recommend over and over, not least because it’s ineffable, because it’s a raw whiskey slap dropped in golden sunset champagne; it’s full of humanness and joy even as it’s also full of addiction and struggle and pulled teeth. It’s its rare self.
You want language to work you over and over and over.
Perhaps a different thing brings joy to each of us. For Failla, it’s plants of all sizes and nature in general. Her plant joy is infectious, a smiling invitation to pick out your own pot and get started on your own cultivation of happiness.
You crave a spot of green.
Kindness: hardly even in the headlines, but more vital than news
A story that focuses on the quiet kindness of an adoptive farm family. It’s a whisper of a book, one that urges us to look for ways to reach out our hands to help each other rather than push each other down.
You need a flicker of warmth in the harshness of human behavior.
Today we may feel starved for kindness. “Regular” citizens feel parched for a kind word; professionals feel tapped and unable offer yet more understanding. Zaki examines this problem and points out scientifically supported ways to build sustainable, empathic kindness.
It would be nice to catch a glimpse of how to be a kinder, more understanding society.
A single life-crumpling fall…and everything changes. This novel gives us a sobering look at being just a misstep away from misfortune, but yet only a different step away from a kind gesture that can also change a life.
A doctor may flit in and out of a patient’s life, but a nurse lingers. This thoughtfully devastating account of British nursing details both the wonders and many costs of caring without ever undermining the impact of “common” kindness.
You want to cry at how much pressure the healthcare system places on nurses and patients both, leaving so little capacity for the kindness that nonetheless manages to grow there.
Here’s a short, brutal depiction of a world without kindness, where no one can bear to be gracious and everyone ends up paying with what’s dearest to them.
It would be helpful to remember that harshness and big power moves can exact more than they give, and that true kindness can also be a true and incredible strength.
Longing: strong, sometimes strange desires that twist us in all life’s many winds
Long Soldier’s words deal heavily with longing: yearning for things to have been different, for less trauma, for more Lakota language – for more and better life, in other and cuttingly memorable prose.
You want to see how a nation and an individual can long alike.
A corner of my heart always keeps a mug of hot coffee out for Williams and her wry, off-the-wall and yet deadly serious writing in which anything can happen, but whatever it is, you’ll feel it in all its longing and life.
You could use a weird chocolate box of stories about desire.
Part art criticism, part history of minimalism, Chayka’s book walks us through minimalism and the movement to own less and consequently, perhaps, feel less owned.
Here an American teacher in Bulgaria reflects on encounters he’s had. What do they mean? What did he permit himself and what did he learn? Both fervent and vulnerable, the narrator’s voice reaches straight for the reader.
You want to be deeply touched by reflective, animated prose.
What if you don’t want much at all but people won’t stop telling you that you should want more and should do something about it already? Murata’s novel tells of wanting to be left alone to a quiet-paced life outside the melee.
You like to peruse shelves without worry about making dinner.
Loving: a physics problem that never seems to work out. Yet.
A book I’ve long held close for its wistfulness and crystalline prose, Robinson’s novel suspends its characters in a sort of watery snowglobe where some feel isolated and others uniquely loved and invited to love nature in turn.
You want your mood to get foggier and more lovelorn, in the best way.
No shortage of lusting-after-ladies tales in the canon, and Durrell is not a clear exception. However, read his Quartet and it becomes clearer that his love is actually for the incomparable Alexandria, Egypt and its people as well as for shining words.
You like to punt your heart into dusty souks and down jasmine alleyways.
Unconventional relationships, triangles of attraction or repulsion, and other non-square relational geometries characterize this collection of sparkling, sometimes cutting short stories.
The falling in love part? Wonderful. The falling out part often happens stealthily, subversively, tragically…help prevent that fall-out by following counsel from the Gottmans, renowned relationship researchers.
Hatred can have just as powerful a charge as love. We see that in action here as Priests’ dueling magicians are bonded through mutual competition and frustration. There’s a heat radiating through this book’s twists like the inverse of love.
Turning to a hawk for solace after your father’s death is not a conventional choice, but falconry as Macdonald tells it is immensely absorbing, giving her multiple ways to find meaning during a painful transition period.
You want to draw slightly deeper breaths and feel a little lighter, a little more fiercely wild.
This memoir about a doctor’s mortal illness has a delicate but bruising impact you feel to the depths of your gut. It’s Kalanithi’s rich introspection that helps him locate meaning as he leaves his life early.
You want to feel gutted and hugged at the same time.
For a narrative that exemplifies radiant, lived meaningfulness, turn to Blanche’s account of spending summers with her children on a 25-foot sailboat in British Columbia. Her account eschews philosophizing in favor of showing the satisfaction of living deliberately.
When you need to be reminded that the answer to anger might be just outside your front door.
Here the main character is deeply invested in devoting his life to a meaningful purpose. Yet it proves much more difficult than he believed, asking us in the process to evaluate our own choices around meaningfulness.
You feel scraped, somber, or reflective, contemplating a value you’re not sure will pan out.
What does it mean to ask what things mean? Not sure, and I’m not sure Vonnegut is, either, but he is interested in parsing decisions for their absurdity, satirical import, or subtlety.
It would feel meaningful to giggle.
Monstrous: a magnetic pull in the core even as it frightens us
We are still in community after we do terrible things, though we may gloss over that. How to relate to a horrible act is the heart of this epistolary novel from Shriver, whose main character walks a fine line between dedication and absolute revulsion
You want to swallow something a bit nasty that poses hard questions about how to love other horrible humans.
Here’s a retelling of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, made wonderfully weird and creepingly icky with its infectiously Gothic tone and striking visuals.
You wonder if the undead must always be monstrous.
Oh, Grendel. A monster, and also a character, as Gardner tells it, who struggles to escape monstrousness. Does he just need to “be himself”? Does he actually crave hope? This brief book proves an existential romp, but with plenty of pathos, too.
You fancy somewhat tortured but soulful coming-of-age stories told a bit differently.
We, of course, are often monsters of our own making But nature can take its turn as well (or at least it seems to, from our viewpoint). Here Junger rides into the teeth of the storm and meets an uncontrollable force.
It’s time for a crashing narrative about struggle and doom.
If you could step into the psychology of “evildoers” to better understand their mindsets, would you? Baumeister takes a stab at it in hopes of helping untangle the troublesome questions of why we hurt each other so much.
You’re always wanting to understand more and are willing to stretch a bit.
Now idolized, Lincoln was a complicated man capable of doing immensely complicated things. Here Goodwin delves into how he developed his political acumen and practiced a tricky kind of teamwork to get things done.
You want to watch how monstrous things are overthrown by steady, unglamorous effort.
Need for Narrative: the need for plot can overwhelm so much else
Here is an exceptional memoir I’ve given my heart to: Martin’s account of having her skull partially crushed by a bear, followed by a deep inquiry of what it means to “heal,” to not feel “yourself,” to change and to shift into an alternate comprehension of community.
You’re not sure where you stop and the wilder world starts.
Much like John Gardner with Grendel, Carson essays an interpretation of a monster. A dreadfully, touchingly humanized monster in this case, red and winged and gay, who wishes to find the central thread of his convoluted and lovely life.
You like prose strong and delicate as a frozen waterfall.
I admire this book for chopping a story up and handing it around to different narrators’ singular interpretations. This is a brief but striking illustration of how we all possess limited knowledge and unknown depths. And oh, the language.
In this memoir of thumbnail sketches, Machado struggles to leave an abusive relationship in her rearview mirror. Part of the problem is that of narrative, of trying to understand what happened in the first place and what it all means.
Elliptical recollection and fragmentary thinking feels like home for you, albeit a a haunted one.
This Taoist classic lays out a series of philosophical aphorisms for perusal and consideration. Sometimes simple, sometimes layered, Tzu offers multiple ways to simultaneously detach and care.
The non-spaces are forming part of the narrative, too.
Obsessive: maligned, yet sometimes surprisingly productive
This biography features the stunning story of Elizabeth Friedman, codebreaker extraordinaire, who led one of the most captivating lives I’ve had the privilege of reading about.
You obsess over the tiny-seeming details on which the world turns.
It’s difficult to become more obsessive than Suskind’s protagonist; it’s also difficult to read more sensorily dense and dedicated prose. This is heady and down-dragging, lemon mixed uneasily with birch tar, that permeates your sinuses and your mind.
The erotics of the other is the focus here in Ernaux’s precisely controlled prose whose coolness frictionates against her subjects to create a heightened effect.
Here Nelson flings herself at the color blue as a way to gather the convoluted thoughts that grow in the spaces between loving and losing. These mini-meditations feel hand-plucked and arranged in little clay vases for lingering perusal.
I wish for more of these kinds of books, interpretations of past incidents but so compressed, so lyrical, they vault from the ordinary and spring for the horizon. This one corners Billy Bolden and his hard-won, heart-felt music.
You wonder if you could ever care enough about something to let it unravel you.
Here is a novel to remind you that even in war, even in duress, and possibly even more so than usual, luminous moments you can practically hold in your palm matter immeasurably.
You need to fall back in love with art, color, and beautiful, unironic things.
Here is the pleasure of seeing a Roman emperor in his full, flawed humanity as he talks himself through his days, trying to improve, trying to maintain equanimity, just…trying. It’s a relatable read often riddled with wisdom.
Feel the mud, the grit, the glum desperation ooze slowly under your skin, leaking from the pages of this WWI novel bashing the “necessity” of war. Where Remarque excels is in illuminating the death of passion on multiple levels – what is suffering worth, this novel asks, if it accomplishes nothing?
You want to marinate in the futility of mechanized conflict.
Patient: not always praised, yet a durable way to treat the days
As Noesner points out in this memoir, simply feeling a sense of urgency does not always mean you must act. Waiting and striving to understand often prove a more sustainable, stable course of action in the conflagration of life’s hot moments.
You’re willing to benefit from someone else’s deeply-lived knowledge.
As a game, chess demands a great deal of patience and strategy. For the orphaned protagonist, the game is an escape, for those of us reading along, it’s a unique pleasure.
You’d like a straightforward story about a unique character.
Most of us start longing for approval and love in childhood and never really stop. It’s a natural urge, but one that has also undergirded entire movements and social shifts. Here, Steinbeck tracks the violence and passion this longing can entail across acres and generations.
There’s human history and then there is geological history, a time scale that can be exceedingly difficult to comprehend. With patience, Raffles tours us through several geological strata, mixing in memoir and essays along the way.
You’d like to know more about the patience of rock.
In this reimagining of Joan of Arc’s life, Chen shows us an adamantine tomboy forging her own path forward, for better or worse. It’s an intriguing portrait of an immensely purposeful warrior woman.
The first elected female chief of the Cherokee Nation, Mankiller’s memoir brims with purpose as she details influential legislation, personal moments, and native stories to show us what’s happened and what should change.
Yes, it’s the book you see recommended everywhere, surfacing here yet once again. Because. It’s subversively funny; it’s passionate; it’s not afraid to muck about with whale details for page after salty page. Because Melville is having so much fun here, and because Ahab is nothing if not maniacal.
You run up your sails for big stories crammed with tangents and delightful asides.
Through fortitude and a drive to experience nature, Tabei has seen places few of us will ever set foot in. We can be grateful, then, for her memoir on mountaineering and encouraging others to seek out nature as well.
You feel moved by people who dare to do unusual things.
Do we always know why we do what we do? Not so much. So it’s welcome to encounter a book that carefully dissects some of the science behind our actions.
You’re ready to look under the hood of being human.
This novel gives us the story of a woman struggling to care for a newborn in unsupportive circumstances in a Japanese setting stripped of romance or artifice. She’s a flawed and believable character doing her best to carve out her own space in her own way.
You’re tired of reading books about people with money and problems that are easily overcome.
In this memoir, Hodges struggles with not making it as a professional violinist. You can feel the anguish of a snuffed-out dream just as much as the joy Hodges continues to locate in seminal compositions and in life itself as she ponders and pivots.
You’d like to witness a remarkably graceful telling of how it feels to change.
It’s a small but constant background worry, right – the fear that everyday life could be punctured by a cataclysmic accident. Look again though, Mariani urges in these explanations of how people do, in fact, recover and renew.
You need to remember exactly how malleable and adaptable we truly are.
Life is a stubborn thing and often takes us to strange, unforeseen places. That’s the case for Mintry’s characters, who must decide if and how they can move onward after Partition.
Being vulnerable and willing to befriend one another during massive changes speaks to you.
These letters glow with a refined, graceful wisdom it’s worth returning to over and over. Chang doesn’t shy away from either the pangs or the joys of memory.
Your own memories feel worn or stripped of meaning by too much handling.
Move past the memories of living people, and there are bones that testify. Koff doesn’t shield us from the rigor of working day after day with the bones of those killed in wars and genocides, but neither does she spare us from the hard wonders of building a truer account of history.
You want to consider memory from a new angle: that of people now unable to tell their stories directly who depend on careful professionals to testify for them.
This is a book for those worried about memory slippages and slidings. For reassurance, follow the guidance here to prevent memory issues as much as possible while promoting sharp recall.
You’d like to peer into the neuroscience of how memories are made and preserved.
Douthat opens up about the trials of battling Lyme disease along with the rest of life in this soulful story of being sick without knowing if recovery is possible.
Made even more relevant by COVID-19, Biss’s book asks poignant and powerful questions about vaccination, our ability to shield each other, and the tricky autonomy and powerlessness involved in trying to stay well.
You’re ready to see wellness as a network rather than a node.
Physical and mental illness threads these short stories of desperate or overlooked people making strained decisions in unsavory places. That thread glints every once in a while as Johnson lights his writing with jabs of hope and insight.
Is it normal to feel stressed, pushed beyond capacity, off our rhythm, “behind,” and prey to multiple chronic illnesses? No. But we’ve learned to act as though it is, to our profound detriment, according to Maté, who points to how it could be different.
We can learn a lot about the opposite of being sick from those who live the longest, as Buettner demonstrates in this book about the areas of the world that best support longevity and happiness.
You would say both quality and quantity matter.
Stressed: the inescapability of the world buzzing in your flesh
Stress happens not only on an individual level, but to entire swaths of society, and it doesn’t always happen fairly or for “good” reasons. The explanations behind that may infuriate, but will, it’s to be hoped, also drive us to create more just societies.
A journalist working the Mexico-U.S. border, Bowden had a hot, often unhappy mind seething with border awareness and anxiety. The stress of the entire area comes off pungently in this collection of raw essays.
Sometimes when stressed (though not always in the moment), it can help to comprehend more about why and how the stress is happening. Greenberg steps in to offer those explanations along with suggestions on how to handle stress.
You like to understand the science behind the advice.
It’s not always drugs we need, or spas, or expensive vacations to Bali. Most of us need close, regular encounters with nature, and there are good reasons for that. Whether in brief moments or in week-long retreats, nature can truly heal.
Listening to trees rustle sounds like a perfect way to lift stress.
In this satire, Voltaire’s main character goes traipsing around, thinking things just might be alright with the world. Ha. As if. Voltaire sets out to puncture his bubble, though with a certain amount of humor and charm.
It’s stressful to keep thinking things will work themselves out.
Surviving: sometimes just making it through a day is a trophy
Indigenous Canadians try to weather an apocalypse in this spare survival novel that puts its emphasis on resilience over revolt. In some ways, Rice reminds us, answers have long roots.
Not an easy read, this novel juxtaposes love affairs and happier times with the experience of being a POW forced to work on the Burma railway while trying to keep fellow prisoners alive. It’s jarring, brutal, unsparing and shockingly lovely.
You’re ready to board a soul-rattling narrative set deeply in a psychological jungle.
A fairy tale featuring the Mayan god of death? Yes, please. Now already. Moreno-Garcia gives us a fast-faced quest in the underworld. I suppose if you can survive that, you can survive anything?
Brief but mighty, Solzhenitsyn’s classic conveys the sapping nature of the gulag along with the uncertainty of knowing how to survive when the length and rules of your sentence keep twisting and expanding.
You feel like a camel slowly bending under a weight of straws.
McAnulty chronicles a slightly different sort of survival: social survival, specifically as he grew into being 15 as an autistic young man enlivened and invigorated not necessarily by people, but by the natural world he thrills to explore and record.
A leaf pile of thoughts on travel, Tokarczuk’s book is itself like a long road trip: wandering, pensive, fulfilling, and full of glimpses of intriguing vistas. Read this to survey a mind in full flight.
There’s no plane or train ticket in your pocket at the moment.
Kapuściński goes on a long journalistic jaunt with a copy of Herodotus for company. Interlying ancient insights over modern ones, it’s a kind of two-for-one travel book, one loaded with interesting observational nuggets.
You’d like to savor a rich armchair read that will put vivid images in your mind.
This is nearly a work of sociophilosophical commentary stitched into a travel journal. In it, Kassebova crosses and recrosses the fraught Turkey-Bulgarian border, having deep discussions about what’s happened there as she goes.
You enjoy deeply questioning and deeply felt journeying, the kind that isn’t always comfortable.
Not all travel is done for enjoyment or leisure, as Sirisena elegantly illustrations in this collection of essays on disability, queerness, family roots, and the practice of visiting painful places around the world.
You like thoughtful, provocative meditations on disturbing places.
Sebald tramps morosely around East Anglia, thinking of fish and skulls and worms. His is not the most uplifting of road trips, but neither is it a slog.
A wander might cure a lot of things.
Traumatized: no way to avoid being marked by it. Then what?
No matter how many times I read this, it remains devastating, both for the events it portrays and for the anguished lushness of Morrison’s writing. Yes, it’s a literary ghost story; it’s also an insightful and shaking portrait of life-eroding trauma.
It’s time to reflect on how systematic and singular events ripple throughout lifetimes and generations.
Like termites in the soul, complex PTSD can turn one’s identity into psychological sawdust, to devastating and long-lasting effect. In this memoir, Foo sets out to understand the racial and generational influences that fed into her trauma.
Multi-layered considerations of traumatic events might admit some light to a murky subject.
Ung witnessed the Cambodian genocide sweep her country when she was quite young, making this account of it both absorbing and heart-crushing. It’s difficult to comprehend historic tragedy on this scale, much less what they do to the individual.
You want to consider how trauma can affect people of all ages and places.
Here Turkel turns a receptive ear towards a wide range of Americans living through the Great Depression of the 1930s. He frontloads the resilience required during that time without soft-pedaling the difficulties of being that resilient.
You’d like a sweeping account of a coping country.
A striking and emotionally driven account, former Marine Morris digs fervently at the roots of trauma, both for affected soldiers and for civilians. As he tries to locate healing for himself he recounts the latest scientific advances on PTSD.
A tight and compelling narrative that weaves literature, lived experience and science sounds like it’s for you.
Uncanniness: something peering three-eyed from the underbrush
Onda’s creepy, dreamy story about an unsolved murder haunts in a deliciously dark way. Her unique descriptions alone distinguish it, while the book’s composed tone heightens the prickling horror.
You understand, to a tiny extent at least, why people feel tempted to murder those closest to them.
I don’t know how Oyeyemi does it in this collection: deftly and delicately welding fairy tale conventions with modern sensibilities to create short story settings and scenarios that have simply never crossed most people’s minds.
Beautiful phrases, striking one-liners, and truly unique situations appeal.
A bygone Chinese Malaysia springs to life in this folktale telling of how a bride marries a deceased groom and unintentionally wanders the night underworld afterwards.
This nonfiction telling of how a group of young women working in the war effort details the lingering, deadly effects of enchantingly luminous radium. Read it for the unnerving details about dark energy and dangers of not knowing.
What you don’t know you don’t know keeps you up at night.
At one time or another, many of us have felt the presence of some sort of “other,” some sense of a being where nothing is tangibly detectable. Alderson-Day tells us why that is and introduces us to people who deal intimately with a sense of presence.
You’ve ever felt that you’ve shared a space with someone invisible.
Wandering: so many ways to feel wonderfully lost in the plot
Something is delightful about the idea of Old World gods becoming aware they are losing their followers, and along with it their powers. To remedy this, some of them go on a rambling road trip full of allusions and twisting myths.
A road trip where you might bump into Odin in a diner is a trip you would take.
Here Aikins embeds with Afghans refugees attempting to escape Kabul on foot through perilous border crossings and stretches of profound uncertainty. Although he himself is not Afghan, this is a carefully observed story that reveals experiences many of us remain ignorant of.
You want to know, blow by blow, what it means to leave your home and try to find another as a legal “non person.”
Cultures grounded in ancient and indigenous awareness and knowledge often “fly under the radar” in contemporary times, yet practice ways of knowing and being more technologically dependent cultures cannot even dream of. Read more about them here.
You wonder who you might be without your cell phone.
Even a single day or a brief wander can buzz with a feeling of distance and disconnection. Such is the case for Lahiri’s protagonist in this brief and eloquent book.
The opposite of wandering, Mantel gives us a fictional account of Cromwell’s laser-focused quest to keep the “right” royalty enthroned. Mantel’s narrative questions how far to go to keep a sense of “home” in times of change.
You wonder how long things can stay the same and what role force of personality might play in the change and stasis.
Let me know about any books that would be perfect for this project; I’ll be sure to credit you if I write about them. Or tell me if any of these proved helpful to you. Happy reading!
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