Local book experts share recommendations for books to read or give for the holidays
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Asia Tabb
Aired; November 29th, 2024.
The Spark is hosting its annual book-as-gifts- guide. We spoke with Catherine Lawrence, co-owner of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Travis Kurowski, (Ph.D) an assistance professor of creative writing at York College of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Blatchley MLIS, Executive Director of Cumberland County Library System.
The Midtown Schloar Bookstore recommendation can be found here.
The Cumberland County Library Systems recommendations can be found here.
Travis Kurowski Recommendations list below:
NONFICTION
Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music
By Rob Sheffield
I just ordered this book because I am in love with a woman who is the biggest Taylor Swift fan I have ever met. As it happens, I have only recently realized the most obvious thing about Swift’s music: It’s mostly about heartbreak. Our American Shakespeare of longing and distance, of regret and revenge, Swift’s oeuvre is analyzed from first album to last by best-selling Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield in this new book.
From the publisher: “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is the first book that goes deep on the musical and cultural impact of Taylor Swift. Nobody can tell the story like Rob Sheffield, the bestselling and award-winning author of Dreaming the Beatles, On Bowie, and Love Is a Mix Tape. The legendary Rolling Stone journalist is the writer who has chronicled Taylor for every step of her long career, from her early days to the Eras Tour. Sheffield gets right to the heart of Swift and her music, her lyrics, her fan connection, her raw power.”
The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book of nonfiction takes a risk in being human. I’ve been following Coates since his days reporting for The Atlantic where he made national attention making a persuasive case for reparation. Since then, he’s published a best-selling works of fiction and nonfiction, even written for Marvel Comics. This latest book from Coates is an analysis of how myths and stories shape cultures and nations, from Senegal to the ongoing war on Gaza.
From the publisher: “In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.”
Lovely One: A Memoir
By Ketanji Brown Jackson
The election was hard for everyone—every national election has been in recent memory. Memoirs from people behind the scenes in spaces shaped by such elections have always been popular, more recently they seem to be a source of sustenance. I cannot see the new memoir by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first black woman and first public defender to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court—as anything else.
From the publisher: “With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.”
FICTION
The Vegetarian
By Han Kang
2024 Nobel winner for Literature, Han Kang also won the 2016 Booker Prize for her most widely read novel, The Vegetarian, a short novel I read in a gulp years ago when it was first translated from the Korean into English by Deborah Smith. The power of The Vegetarian is ineffable, which is an odd thing to say for a book—that it is beyond words—but that is the power and experience of great art. A perfect introduction to Kang’s work.
From the publisher: “Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.”
All Fours
By Miranda July
There has been no other book I’ve heard about as much this year as filmmaker and fiction writer Miranda July’s latest novel All Fours, about what happens when we ignore our desires—by which I mean, ignore our very selves—and the confusing struggle it might be to ever find ourselves again. The conversations I’ve had about this book have been as rich and meaningful as the book itself, conversations I hold dear and have changed me forever.
From the publisher: “A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.”
Playground
By Richard Powers
Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his previous novel The Overstory, arguably the single most important American novel ever published about our relationship to the environment, all told through the lens of our human relationship to trees. Powers’s latest novel, Playground, is about artificial intelligence and the ocean. And I expect nothing less.
From the publisher: “Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
COMICS
Future
By Tommi Musturi
I saw this book while browsing with my daughters and close friends at Lost City Books in Washington, DC—a bookstore I cannot recommend enough for its curation, display, and overall artistry in the selling of books—and it actually took my breath away. I saw it from across the room, huge and bold in color and design. Almost the shape and size of a small board game, this absolutely thrilling collection of Mutsuri’s is so stunning it feels unbelievable it exists and, more than that, was somehow published. It’s an atomic explosion of creativity fracturing the very medium of comics. Few art experiences in the world give such a rush.
From the publisher: “A graphic, genre-mashing magnum opus from one of the most restlessly creative voices in comics. Tommi Musturi’s Future traps the reader into a web of stories happening in different timespaces, providing perspectives on the possible futures of mankind through imaginary future worlds, current events, historical references, utopias, and ideals. Future is a mash-up of the familiar and the terribly alien: quotidian existence, sci-fi spectacle, utopian fantasy, AI dystopia, and other worst-case scenarios. Richly philosophical and allegorical, Musturi gives us alcoholic magicians, guerrilla art squads, mutant reality television hosts, and incel archaeologist-astronauts, among many others. Weaving between a variety of styles in illustration and narration that transform and reflect our constantly changing reality, Future is an impassioned graphic novel for our times that renews the medium of comics—a vital and multifaceted work of art.”
Here
By Richard McGuire
Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Robin Writing, Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here is almost made small by calling it a graphic novel. It is, certainly, a work of fiction, and so technically then a graphic (comic) novel (fiction), but it’s also one of the strangest and most beautiful works in the comics medium ever made. Every page of the book is a drawing of the same corner of the same room across 300 million years of history. Yes, the same space, variously drawn, across 300 million years. And seeing that space across time, stories do emerge, but only in the same way they do in the reality within which we all exist—because we construct them. Since the first pages of the book concept were published in 1989, its impact has rippled throughout the comics world, and continues to.
From the publisher: “From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision: the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.”
POETRY
By Fady Joudah
There are few contemporary issues as important as the well-being and fate of the Palestinian people, and few voices in American literature as important and prominent in this area as Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. The book’s strange title, […], is a pictogram, a symbol evoking meaning: silence, perhaps, or erasure. The brackets for what has been omitted, the internal ellipsis for all that remains unsaid. Joudah wrote the poems in […] between October and December 2023, a time of much suffering, ceaseless since.
From the publisher: “Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, ‘I am unfinished business,’ articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But ‘Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,’ Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language ‘before [our] wisdom is an echo.’ These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us ‘Wonder belongs to all.’”
Wrong Norma
By Anne Carson
I’ve been following Canadian poet Anne Carson’s career since I picked up a copy of her wildly experimental and stunning 1998 book, Autobiography of Red—” richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is”—while living for a summer at the home of potter Jim Romberg in southern Oregon, details that may seem insignificant, but that’s not how art works on us. Carson is one of the world’s—the world’s—most experimentally stunning poets who somehow still reaches the depth of human emotion. A classicist who has translated the Greek Tragedies for the stage, along with the most stunning book of Sappho’s poetry I’ve ever read, Wrong Norma is a sampling of the same erudition and emotion we have for decades expected from the poet. Oh, and she’s incredibly funny. I haven’t read this book yet, but I will, because I agree wholeheartedly with the late Susan Sontag about Carson: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.”
From the publisher: “Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: ‘Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”
