He aims a spear of simple logic to the irrational and rather hubristic disdain for self-help: To dismiss the idea that underpins self-help — that one might at points stand in urgent need of solace and emotional education — seems an austerely perverse prejudice. How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? A trailer park’s worth of white supremacists is squatting on land owned by residents of Hopeton, and it’s up to Darren to protect the community from further encroachment as he searches for the child. This book motivated me to get back to work on the book I’m writing now, and I’ll bet it will spark in you the same sort of motivation to plunge into whatever God has called you to create. Throughout the history of humankind, Robert Macfarlane writes, people have buried “that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” Underland is a stunning exploration of what lies beneath the surface of the earth—from the catacombs of Paris to an underground river, nuclear waste, and elements long encased in ice—and the often-volatile human relationship to the subterranean world. Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. But she refers to it in her characteristic good-natured humor as a disease of having loved so hard as to have strained her heart. I am done waiting. A quarter century later, in an award acceptance speech delivered at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 2013, also included in the book, Morrison considers her core credo as a writer and the central function of art in human life: I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. All rights reserved. This is what Houston (and America) look like, and writing characters that reflect the country should be so common as to be unremarkable. ‘Tis waking that kills us,” Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando — her groundbreaking novel that gallops across centuries of history, across lines of logic and convention, to telescope a vision for a different future of the human heart. We were not able to add you. Here's an example. Rilke considered winter the season for tending to one’s inner garden. A war photographer is waiting for me there, and we’re going to talk to some of the workers who are risking their lives to go into the poisoned area to try to repair the plant, and ask them why they’re doing it. She moves through this world as a time-traveler, an eavesdropper, a vagrant, a vagabond in the land of literature and life, where people, always seemingly unwitting of her identity, engage her in diners to talk about Roberto Bolaño novels, take her on as a hitchhiker so long as she pays for the gas and vows to keep perfectly silent, ditch her at a gas station when she breaks the vow to compliment a playlist of songs from her youth. I can love that power for the beauty it has brought into the world, and admire it for the strength that makes us understand how futile and useless it would be to appeal to it in prayer. It is one of the most honest things I have ever read. Drawing on the family dynamics unfolding in the letters and poring over the British census, he eventually uncovered Jacoby’s identity, tracked down her descendants, and teamed up with her great-granddaughter, Jocelyn Catty, to publish these forgotten treasures of thought and feeling as Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death (public library). A few years ago, I was preaching in north Mississippi, and someone there asked what part of Mississippi I’m from. Space is behaving strangely — and so too is time. Public space.
Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider — and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it. Gingerbread, however, the author says, departs from her previous work: “This one’s about gingerbread.” Regardless, any Oyeyemi story will be made of intricate plot-webbing, history, and cultural heritage; it will be brimming with prose that is as thoughtful as it is amusing. And love.
Likewise, he expertly analyzes the theology behind both, and how it contrasts with an age of malaise. Bardugo’s first foray into adult fantasy is a meaty, satisfying novel that reimagines (I hope) Yale’s secret societies as houses of magic—Skull and Bones holds prognostications where they sift through the guts of unwitting “volunteers,” Manuscript (real life alumni: Jodie Foster, Zoe Kazan, Anderson Cooper) specializes in glamours and mirror magic—and sets a girl who can see the ghosts who may disrupt their rituals down in their rarefied midst.
It’s also the attribute that makes him so imminently relatable. Only things—the societies, the girl, New Haven itself—are not as they seem, and when a local girl is murdered, it all begins to unravel. Specifically, Bundy—son of Nevada rancher Cliven, infamous for his 2014 grazing rights standoff with federal authorities—was calling for an occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Read this book and then, immediately, go read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Knopf). This letter is my attempt to endow my father with the will and the words to cross the border, and speak the language, of apology so that I can finally be free. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. You can find last year’s books of the year here.
By Maria Popova. I felt needed and talented at something. Her name is Libby. That humans love their dogs is a fundamental fact of our animal heart, as indisputable and irrepealable as gravity — just look at Lord Byron’s leaden eulogy for his beloved dog.
They were my family, too, and had been all along. This is a book about more than shock, grief and mourning, though. “Oh, the fun part,” he said. Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold. The series was also a bleak picture of the superhero genre, with the has-been heroes consumed with lust, envy, self-exaltation, and violence in a world in which Richard Nixon is always president and nuclear annihilation is just around the corner. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle. Lara Prior-Palmer, Rough Magic (Catapult). This book gives advice on how to structure a day, a week, and a year, such that certain habits (of prayer, quiet, Scripture reading, and so on) get built into the rhythm of a life. “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,” Hermann Hesse wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century in trying to course-correct the budding consumerist conscience toward the small triumphs of attentive presence that make life worth living, adding: “My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.” Delights, we may call them. Watchmen was, almost no one disputes, one of the greatest graphic novels ever written, and can stand on its own as a piece of fiction, regardless of the medium. Solving is an illusion. There’s a blatant truth to the way characters discuss race, the way Carole had a hard time dating black men at university because they tended to go for light-skinned women “not that she’s blaming them, it’s what they have to do to get on, to reduce the threat they’re supposed to be in society.” In the mouths of these characters, Bernardine Evaristo is able to talk about the push-and-pull of alliance that comes with growing up in an immigrant family, the way a daughter might fault her father “when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him.” Girl, Woman, Other is a powerful story of intersecting identities, the things that are taken from us and the things we willingly sacrifice for those we love. “I’d be humiliated,” another says.