Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton

4/5 stars

What's it about? Danielle Dutton writes to the four title subjects, forging a collection of plain good storytelling. A book that takes risks, and they work.

How’d I find it? The person who recommended Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves suggested this one, so I had an inkling I’d like it.

Who will enjoy this book? Readers of Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets will love this book.

What stood out? I was particularly smitten with the collage pieces of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other: “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read,” a quilt of writing about dresses that builds into a larger narrative, and “A Picture Held Us Captive,” a smart essay on how artworks converse with each other. The eclectic mix of work featured here includes flash fiction, essay, memoir, and even a one-act play.

Which line made me feel something? From the short story “Installation:” “The ‘hillside’ evoked hillsides, she realized, but other things as well. It felt like a performance. It felt like an obsession in space.”

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

4/5 stars

What's it about? This vivid and human account of the Nazi occupation of France is made all the more potent by the fact of the novel’s publication long after the author’s death at Auschwitz.

How’d I find it? Suite Française appears on “best of” lists, and I had to check it out.

Who will enjoy this book? Fans of Kristin Hannah’s work and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See should like this one.

What stood out? Suite Française collects two of a planned five-part series unfinished by Némirovsky; the work she was able to complete captures war in the intimate details of individuals trying to survive. The edition I read concludes with Némirovsy’s notes on the project, as well as heartbreaking correspondence that describes her deportation and disappearance.

Which line made me feel something? “Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this.”

Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves

4/5 stars

What's it about? In his second collection, Roger Reeves interrogates the grief and suffering wrought by humanity. Best Barbarian lays out our ugly, violent, and racist wrongs and marvels at how we continue to reach for each other to survive.

How’d I find it? This was recommended by someone who knows poetry and my taste in poetry. A home run.

Who will enjoy this book? These poems should be appreciated by any poetry reader. Try Kyle Dargan’s work once you finish Best Barbarian.

What stood out? Like Anne Carson, Roger Reeves is a poet-scholar whose work mines history, literature, myth, and memoir as source material. Every poem contains a treasure trove of references deserving of multiple reads. Take “Domestic Violence,” a nod to Dante, Chaucer, and Virgil in which Louis Till is guided in the afterlife by Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. Yeah, it’s heady.

Which line made me feel something? Almost every line caused a twinge, but I was of course drawn to “The Broken Fields Mended,” which riffs on Whitman: “It is like the future and past of us meeting above and below us, our something in the way / Of disappearing, our something in the snow; though the deer past, though the angel burned, stay with me”

Every Deep-Drawn Breath by Wes Ely

4/5 stars

What's it about? Physician Dr. Wes Ely discovers that the ICU practice of sedating and immobilizing critically ill patients leaves many with chronic illness and disability if they survive their hospitalization. Through research, determination, and collaboration, Dr. Ely vows to cultivate a practice of beneficence (doing good) instead of benevolence (wishing good). An impassioned plea for compassion in critical care.

How’d I find it? A colleague recommended this title for our book club, and oh, how it fired up us nurses. I borrowed my copy from Multnomah County Library.

Who will enjoy this book? Every Deep-Drawn Breath pairs well with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which Dr. Ely lists as an inspiration for his book.

What stood out? Dr. Ely’s belief in his mission comes through the page, and it’s hard to resist his conviction. For healthcare workers, this book will read as a call to action; my fellow nurses and I spent much of our book club meeting discussing ways to introduce long-term quality-of-life activities into our daily practice. Every Deep-Drawn Breath’s most valuable content is perhaps the resource section at the end of the book with practical information for patients, families, and the medical community.

Which line made me feel something? I need to know more about this Halpern: “Compassion can be understood as empathy in action. I had long been a believer in researcher and bioethicist Dr. Jodi Halpern’s work on clinical empathy, especially her teaching that compassion should never be an extra step in our care, but an adverb to describe how we care.”

Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls

4/5 stars

What's it about? The narrator lives in her childhood home alone and can’t quite rouse herself to leave the small town where she grew up. She becomes fascinated by a visitor and invites him to stay, and before long the visitor consumes her whole existence. Funny, trippy, and endlessly strange.

How’d I find it? I love this influencer for translated book recs. She knows what’s up.

Who will enjoy this book? Overstaying embraces absurdity and tension in the manner of Samanta Schweblin. In fact, the fluidity of interiors reminds me of Seven Empty Houses.

What stood out? The narrator’s sense of humor makes this bizarre tale more fun than creepy, quite a feat when the visitor with his furry “brushfingers” mutates and evolves the longer he lingers. Overstaying fills inertia with small horrors (how I loved the sentient vacuum cleaners) and completes its sense of claustrophobia with short, choppy chapters. Koch pulls off an immersive mirage of a book.

Which line made me feel something? This tidbit had me laughing out loud: “It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.”

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland

4/5 stars

What's it about? Tara Selter wakes up every morning to November 18th, and nothing she tries ever seems to propel her out of the time trap. A trim, melancholic novel on the mystery of existence.

How’d I find it? I read an excerpt from this novel in Harper’s had to pick up a copy to read the rest.

Who will enjoy this book? This blends the dreaminess of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the enigma of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and the domestic focus of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

What stood out? This book is the first in a series of seven, and I appreciated its metaphysical musings in the form of Tara’s daily journal. We enter the story on her 122nd iteration of November 18th and follow as she tries to lure her confounded husband to her aide, develops an obsession with the night sky, and logs how her continued presence diminishes the resources of the day. On the Calculation of Volume is about time in such a way that you feel time while reading it.

Which line made me feel something? “The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.”

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

4/5 stars

What's it about? Bounty hunter Rick Deckard wants a real animal, and to get one, he needs to “retire” as many androids as possible and collect the spoils. When Rick is tasked with eliminating a group of Nexus-6 androids, he begins to question the nature of the soul.

How’d I find it? I credit the shelves of Powell’s. This cover caught my eye.

Who will enjoy this book? I mean, if you enjoyed Blade Runner…

What stood out? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has the noir undercurrents of a Chandler novel, while trudging through the miseries of nuclear aftermath. Tiny twists abound. Through it all, the characters interrogate the larger questions, which makes this novel ambitious beyond its carefully plotted intrigue. Extra points for sticking the landing.

Which line made me feel something? “Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed.”

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

4/5 stars

What's it about? In a post-Arthurian England, Axl and Beatrice set out to find their son, relying on traces of memories erased by a mysterious mist that hangs over the land and placates its people. The journey soon becomes a quest illuminated by ogres, a warrior, a strange boy, a knight, and, of course, a dragon. A book-length daydream that lingers.

How’d I find it? I don’t know how this book came to me. A book sale? A yard sale? A box on the street? I do remember reading Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go on the porch of a beach hut in Zanzibar, the ocean roiling, the wind tearing the pages from my fingers, and stars absolutely everywhere.

Who will enjoy this book? Did you appreciate The Northman or Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds? Try this one out.

What stood out? Many questions remain unanswered in The Buried Giant, creating possibilities that sparkle in the imagination. Possibly the point of a book full of tales told and tales lived by. It’s a tool that Ishiguro wields to anchor the reader firmly in this strange and violent time in human history, when death was its own character and uncertainty an expected frame of mind. We get to see the mud on the proverbial skirts, lending depth to an elusive, tone-heavy novel.

Which line made me feel something? “He had felt as one standing in a boat on a wintry river, looking out into dense fog, knowing it would at any moment part to reveal vivid glimpses of the land ahead. And he had been caught in a kind of terror, yet at the same time had felt a curiosity—or something stronger and darker—and he had told himself firmly, ‘Whatever it may be, let me see it, let me see it.’”

The Moustache by Emmanuel Carrère

4/5 stars

What's it about? The Parisian of this smart novel shaves off his mustache, the catalyst for a delirious descent into madness when no one seems to notice or, in fact, recall his ever having facial hair in the first place. Absurd, funny, and with an ending you won’t soon forget.

How’d I find it? My favorite Bookstagrammer, of course. I do enjoy a Carrère novel.

Who will enjoy this book? I’d liken this book to the experience of reading Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan or the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

What stood out? The narrator’s slippery grip on reality and his shifts between trust and suspicion make for an entertaining read, a feat considering the relative lack of plot. Carrére is deft at keeping the narrator and the reader guessing, with sprinkles of psychological thriller and horror that maintain momentum. I didn’t love how women were written in this book; Agnès, the narrator’s wife, gets a superficial treatment despite her importance. The narrator is a scoundrel though.

Which line made me feel something? I positively adored the brilliant back cover copy, which included (translation my own): “The story, in any case, inevitably ends terribly and, from impossible explanations to irrational escapes, leaves you no way out. Save one, which is revealed in the last pages and not advised when beginning a book. Consider yourself warned.”

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

4/5 stars

What's it about? Emergency room surgeon Atul Gawande reflects on the tension between the promise of medicine and the reality of death in this thoughtful ethical conversation. How can healthcare facilitate “a good death,” since we all have to go sometime?

How’d I find it? A grandmother’s shelf of books she left behind, telling me to take what I wanted. I kept the lion’s share.

Who will enjoy this book? If you like the fusion of memoir and health, try The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos or When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

What stood out? As a nurse, I loved Dr. Gawande’s moral wrestlings, as I encounter them frequently in my own practice. To cement his arguments, Gawande presents case studies from friends, family, and patients that make the stakes all the more real. Medicine can prolong our lives, sure, but at what cost? What do we lose when we resist our fate?

Which line made me feel something? The second chapter of Being Mortal drew me in, and this statement played no small part: “with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time. When we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.”