Category: book list

book list

5 books about being “weird” and not fitting in by Misfit Author Sean Mortimer

by AdamLeave a Comment on 5 books about being “weird” and not fitting in by Misfit Author Sean Mortimer
5 books about being “weird” and not fitting in by Misfit Author Sean Mortimer

The idea of a survival guide for misfits started when my kid came home from elementary school and asked if he was weird. Most of my friends fall into that category with unconventional interests and nontraditional jobs so it was a proud moment and I answered with a congratulatory, “Yes! And being weird is awesome!” 

Then I realized that he might not be so sure being weird was awesome. I remembered my childhood and the desperate desire to fit in and my obvious failure to accomplish that task. Like a piñata stuffed full of anxiety and self-doubt awaiting that final hit, I tried and failed to not be different, second guessed myself about everything, wished upon whatever that I looked and acted and felt like a “normal” person. The radical part for a misfit is how that inability to conform ejects you onto a journey that can eventually land you in a place of gratitude for being all askew and outcast. That said, the journey isn’t going to be easy. There is a reason why people love conformity and the predictable security it offers.  

But what the conformists have declared “wrong” with you can help guide you towards subcultures that celebrate so called imperfections. Misfit subcultures illuminate hidden strengths outside of conventionality as they encourage DIY solutions and a sense of discovery develops a dynamic approach to life. To map out this journey, I collaborated with an assortment of fellow outcasts, some of whom are now internationally celebrated for exactly what used to earn them abuse. Their personal stories and learned hacks will hopefully inspire people to recognize that while it might not be straightforward, being a misfit can be rewarding if you learn to embrace unconventionality, AKA, all the things that make you “weird.”

Here’s a list of books that might make feeling like a misfit a little less lonely. 

Continue reading “5 books about being “weird” and not fitting in by Misfit Author Sean Mortimer” →
book list, Recommendations

The Unfolding: 9 Linked Short Story Collections Recommended by Tayyba Kanwal

by AdamLeave a Comment on The Unfolding: 9 Linked Short Story Collections Recommended by Tayyba Kanwal
The Unfolding: 9 Linked Short Story Collections Recommended by Tayyba Kanwal

When I emerge from a masterfully linked short story collection, it feels as if I’m beholding a complex origami figure after having ambled around, Alice-like, in its chambers and passageways: each turn, each fold intentional, yet delightfully surprising in how it informs the world of the collection, the final creation at once weightless and alive. Short stories operate on economy, with silences and gestures as meaningful as dialogue and action. I relish how in a linked collection, each story offers itself up to me as a single facet, a vibrant plane in a whole that depends for its dimensionality on memory and a sense of accumulation. That brief frisson as unanticipated connections cohere keeps me coming back for second and third readings in the hope of a deeper understanding, like unfolding and refolding an intricately transformed square of paper.

The nine books below are each unique not only in the stories they tell, but the terrain that takes shape by the last page. Some collections are lightly linked, more interested in their worlds rather than the lifetimes of characters. Others build toward a novelistic arc, even as each story speaks on its own terms. Each one comes from a singular sensibility.

Continue reading “The Unfolding: 9 Linked Short Story Collections Recommended by Tayyba Kanwal” →
book list, Recommendations

6 books about Radical Care by Jennifer Eli Bowen

by AdamLeave a Comment on 6 books about Radical Care by Jennifer Eli Bowen
6 books about Radical Care by Jennifer Eli Bowen

Nothing makes me bawl like a book in which characters fiercely look after one another. Maybe that’s because my dad bailed on us when we were little, never to return. Or maybe it’s because my mother was a hospice nurse, setting an example of caretaking in the hardest moment a family will face. Or maybe, it’s good old-fashioned co-dependence–some of us find our worth through being needed. Whatever the reason, I’ve been drawn to literature of radical care since my earliest reading days.

My collection, The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There, is a series of linked essays that span twenty years. The essays speak to each other about connection, isolation, community building, seeing, and of course, care– as ingrained habit, as rebellion, as a quiet fuck you to abandonments. Living things need other living things to care for us and about us, but that doesn’t mean it always happens. 

Hanif Abduraquib says, “That anyone loves us at all is not a given.” We’re born alone and we die alone, this we all know. But in between we make thousands of daily choices about if we will give a damn and for whom and how: a rooster, a community, prisons, our kids, students, a neighbor. And from our caring stems our deepest failures and richest successes. Something else I’ve learned from reading and writing about care, my own especially, is that it’s imperfect, hard to sustain, and still, the only work that really matters in the end. 

Continue reading “6 books about Radical Care by Jennifer Eli Bowen” →
book list, Recommendations

8 books about Fame, Family, and Art by Allie Tagle-Dokus

by Adam1 Comment on 8 books about Fame, Family, and Art by Allie Tagle-Dokus
8 books about Fame, Family, and Art by Allie Tagle-Dokus

When I started my debut novel Lucky Girl, I named the Microsoft Word document “Fame.” Essentially, all I knew was that I wanted to write a novel inspired by the journey of several tween Dance Moms stars, and I knew I wanted to interrogate fame—namely, childhood fame. I began writing with a loose message that children should not be famous. And yet. I started writing a book against fame, secretly hoping this would be my stellar, famous debut—best-seller, known throughout the seven kingdoms, celebrated, external validation all around. While drafting Lucky Girl, I wrote into that tension: Can a good artist also be ambitious?  

By the novel’s end, I had concluded that while art is great and important, the people around you matter more. I spent a good bit of the novel trying to get Lucy home to her family. Serendipitously, the same month Lucky Girl departs into the wider world is the same month I’m due to have my first child. As I approach this debut, I find myself continuing to navigate how to both care and fret about the “success” of my art, while also trying to focus on how I can be a good Mom. Can good Moms also worry about their art?

In that spirit, I offer a list of novels that deepen my exploration. These books interrogate how fame shapes our relationships to other people. And beyond that, how fame corrades how we approach our art.  Some novels conjure characters that are burned out from chasing their dreams. Others examine how public expectation reforms identity on a cellular level. All these characters—obsessive, hardworking, vulnerable—helped me render Lucy. 

Continue reading “8 books about Fame, Family, and Art by Allie Tagle-Dokus” →
book list, Recommendations

13 Works of Sapphic Asian Historical Fiction by Wen-yi Lee

by AdamLeave a Comment on 13 Works of Sapphic Asian Historical Fiction by Wen-yi Lee
13 Works of Sapphic Asian Historical Fiction by Wen-yi Lee

Queer historical fiction always feels particularly powerful to me because it’s the author saying we have always been here. It’s laying claim to the canon. It’s a tether to the past and all those who have come before you. It also tends to ask about intersectionality. By often taking place in significant historical moments–in this list, there are independence movements, occupations, racial segregations, and martial laws–it can explore how the characters are shaped by multiple sets of politics and identities.  

My first adult novel, When They Burned the Butterfly, is about the rapid transformations of postcolonial Singapore in 1972–just a few years after independence in 1965–and the increasingly throttled Chinese secret societies who, in this alternate history, draw magic from gods. Specifically, the book follows a girl gang called Red Butterfly who follow a fire goddess, and the schoolgirl that becomes entangled with one of its leaders after the violent death of her mother. 

It’s a coming-of-age and creation of an identity for both the nation and for Adeline, the lesbian schoolgirl, who loses her only parent but gets adopted into a found family and falls in love, even as the pressures of the underworld and the changing city threaten to take all that away, too. It’s a love letter to my home as much as it is a critique and an exploration of its survival anxiety; it’s also a nod to queer history and reclaiming the nation-building story, in a way.  

I’m particularly interested in histories featuring queer Asian women — a trifold intersection that’s difficult to find. Even putting together this list required some excavating, as I realized I had to especially search for books that featured a wider range of settings and cultures. 

Here are thirteen other works of historical fiction featuring bisexual, lesbian, and otherwise sapphic Asian characters, ascending through time, space, homeland, and diaspora.

Continue reading “13 Works of Sapphic Asian Historical Fiction by Wen-yi Lee” →
book list, Recommendations

Patchwork author maddie Ballard reveals the books she turns to for inspiration

by AdamLeave a Comment on Patchwork author maddie Ballard reveals the books she turns to for inspiration
Patchwork author maddie Ballard reveals the books she turns to for inspiration

In Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, writer/editor Maddie Ballard explores making seventeen garments over a period of great change in her life in a unique memoir that provides readers an inside look on how crafting can provide a sense of grounding when we need it the most.

We asked her to provide some books she turns to when she needs inspiration.

Continue reading “Patchwork author maddie Ballard reveals the books she turns to for inspiration” →
book list, Recommendations

Six Cat Books That Go Beyond Cozy by Rebecca van Laer

by AdamLeave a Comment on Six Cat Books That Go Beyond Cozy by Rebecca van Laer
Six Cat Books That Go Beyond Cozy by Rebecca van Laer

When I tell people that I’ve written a book about my cats, they often ask if it’s a children’s book or a humor book. One person who had read my first book—a cross-genre novella with a healthy dose of literary theory—asked if it featured cartoons. I understand that this is where the mind goes when someone thinks of cats: to the silly, the cute, the cozy. After all, our Instagram feeds are populated by cat memes.

This assumption bothers me to no end. I want another language to talk about my book; I want to do an interview where I don’t talk about cats at all. I wrote about two years of my life with my partner and our decision not to have kids; I wrote a book about making a family in the age of climate collapse. But, of course, it’s called Cat, and the story is impossible to tell without talking about our nonhuman family members. If you order it, the algorithm will serve you content about cats, not species decline.

And, aside from my book, the history of feline literature already shows that our relationships to cats are not always tender and sweet. Cats are complex creatures, and so are we. When we move beyond coziness, we better understand our history not just with cats but with animalia writ large. These six books do just that.

Continue reading “Six Cat Books That Go Beyond Cozy by Rebecca van Laer” →
book list, Recommendations

Nine Extremely Nerdy Books of Folklore and Mythology by Seamus Sullivan

by AdamLeave a Comment on Nine Extremely Nerdy Books of Folklore and Mythology by Seamus Sullivan
Nine Extremely Nerdy Books of Folklore and Mythology by Seamus Sullivan

Whenever I’m struggling to write stories or even sentences, when the creative process or the world outside my window or both are in such a state of crisis that it feels impossible to articulate what stories are for or why anyone bothers with them, I turn to my folklore and mythology shelf.

I’m a member of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark generation, and a D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths kid. The old stories, the ones scary or funny or weird enough to keep coming back, to spread from person to person spawning variants – these were my first loves.

When I was trying to get back to writing regularly after becoming a parent and spiraling my way through a pandemic and an insurrection, I turned again to my favorite shelf. I needed something sturdy, because the world was not and I was not.

One of the sturdiest images offered up by my old pals the D’Aulaires came back to me: the interlocking rooms and winding corridors of the Labyrinth. I began to see the Minotaur stalking along a riverbank. Sentences grew into scenes, chapters, and then into my first book, Daedalus is Dead.

Finishing a book had eluded me, even in the salad days of 2019, when I slept better and was only afraid of men some of the time. But the old tools I picked up moved of their own accord, the old stones practically stacked and mortared themselves.

I wonder sometimes if humans are most important as carriers, and certain stories, the ones that outlive and outgrow us and move through us at will, are really in charge.

Here are some of the titles that have, of late, called me back to my favorite shelf. Maybe some of them will call to you.

Continue reading “Nine Extremely Nerdy Books of Folklore and Mythology by Seamus Sullivan” →