5 Books That Made Me Say, ‘I’m So Glad I Read Them Until Their Last Pages,’
Book recommendations I read in the last month.
“These descriptions are good sentences not just because they’re polished but because of what they are saying, because they have the power to make you stop reading, to go back and read the sentence you just read, then to muse over it, over the keen insights buried in the sentences, over the images that make you see Earth differently.”
1. Young Skins by Colin Barrett
I’ve a list of favorite story collections. I recommend these collections to friends and colleagues, and any person who asks me for a story collection recommendation. Now, Young Skins is at the top of my list.
The beauty of reading stories is to find surprises on every couple of pages but in this collection I found surprises in almost all paragraphs—a startling word, an unexpected phrase, a verb that shattered my brain with its forcefulness, an imagery that made me see the small town in Ireland where these stories are set as if I was right there with the characters.
If I do not love reading short stories, I would have fallen in love with them, just because of this collection. My book is full of highlights. I read this collection ten years after it was published. It’s never too late to read a good book, and I’m glad I read it now.
So many things to love about this collection:
How boldly Barrett uses adverbs, in many of his paragraphs.
The beauty of language on these pages. Poetic. Lyrical. Every line in these stories is carefully thought out and written on the page.
2. The Woods by Janice Obuchowski
For the past few months, I deliberately bought story collections set in a particular place. I wanted to read these collections for research because my debut story collection is set in a particular place. I want to learn from other story collections set in a particular place.
I started reading The Woods for research but I ended up reading each story for the sake of the story and the characters.
This collection is a John Simmons Short Fiction Prize Winner. The setting of these stories is alive and palpable. I love when a place binds the stories in a story collection, but in The Woods, it’s not only the place that binds them, but motifs that appear throughout the collection, recurring objects, and thematic connections. Reading these stories, it felt like the stories were speaking to one another, speaking a language of their own, beyond the fact that they are linked by a setting.
3. Clear by Carys Davies
This short novel with short chapters follows two men as they form an unlikely bond.
The movement of the camera in this novel has surprised me. The camera moves from one character to another, sometimes after a paragraph. And there’s also an omniscient, all-knowing camera. And yet, and yet, the movement of the camera is never jarring.
Alliterations appear throughout, and the book is full of lovely descriptions like this one:
“It was so long since anyone but Strachan had looked at him properly, and if he’d been asked to describe his feelings he might have reached for that word in his language that described what happens when a rock is covered and uncovered by the sea–when, briefly, the water rises up and submerges it completely before it falls away again and reveals it. It was how Ivar felt when the wave of emotion crashed over him. He was engulfed by it. His breathing stopped and there was a long, stalled moment before he broke free and breathed again.”
4. Open Throat by Henry Hoke
In this tiny novel, there are no punctuation marks, no fullstops, no commas, not a single one, throughout the book. Because a mountain lion narrates this novel, I thought the writer was insightful to choose a narrative without any punctuation marks.
5. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Writer friends have been urging me to read this novel for months now. I finally read this book last week. I learned so much about space and there was no single moment when I wanted to put the book down. This is the second book where I enjoyed the social commentary in a book. The first was Nina Schuyler’s story collection, In This Ravishing World.
Not much happens in the plot and yet, and yet, this novel intrigued me from the first paragraph. The descriptions of the omniscient, all-knowing camera gave me goose bumps. I’ve never read such startling descriptions before. I thought I would come upon the next startling description a few pages later or in the next chapter but I was wrong. I read the next startling description a few sentences later, then the next one a few sentences later. These descriptions are good sentences not just because they’re polished but because of what they are saying, because they have the power to make you stop reading, to go back and read the sentence you just read, then to muse over it, over the keen insights buried in the sentences, over the images that make you see Earth in a different way.
The novel is full of exquisite writing like this one:
“This is the way it goes–and then another day they look into the face of one of those five people and there in their way of smiling or concentrating or eating is everything and everyone they’ve ever loved, all of it, just there, and humanity, in coming down in its essence to this handful of people, is no longer a species of confounding difference and distance but a near and graspable thing.”