Recommended Reading: Serena's Forever Favorites
Backlist books need love too! For this series, each bookseller is shouting out a few backlist titles (as opposed to recent frontlist books) that you should put at the top of your TBR. This week’s bookseller is Serena!
While I love a good plot, what really makes a novel memorable for me—and thus most likely to recommend—are books that assume a singular approach to storytelling, or in other words, books that demonstrate an intimate and devoted relationship with language as both the vehicle for the story and the road signs that guide that vehicle. For my Forever Faves, I chose titles that are written in such a way that makes them stick onto the inner caves of my mind, animating and reanimating themselves before the dancing flames of my psyche.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
I can say without hesitation that this is the book I’ve recommended more than any other in the store, as I take every and any opportunity to put it into your—our community members’—beautiful hands! This is exactly what I look for in a novel, it is so piercingly, painfully, and precisely human. There’s so much heat here, and water, and ache, and most importantly, so, so much love. This is the book that turned me into a permanent Ward stan. If you are a lover of fiction, or any delicious writing really, then you likely have or will have this on your TBR—this is your sign to move it to your READ (& loved!) pile!
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
This book follows centenarian novelist, Yoshiro, as he cares for his ailing great-grandson, Mumei, in a Japan transformed by a series of unspecified ecopolitical and environmental catastrophes. In this dystopian Japan, society has been cut off—both literally and linguistically—from the rest of the world. Here, the elderly are burdened with increased longevity while the children weaken and die young. It may sound grim but this book is honestly laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a light and fast read that continually engages, surprises, and delights. Tawada meditates on mortality and language with the utmost sense of wonder, playfulness, and imagination. It’s seriously good.
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
After her son, Nikolai, takes his life, a grieving mother invents a liminal world where she can still commune with him through words. Even as I write this, so much emotion comes up for me because I’ve never read anything quite like it. This is a devastating and vital work of fiction, it’s probing and profound, I would even go as far as to say it’s a masterpiece. At a time when grief surrounds us, it’s so important that we have works of art, like this one, that acknowledge the reality that some questions are, and will always be, unanswerable, but that we can still ask them, and we can still sharpen the tools with which we carve our queries, and that there is value in that. If you’ve experienced loss, or if you’re just interested in language and how we wield it, I highly recommend this book.
Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis
To borrow from the words of one of the characters, this book is about the remarkable ways that hidden people find each other. Through it, the author asks, “how do we create refuge for ourselves and each other? How do we live radiantly when the world around us seems bent on our erasure?” I read it because Carmen Maria Machado recommended it for someone asking after a lesbian novel by a woman of color (so enough said, right?). Rich with historical details and expertly crafted, this novel, on every level, offers a generous, subversive, and immersive reading experience. It’s a triumph of queer history, it centers and celebrates queer desire and love between women. It’s revolutionary, really.
The Shadow King by Maaza Menginste
A spellbinding, complex, and unforgettable novel that foregrounds the—until now—untold and marginalized perspectives of WWII, centering the women soldiers at the heart of Ethiopia’s fight against Italian forces. This book manages to be both monumental and deeply nuanced, both epic and intricate. There’s no need to fear its size (or scope) because you will inhale this book, compelled by Mengiste’s precise and evocative prose. She renders the realities of war with a poet’s sensitivity and a filmmaker’s lucidity. I don’t typically reach for historical war novels, but this one I could not put down.
