3 Book Recommendations #3

Excitement and propulsion!

Anemones in Yellow Jug by Christopher Wood

I’m back with a new set of recommendations, which provide an excellent opportunity for me to scan my bookshelves and do some rereading: last week that included Lily King’s Euphoria and Lauren Groff’s Matrix, btw. (And here’s the last set of recommendations, if you want to take a look.)

Remember, if you want to join the list, provide the titles of three books you could not live without and three adjectives, phrases, or ideas that you’re hoping to get a feel for in your recommended books. You can either leave a comment on this entry or hit reply to the email.

For our second entry of the series, Ben I. sent in the following…

Books Ben I. could not live without:

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

• Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

• Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

What Ben I. is looking for in his next book:

• “I’m always looking for a feeling of excitement and propulsion and characters that I’m thinking about for days and sometimes years afterwards. I enjoy being surprised by characters and that feeling when a larger arc an author is playing out starts to come together in a satisfying and unexpected way.”

Recommendation 1

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

It’s 1961 in the Netherlands. Isabel is reserved, snappish, and doggedly dedicated to her childhood home, which she now lives in alone. Eva, Isabel’s brother’s new girlfriend, is more brash and brassy. So when Eva unexpectedly comes to stay with Isabel for a month, the two women collide—until a sexual charge ignites between them. Van der Wouden is the rare writer who makes intimacy as appealing and tangled as it is in real life, and The Safekeep thrums with tension until it explodes. But the novel has another undercurrent, a mystery about Isabel’s keen devotion to the house and Isabel’s curiosity about it. There’s a dark twist at the end, but it doesn’t come at the expense of the writing, which is lush but taut at the same time.

Recommendation 2

The Innocents by Michael Crummey

A young brother and sister live alone on the Newfoundland coast sometime in the nineteenth century; their parents have died, and only traders know of their existence. Sweetly at first, they set up house: build traps for fish, scavenge for clothes for their growing bodies, and chop enough firewood to last a long hard winter. Then, things between the siblings begin to change. The Innocents is gripping on two fronts: first, in the hardscrabble story of how the pair eke out an existence, desperately waiting for a ship, The Hope, to bring them food and supplies; and second in the mesmerizing, disturbing Adam and Eve story Crummey creates for these two naifs. Crummey, a Canadian writer who really is due for a big break in America, writes about the verdant but forbidding Newfoundland landscape—and the children’s unconventional relationship—with a microscope’s detail and a painter’s eye.