BookThugs Recommend: Holiday Reading
Looking for the perfect book for that bibliophile on your holiday shopping list? Perhaps you’re actually searching for your next great read? With the winter holidays upon us there’s no better time to take a break from all the usual busyness, relax and curl up with a warm drink and a good book. In this edition of BookThugs Recommend, some of our wonderful authors share their recommended reads for the festive season. Maybe you’ll find that perfect book at last. You know, the one you’ve been looking high and low for but haven’t been able to find until now.
François Turcot and Erín Moure, author and translator of My Dinosaur
François Turcot:
My choice would be The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (Penguin, 1992) for his particularly lyrical way of writing about the father, and because it is great Polish prose.
Erín Moure:
My choice would be this amazingly beautiful book I was talking about today on FB:
Currently and Emotion: Translations, Sophie Collins, ed. (Test Centre, 2016)
Also, I do recommend My Dinosaur to everyone I see… it’s such a great book to share with people… it’s about loss but also memory, gift, and what we gain by being live and carrying memory and thinking with us… I think as a book of non-narrative poetry, it uses narrative and disjunction marvellously.
Another book I recommend in French is Chantal Neveu’s new one, La Vie radieuse (Éditions La Peuplade, 2016).
Jennifer Zilm, author of Waiting Room
My pick is You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends by Dorothy Iannone (Siglio Press, 2014).
Stephen Thomas, author of The Jokes
My reco would be White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013). The best book I’ve read in a decade, it’s anchored by an 86-page memoir/essay (“Tristes Tropiques”) on the defining relationship of the author’s life, which was with a man. The relationship cut deeper than gender or sexuality or labels, and the memoir/essay shows how far it’s possible to let someone inside your soul, and how much they can change you.
Adrienne Gruber, author of Buoyancy Control
