Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
If I were to distill the lesson of novelist Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s essay collection Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl into a single sentence, that sentence would be: snails are someones, too! The same goes for crabs, jellyfish, starfish, oysters, mussels—Wong excludes no one, no matter how eyeless or slimy. Her essays on undersea invertebrates operate as experiments in empathy, striving towards an alert and open-hearted attunement to creatures whose ways of being can seem so alien, from our limited terrestrial mammalian perspective, that we reject their beinghood out of hand. Wong repudiates the arrogance that underlies this dismissal, along with the accusations of “anthropomorphism” that those afflicted by it tend to level at efforts to imaginatively honor other animals’ inner lives. It is vulgar, she writes, “to think that everybody’s feelings must be intelligible to oneself in order to exist or qualify as feelings.” Against this crude habit of mind, Wong challenges readers to let themselves be humbled before the shimmering, spiraling polymorphic strangeness of other lives, and the marvel it is to share the earth with myriad precious and mysterious someones.
For fans of My Octopus Teacher, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, and those looking for motivation to keep expanding their own personal circle of care.
Organ Speak: What It Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies by Giulia Enders
When people talk about “body positivity,” they typically mean something rather superficial. When they tell you to “love your body,” they’re hoping you will cultivate a healthy appreciation for your physical appearance, your shape and contours. They do not expect, for example, that you’ll develop an affectionate intimacy with your spleen. But Giulia Enders, a German physician and the author of Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (2014), champions the latter sort of body positivity, increasingly hard to imagine as our days swarm lousy and lousier with screens and memes, AI hallucinations and spambot promises of machine-mediated “optimization.” Upon realizing how many of her patients were frustrated with their bodies for not “functioning like machines” or “looking like dolls,” Enders felt called to write Organ Speak as an intervention on the side of the flesh. She saw that, too often, people’s bodies were experienced by them as a source of chronic dissatisfaction, viewed with distrust, even hostility. Which seemed a shame, she thought, for the human body is truly a wonder. Each chapter of Organ Speak spotlights a different bodily structure or system – lungs, skin, muscles, immune system, brain – to resuscitate a due reverence for the intricate and interconnected workings of these vital parts. Enders sees the human body as a kind of microcosm for the biospheric “superorganism” and proposes that, by contemplating the viscera that compose us, we can glean insights for how to conduct ourselves in our own role as the constituents of an interdependent whole, members of communities both human and larger-than-human.
For explorers of that weird misted mystic realm where biology and philosophy cross paths.
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard is forest ecology’s answer to Jane Goodall, celebrated for her pioneering research into the arboreal relationships facilitated by the “wood wide web,” the twining of hair-like fungal hyphae that sprawls beneath the forest floor, stitching trees and other plants together in a vast interwoven lace. Without these networks, and the communication and collaboration they make possible, there would be no forests; these complex ecosystems could not survive. Such was the subject of Simard’s previous book, Finding the Mother Tree, and though she dips into that fertile ground again in her latest work, her present focus takes us treading onto unhappier territory: the stricken barrens left behind by the logging industry. In When the Forest Breathes, Simard writes about her research into the desolation wrought by clearcutting, which undermines forests’ regenerative potential, as well as her years of activism as she worked alongside scientists, environmentalists, and indigenous communities to stop this injurious practice. Yet the book is by no means a cheerless read, for as sorrowfully as she grieves the damage done, and as fierce as she is in her disgust for the corporate greed behind the ongoing destruction, no extremity of despair or horror can dampen the radiance of Simard’s awe for forest worlds, for the rich congregation of lives that compose them: the lichens, moss, ferns, spiders, squirrels, bears, and, of course, the trees, like spires questing into earth and sky in one breath, greening the light.
For fans of forests, woodlands, glades, thickets, and copses.
A thorough and engaging historical account exploring the mass hysteria, accusations, and executions that took place during the witch trials of 1692. In The Witches, Schiff examines all aspects of the community at that time, including the social, political, and religious tensions of Puritan New England.
-Samantha, Development
A novel that tracks the lives of the people, animals and angels of a Polish village as they unfurl across the volatile twentieth century, snarled and wrenched askew at intervals by its upheavals and brutalities. There is much quiet, dreamy strangeness here, like a mist laid over the landscape between scenes, swirling full of ghosts and mushrooms that eat death and rifts in the earth spitting out matter newly begotten, in the form of red stones and matted hair.
-Aurora, Reference
Parable of the Sower is a sci-fi futuristic tale written in the early 1990s and set in the California of the future – the 2020s. There is no water, food is scarce, and jobs that pay money no longer exist. The main character, Lauren, has hyperempathy, which is a difficult disease to handle when surrounded by death and pain. In an attempt to find an answer and some direction in this world, she creates Earthseed, a religion based on Change. After she is forced out of her gated community and loses everyone she loves, Lauren must learn to trust others as they make their way north towards what they hope is a welcoming and accepting place to live, where they can create their Earthseed community and survive together.
-Samantha, Development
You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine edited and translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor
When the Palestinian-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha received the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, in her acceptance speech she said, “I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation. I don’t want to console.” I have read a not inconsiderable amount poetry, because historically I have written poetry and as everyone knows, it is almost entirely writers of poetry who read the stuff – this is only the slightest exaggeration – so I feel sufficiently informed to say that there is too much consolation in poetry by far, too many lullabies for the long ago sedated. It is a shame, because poetry is a medium of communication as versatile as any other, with nothing innately anodyne about it. There are many non-consoling things poetry that poetry can do exceptionally well: it can be the siren screaming through the night, a red flare; it can be testimony and indictment and howl and spell; it can rage against cruelty, tyranny, indifference—those crimes against life and love that poetry documents with its own incomparable, lacerating clarity. Poetry can sit heavy in your gut, can thunder through your skull, your heart, until you’re too sick and shaken to stay lying down. Poetry has all of these powers, and it is put to all of these uses in You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, an anthology of recent work by poets living and writing in Gaza and the West Bank. Editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor write in the introduction of the joy they felt simply to receive the poems, as cherished proof that the poets remained alive. But these are not joyful poems. They are poems of hunger and dislocation and world-devouring loss, poems addressed to scavenger dogs, poems like footfalls sinking into ashes. One poet describes the people of his city under siege as “drowned in stones”; another writes, “the war / arrived as a curse, ate at our bodies. / It left nothing for the hungry / but heartbreak. The dream that rots from waiting.” To be confronted with these poems, unconsoled, is painful. It hurts, of course; it has to. And that is poetry, doing its work.
Other Favorites from the Patten Free Library Poetry Collection:
Breathturn by Paul Celan
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser
Satan Says by Sharon Olds
The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy
Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
The Animal is Chemical, by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Primordial by Mai Der Vang
The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak
Erzsebet Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess, is frequently infamized as history’s most prolific female serial killer, alleged to have murdered housemaids and peasant girls by the hundreds, torturing them, draining their young bodies of blood so she could employ it in her toilette. Virgin blood, the ultimate anti-aging elixir. So goes the story, anyway, and it’s a good one, lurid and salacious, packed with a full serving of fairy-tale tropes: the gothic castle in the dark Eastern European wood; the vain, decadent, sadistically self-absorbed aging female villain; blood sacrifice; scores of innocent virginal victims. In some versions, there are even talking wolves. Bram Stoker took the Bathory legend as inspiration for Dracula, and nods to the so-called “Blood Countess” scamper rampant as rats through the canon of female vampire fiction, on film and on the page. Indeed, a new movie is out this month revisiting the abominations of the depraved maiden killer, by all signs a classy affair, co-written by Nobel-Prize-winning Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek and starring French icon Isabelle Huppert.
So, yes, it’s a rousing little yarn, but, as Shelley Puhak evinces in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster, it’s probably total baloney. Puhak dips into the archives, reviewing deeds, letters, and court transcripts, as well as recent scholarship on the Bathory case, and returns with scant evidence to bear out Bathory’s murderous rep. Instead, that portrait that emerges is of an independent woman targeted for character annihilation by a clique of choleric men resentful of her undainty step outside the lines of decorous feminine dispossession. The real story of the Blood Countess would appear to go something more like this: when Bathory’s husband died of the plague, she inherited his land and his political position as lord-lieutenant of two counties, to the horror of high-status men in the region, who were of the view that she should have neither, and thus concocted a gory saga of rabid madwoman debauchery to justify seizing her lands and exiling her from public life. People have been inclined to believe the smears, then and now, because women of influence are just not very well liked. Go figure. Puhak deftly argues the case for Bathory’s exoneration in this gripping blend of whodunit and feminist historical redress.
For fans of historical true crime, vampire lore, debunking misogynist mythology, and Eleanor Herman’s Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power.
I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right by Matt Kaplan
Apparently our theme for this month is posthumously vindicated Hungarians, since the leading man of Matt Kaplan’s new book about disgraced-only-to-be-later-proven-absolutely-correct scientists is Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian doctor who had the zany idea that it might be prudent to pause to wash one’s hands in between mucking around with dissection theatre cadavers and delivering babies, considering how many women were dying from a mysterious fever in the days following childbirth at the hospital where he worked. He suspected there might be some connection between the women’s deaths and their doctors’ unsalutary hygiene habits. Semmelweis’s colleagues and hospital administrators, offended at the insinuation of uncleanliness, were not overly friendly to this theory, nor to his research in support of it. Semmelweis was fired, shunned, and mercilessly mocked for his fanatical obsession with life-saving basic disinfection practices. Discredited and reviled, he died in an asylum from a gangrenous wound believed to have been inflicted when he was beaten by asylum guards. Today, of course, he is revered as a pioneer of infection control, and referred to as “the savior of mothers.” Although Semmelweis’s is perhaps the cruelest case of scientific cold-shouldering Kaplan recounts, the ill-treated Hungarian is far from alone in his persecution, as the author’s wide-ranging collection of historical and contemporary parallels amply demonstrates. Science, despite its mandate of constant questioning and questing after new discoveries, is not always as receptive to change as one might hope. Indeed, it can be brutally stodgy; stick-in-the-mud institutional paralysis too often reigns. I Told You So! is an enlightening (and sometimes infuriating) history of the underdogs who have taken on the thankless task of thinking against the grain, and a searing indictment of intellectual complacency.
For fans of character-centered popular science, medical and scientific history, and apostasy in every field.
This latest novel from Stephen King returns to the crime thriller territory he began with the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch). It’s another Holly Gibney story, with her private investigation business, Finders Keepers, front and center.
King balances two storylines that slowly build and eventually collide in a satisfying conclusion. Holly is tasked with protecting an outspoken abortion rights activist who has become the target of credible threats, while her sometime coworker and fellow investigator, Jerome, works alongside police on a serial killer case that has the whole community on edge.
What I continue to enjoy about these books is Holly herself — smart, observant, and quietly brave, even when she doubts herself. The tension builds steadily, and the alternating storylines keep the pace moving. As an audiobook, it’s especially engaging and hard to turn off. If you’ve been following Holly’s journey, Never Flinch is a strong addition to the series and another reminder that King knows how to keep readers on their toes right up to the final pages.
-Samantha, Development
