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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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NonfictionMiddle Eastern HistoryMemoir

Dancing in the Mosque

Review by Priscilla Kipp

“Divorce, divorce, divorce.” Homeira Qaderi’s phone screen lit up with these words from her husband, ending their arranged marriage—and her parental rights to their baby son. This heartbreaking act comes not at the beginning of her searing memoir, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son, but near its inevitable conclusion, as a woman who could not conform to the strictures of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan must face the bitter consequences. Her journey from rebellious child to courageous teacher, acclaimed storyteller and, finally, despairing mother feels like a secret that needed to be told. Someday, Qaderi writes to her son, Siawash, from her chosen exile in California, she hopes their story will mean other Afghan mothers will not meet the same fate.

Qaderi’s childhood in Herat, occupied by Russians and later ruled by the Taliban, was fraught with violence. Bullets flew everywhere. Soldiers strode through streets and into homes. Books were forbidden for girls, and her mother “was like a spider trying to safeguard me within her web.” Her grandmother chastised her curiosity and fearlessness, but her father encouraged her. She was still a teenager when she began teaching boys and girls together, a forbidden act. Their classroom was a stifling tent that served as a mosque, and they kept their notebooks hidden in their Qurans lest Taliban soldiers found them learning instead of praying. Risking discovery and death for a few moments of youthful joy, Qaderi once even allowed dancing.

Interspersed among grim descriptions of Taliban rule and Qaderi’s heartbroken letters to her lost son are stunning passages describing the austere beauty of her homeland, which she still mourns. Yet her grief begs an even harder question: What does it take for a parent to choose hope for a greater good over their own child?

“Divorce, divorce, divorce.” Homeira Qaderi’s phone screen lit up with these words from her husband, ending their arranged marriage—and her parental rights to their baby son. This heartbreaking act comes not at the beginning of her searing memoir, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son, but near its inevitable conclusion, as […]
RomanceNonfictionFictionMemoirGraphic Novels & ComicsBiography

The Hold List: Books that are personal treats, just for us

Feature by the editors of BookPage

January may be a time for resolutions, but it’s also a time for celebrating all we accomplished the year before. We’re treating ourselves to these books as we begin the new year with hope.

Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too

How can something so cute be so devastating? In this comic book, Jonny (Jomny) Sun takes a goofy premise—a cute alien is sent to Earth to document human activity—and milks it for every drop of philosophical and existential wisdom. It’s sweet, silly, sentimental, but also frightening. At first, I was hesitant to choose this book for this month’s theme, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that its waves of emotion are a treat. It’s an indulgence and a wonder to step outside of your brain—all three pounds of tissue and synapses—and see the world through the eyes of a kind alien. And it feels good, life-affirming and joyous to know that I’m not the only one who’s so pensive about this life thing. This book is a friend—a friend who challenges you, but they do it because they love you.

—Eric, Editorial Intern

The Best of Me

I’ve read everything David Sedaris has ever written. I own every book he’s ever published. So perhaps some will call it “indulgent” or “difficult to justify” when I nonetheless buy his latest collection, The Best of Me, since it’s a compilation of previously published works. But here’s the thing—this isn’t just another retrospective volume of an author’s most popular works, selected on the basis of their fame. Instead, Sedaris chose each piece himself, based on a metric only he could know, and I’m curious to see which wild cards he included. I know, for example, that “Santaland Diaries,” which first launched him to fame on “This American Life” in 1992, is excluded. But that essay from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim where he drowns a mouse in a bucket? It’s there. Surprise, delight, confusion, nausea—I’m eager for whatever reactions this book will incite.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Braiding Sweetgrass

It’s been six years since Robin Wall Kimmerer’s luminous collection of nature essays was first published, and I’ve given away every copy I’ve ever owned. That’s fitting: Braiding Sweetgrass endows its reader with the recognition that the world has offered us endless gifts, leading us first to gratitude and then to minidewak, the giving of our own gifts as thanks and recompense in a “covenant of reciprocity.” Kimmerer’s book inspires courage to fight for the Earth amid climate urgency, reveals new ways of knowing and seeing while protecting Indigenous wisdom and fosters a community that actively seeks to heal humanity’s relationship with the world. I’ll keep giving away copies of this book, but this special edition, reissued with letterpress-printed illustrations to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the fabulous indie press Milkweed Editions, will be a gift I give myself.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Catherine the Great

Do I need more biographical tomes of powerful, take-no-prisoners women on my shelves? Yes. Yes, I do. There is nothing that relaxes me more than sinking into an enormous book full of royal scandals and opulent palaces— bonus points if someone gets poisoned via byzantine plot. I read Robert K. Massie’s superb biography of Catherine the Great earlier this year, and I have been peppering my poor boyfriend with anecdotes about her ever since. For example: When Catherine fell ill early on in her engagement to Peter, the future emperor of Russia, she would pretend to be unconscious in order to eavesdrop on the people gathered around her sickbed. Massie loves Catherine even more than I do. He explores her glamorous court and magnetic personality with flair and precision in this absolute masterpiece of a biography.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

The Duke and I

I’m still pretty new to the wide and wonderful world of Romancelandia, though most of the books I read for pleasure in 2020 were romance novels. I bounced happily back and forth between contemporary and historical settings, from Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient to Evie Dunmore’s Bringing Down the Duke. The only thing I love more than a happy ending is a new series I can dive in to and get lost in for volume after volume, and a friend who knows this about me recommended Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books more than a year ago. Now that Shonda Rhimes is adapting the sprawling series for Netflix, I want to make sure I’ve read at least the first few books before I watch the first season of the show, which drops on December 25, so I’m planning to pick up The Duke and I and let it sweep me off my feet and into the new year.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

January may be a time for resolutions, but it’s also a time for celebrating all we accomplished the year before. We’re treating ourselves to these books as we begin the new year with hope.

NonfictionPhotography

America the Beautiful

Review by Anna Christensen

As the holidays approach, it may seem harder and harder for some of us to find the sense of easy joy we associate with this time of year. The discourse within our country feels more fraught than it’s ever been, traveling for the holidays is out of the question for many families, and sometimes in our most frustrated moments, it can seem like there’s little worth celebrating.

America the Beautiful: A Story in Photographs reminds us of the incredible landscapes and rich heritage that are more than worth holding on to. Photographs spanning decades have been pulled from National Geographic’s vast archives to honor each American state and region, while beloved citizens as diverse as Maya Rudolph, Mitt Romney, Jewel and Nick Saban share statements and stories of how their home states have shaped them. Thick, glossy spreads showcase the mountains of Colorado and the white sands of New Mexico. On other pages, the lens closes in tight on a vineyard worker gathering grapes in Oregon, Tejano elementary school students smiling brightly into the camera in Texas and a pineapple harvester in Hawaii ending her day with a cigar.

This beautiful hardcover book feels like a loving reminder of the best our nation has to offer.

This beautiful hardcover book feels like a loving reminder of the best our nation has to offer.

NonfictionHistoryBlack History

White Fright

Review by Catherine Hollis

America’s current struggle with racist police violence, voter suppression and white supremacy has deep and bloody roots in our national history. In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this scholarship through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.

A noted historian of race in America, Dailey grounds this book with a clear narrative voice as she reviews the legal cases that institutionalized segregation in the American South. From Reconstruction after the Civil War to the 1960s civil rights movement, this history has been marked by legal restrictions on interracial sex and marriage occasioned by the sexual panic Dailey terms “white fright,” in a nod to the idea of “white flight.”

Beginning in the late 19th century, voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests were used in the American South to suppress the African American vote. This allowed for the passage of the so-called Jim Crow laws, legal machinations that institutionalized racial segregation under the false claim of “separate but equal” and were accompanied by white supremacist mob rule and the tragic violence of lynching. Dailey shows how inflammatory narratives of sexual predation underpinned these assaults on Black lives, while also revealing how white women were then held to notions of racial “purity.”

An illuminating contribution to the history of racism in America, White Fright reveals how white anxieties around gender and sexuality shaped the Black experience of social injustice.

In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this conversation through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.
Nonfiction

The Mutant Project

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Advances in medicine often outrun advances in ethics. Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we? What, for example, are the long-term risks of the way chemotherapy changes human cellular structure? What are the consequences of genetic editing (cloning, genome mapping) to create and shape human life? With scalpel-like precision, anthropologist Eben Kirksey carves away at these questions in The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans.

The book opens in Hong Kong in November 2018 at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Mapping, where Chinese researcher Jiankui He breaks the news that he has manipulated the genes of freshly fertilized eggs, creating the world’s first “edited” babies. At the conference, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer in the use of a new genetic engineering tool called CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), comments that she knew this day would come but imagined it to be far into the future. Drawing on conversations with Doudna and other scientists, as well as with medical doctors, corporate lobbyists and biotechnology entrepreneurs, Kirksey follows CRISPR around the world, seeking to discover the ways that genetic engineering will transform humanity.

Various questions fuel his search. Who is gaining access to cutting-edge genetic medicine? Are there creative ways to democratize the field? Should parents be allowed to choose the genetic makeup of their children? How much can we actually change about the human condition by tinkering with DNA? In the end, Kirksey concedes that human bodies are ongoing mutant projects, evolving over time in response to various diseases and treatments. We can control our biological destiny to some extent, but he urges caution, prudence and care as we make “new personal and political choices about the future of human biology.”

The Mutant Project might provoke and disturb as it raises unsettling questions about the nature of human life, technology and corporate and personal greed, but Kirksey’s entertaining and fascinating combination of detective story, medical history and ethics is a must-read.

Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we?
NonfictionWomen's HistoryMusic

Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls

Review by Kelly Blewett

Lisa Robinson offers a panoramic view of women rockers, whom she collectively refers to as “the girls,” in Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music and Fame. Chapters explore topics that are personal (relationships, family, motherhood), professional (fame, bad reviews, stage fright) and artistic (inspirations, influences, the writing process). What emerges is not a detailed profile of any one woman, though certain women are referenced several times, but rather a collective portrait of how women have navigated the music industry, which Robinson calls “one of the sleaziest and more corrupt sides of show business.”

If you, like me, have never considered the careers of women rockers, certain patterns may surprise you. Most got their start because of powerful male sponsors. Many were abused by people they trusted. Musicians as diverse as Jewel and Rhianna, Stevie Nicks and Beyonce, describe a singular obsessive focus on music. Some like Gwen Stefani and Sheryl Crow started off as background singers. Robinson has been interviewing the stars for a long time, and she offers satisfying context. For instance, in 1995 Sheryl Crow told her that if she ever made real money, she would buy her manager “a big house, because he has really stuck with me.” Robinson reports that 25 years later, “Scooter Weintraub is still Sheryl’s manager and she did buy him that house.”

As this anecdote suggests, Robinson is uniquely situated to write this book. She toured with the Rolling Stones in the 1970s. (They jokingly called her “Hot Pants” because they considered her such a prude.) She’s been with musicians as they wrote, recorded and performed. Robinson herself, like the best critics, emerges as a strong and likable figure with a clear point of view. Madonna, she opines, would have never gotten so big without MTV. Hearing Robinson’s sidebar commentary on the music industry, as well as her “war stories” with the rockers of the past, is one of the major delights of this book.

Whether you are tuned in to the history of rock or a casual fan, this book has something to offer. The quotes Robinson has gathered over the years are surprising and intimate, bringing figures like Lady Gaga, Alanis Morrisette and Bette Midler to life. Though no one may have asked Robinson about “the girls,” this reader is glad she found space to write about them anyway.

Lisa Robinson offers a panoramic view of women rockers, whom she collectively refers to as “the girls,” in Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music and Fame.

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