Out with the (c)OLD! and in with 30% off spring styles 🌷🌷 SHOP SPRING CLEANING
Spring is the perfect time for a novel about blooming into someone new—and it’s a wonderful season for a love story. Looking for bucolic (but disquieting) scenes in the English countryside? We have that. Approachable poetry with a nature bent? It’s here! A tale of mass animal extinctions that is somehow…hopeful? Take a look at all that and more on our list of ten recommended books for spring and beyond.
In an unidentified country in South America, a group of guests from all over the world attends a lavish birthday party—which is going very well until a band of terrorists storms the mansion where the event is being hosted and takes everyone hostage. The whole book is set in this ornate home, and what starts as a chaotic and terrifying experience evolves into something else entirely. Patchett is one of my favorite authors and this book was truly a treasure that explores the core of human nature.
Never Let Me Go is one of those books I don’t want to tell you much about because you should just read it. In general, the story follows children attending a boarding school in rural 20th-century England. Something feels off about this place from the beginning, and you’ll be fascinated and horrified to find out why.
This collectsion of 12 essays by absolute literary icon Joan Didion spans her career from the 1960s until the early 2000s. If you’ve never read anything by her, it’s a wonderful introduction to Didion’s sharp wit, unique observation skills, and incredible style of writing that can break your heart and make you laugh until you cry in the span of a paragraph. In Let Me Tell You What I Mean, there are pieces on Martha Stewart and Hemingway, on the art of writing itself, on her life in California and summers in Hawaii, and much more. Take it one essay at a time.
I love a book where you leave feeling like you’ve really gotten to know the characters, where they become so real you imagine them still walking around in the world once you’ve finished the last page. A Place for Us examines the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family in a narrative that covers decades of growing up, growing apart, and finding a way to establish an identity while keeping ties to the collectsive. It’s a beautiful tale of what it means to be an American family trying to reconcile old traditions with our modern world. There is love and angst, loyalty and rebellion. It’s not always pretty, but it’s very real.
Maggie Smith makes poetry feel so effortless and moving, so appropriate for our times while also capturing a timeless essence of what it means to be alive. This is my favorite so far:
Poem Beginning with a Retweet
If you drive past horses and don’t say horses
you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane
but don’t point it out. A rainbow,
a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t
whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer!
Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker
and don’t shush everyone around you
into silence. If you find an unbroken
sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see
a dorsal fin breaking the water.
If you see the moon and don’t say
oh my god look at the moon. If you smell
smoke and don’t search for fire.
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.
If you’ve ever been in your late 20s and felt completely out of place while also firmly aware of your destiny (even if you’re struggling to get there), this is a book for you. Anna is an opera singer attending an illustrious London art school trying to balance a competitive environment with a personal life. Spoiler alert: she doesn’t always do this very well. She’s broke and not great with men, but her talent and personality will leave you cheering for her for the whole read.
This novel is similar to A Very Nice Girl in that it follows a young female artist making her way through the world. She is also broke and not great with men, but she (Casey) is a writer rather than a singer. She is also a waitress in an upper-scale restaurant, and the scenes of her at work were so spot on that I almost wanted to pick up an apron and start serving again. There are love triangles and crushing defeats as she tries to figure out if being an artist is even worth all the effort. It’s beautifully written and entirely enjoyable.
In Migrations, there are no more animals in the rain forests. No bears or big cats in the forests. It’s a work of fiction, yes, but one that feels scarily close to our future. In it, researcher Franny Stone takes off on an epic journey to track the last of the Arctic terns on their final migration south. It’s an adventure on the level of Moby Dick, though the ocean has no more whales here. And while this book is definitely a warning about climate change, it doesn’t preach at you or exist to frighten you, but will leave you with sadness and perhaps even some hope.
In 2020, model and actress Emily Ratajkowski penned an incredibly moving essay for The Cut about what it means to be possessed by the world and, more specifically, who has had control over her image and her body throughout her career. In many ways, My Body feels like an extension of that piece. She dives into the above topics, expanding it further to explore feminism, sexuality, power, and our society’s obsession with beauty standards through her own experiences. Like the essay, it’s strongly written, incredibly vulnerable, and absolutely worth reading.
