What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Featuring Yiyun Li, Alison Bechdel, Robert Macfarlane, and More
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, Alison Bechdel’s Spent, and Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel
(Mariner)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Check out Alison Bechdel’s annotated nightstand here
“A sharp, hilarious and humane look at social and cultural politics … Bechdel’s signature wry humor, keen observational skills and masterful storytelling take center stage in Spent. The narrative is driven by richly drawn, down-to-earth characters each with their own hurdles.”
–Maya Fleischmann (BookPage)
2. The Book of Records by Madeleine Thein
(W. W. Norton & Company)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Madeleine Thein here
“An all-too-human novel that explores themes of collaboration and resistance, exile and community … While Thien’s book is a novel of ideas, it’s much more visceral … Thien’s book is full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure I don’t want to ruin for those about to enter its pages. Delight is in discovery.”
–Lorraine Berry (The Los Angeles Times)
3. Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan
(Viking)
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Donal Ryan here
“A wonder … Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives … Moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.”
–Hamilton Cain (The New York Times Book Review)
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1. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
(W. W. Norton & Company)
10 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Robert Macfarlane here
“Perhaps the most moving and beautiful part of his book comes in the interludes between visits to faraway rivers in which Macfarlane tells the history of a small spring near his home … If we’re lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by. The revelations in this passionate book will make that quiet, common experience even more life-giving.”
–Pamela Miller (The Star Tribune)
2. Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 5 Positive
“Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled. Appropriately for a book that purports to stenograph only her thoughts, she writes in a simple, pared-back language … Elicits many difficult feelings. I had to put it down at several places before I found myself able to return to it. Yet Li’s brutal lucidity—her refusal to burnish her thoughts and sentiments to a high sheen—is its own form of ethical commitment.”
–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)
3. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
(Penguin)
2 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Superbly reported … Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids … In the end, I’m not convinced there was a coordinated campaign to hide the truth about Biden’s ‘condition,’ but maybe that doesn’t matter … Original Sin is not a compassionate account of Biden’s last campaign—at times it’s even a painful, if necessary, piece of journalism.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
