Dear Fahrenheit 451

by Annie Spence

  Anyway, although sometimes other worlds in the following books may still be on earth, they all have the ability to suck you into their unique environment. Just remember to listen for the delivery guy.

  Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari (translated by Anthony H. Chambers)

  This book of Japanese occult stories was written in 1776 and pulls you into dream worlds full of spirits; half-human, half-animal beings; and the occasional demon—all the things that come out to play on rainy, moonlit nights. Find a dreary evening and some blankets to hide under and give Ugetsu Monogatari a try (that’s the transliterated Japanese title, if you want to sound smarter).

  Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

  In a dystopian future, in a gated community near what had been L.A., fifteen-year-old Lauren is afflicted with the superpower of “hyperempathy”—an ability to feel the emotional pleasure and pain of others. This means she can’t ignore what the world has become or the suffering of those around her. Lauren creates a sort of “religion of change” called Earthseed, and, after her community and family are destroyed, she begins to move on with her belief in the future and her new companions. This is a two-book series and will rope you into reading more by Butler, the grand dame of science fiction.

  Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

  Dystopian fiction sometimes feels like too much or hits too close to home. Good thing there is such a thing as utopian fiction and you would do yourself some good by beginning your idealist adventure with Clarke’s novel, often heralded as the closest thing to a perfect science fiction book that exists. As the story goes, you know, aliens descend and take over every major city on earth. But they end up being pretty cool about the whole thing and eradicating a lot of human foibles. The book asks, even though the aliens have cured earth of disease and poverty and war, is this new way of life all it could be?

  Little, Big by John Crowley

  Fairies! In this hazy, magic novel, the Drinkwater family lives in a house called Edgewood for four generations—a house on the border of a fairy world. Don’t be turned off by the fantasy stuff. The novel is more of a family saga with some flare and really lyrical language. It’s been compared with, and actually quotes, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (aka drug references, a chick named Alice).

  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

  This novel is classified as ergodic literature. I looked it up. I don’t get it. It doesn’t matter. Still amazeballs, but aggressive with the footnotes! This is a horror/love tale told from the perspective of a tattoo guy and the perplexing manuscript he finds in a dead man’s apartment. You will not only escape your life with this one, you’re going to have to call in sick for a few days. Don’t let my husband sit next to you when you’re reading this because you need to focus. He will, for sure, interrupt several times and end up turning on Fool’s Gold with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. It’s really hard to read ergodic lit with sexually charged banter and a Bob Marley soundtrack playing in the background. This much I know.

  Hotel World by Ali Smith

  The haunting language and stream-of-consciousness narrative in Smith’s novel is what invites the reader to believe they are part of this world, sometimes as one of the living and sometimes … not. (Has it been long enough that “I see dead people” is funny again?) Five female narrators who all have one fancy English hotel in common let us into their thoughts about life and death’s big questions. A dark ’n’ quirky read.

  Dahlgren by Samuel Delany

  Seventies sci-fi American magical realism metafiction. Does that make you scared or excited? Weird shit is happening in one Midwestern city. Like, time is passing differently for different people, there’s a wanderer who doesn’t remember who he is, there’s no money or electricity, but there’s a lot of sex. This book is hard to get through and is not for everyone. “Not for everyone” actually seems to be the unintended subtitle of Dahlgren if you read the reviews. But it’s also the ultimate “live within a book” kind of book. So give it fifty pages. Then give it all 816. What, have you got something better to do? You’re reading this, aren’t you?

  What I Didn’t See by Karen Joy Fowler

  Too fickle to commit to one dreamworld for the afternoon? Read Fowler’s short-story collection, which runs the gamut of subject matter and protagonists—from a bratty teen to a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s to John Wilkes Booth—but sustains a fantastical (mostly dark) thread throughout. Fall into strangely beautiful scenes, one after the other, and return to reality by bedtime.

  Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

  A “first love” story if you met your first love at an artsy boarding school called Hailsham that you weren’t allowed to leave. Kathy, our heroine, is assigned the job of a “carer” (you’ll figure it out). As an adult, she reconnects with two of her fellow classmates from the past, and the three probe further into just how they came to be at Hailsham in the first place and how it alters the course of their lives. Elegant and atmospheric—let go and let it move you. This is a story that has to settle inside you for a bit before you pick up another book.

  Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

  Mandel’s novel is powerful and builds a detailed world while remaining a gripping read. In a not-so-distant future, 99 percent of the population and the world’s technological progress has been wiped out by a flu epidemic. Wait, though. It’s not about that. It’s about how people move on, and how they find comfort, companionship, and hope for their future. And there’s a crazy prophet in there. I can’t put down a book once I know there’s a crazy prophet involved. The postflu world Mandel creates is beautiful and oddly peaceful at times, as much as a world filled with the artifacts of a former way of life can be. Unfortunately, I don’t wash my hands nearly enough to fantasize that I would have been a survivor.

  Blind Date: Good Books with Bad Covers

  There are two things everybody says not to do, but everybody still does anyway: peeing in the shower and judging a book by its cover. Am I right? Guys?

  Well, anyway, think about how difficult it is to come up with ONE image that totally evokes an entire book’s identity. Nearly impossible. I can’t even think of an example of a book jacket that 100 percent captures its insides. Except maybe this book. If I get my way, the cover of this book is going to be a knockoff of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, except I will be all four of the Beatles’ faces and all of the decoupage heads are going to be famous authors (plus Jared Leto) crying because I’ve weeded them from the library. Also I promised my cat, Barb, she’d be on the cover. That, I think, will give people a fairly good idea of what I’m going for here.

  The following book covers aren’t actually bad (psst—some of them are), they just don’t do their pages justice. So if you chance upon some of these books and you like their summary but they don’t look so hot up front, give ’em a gander anyway. They are more than assaults the eye.

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  Not every edition, because there have been a gabazillion, but, man, there are some pretty heinous Jane Eyre book jackets floating around. Most covers tend to fall flat in conveying the governess’s persevering spirit. If someone were to call Book Cover Jane up on the phone and ask what she was doing, she might coolly reply, “Just chillin’, you know, doing some needlepoint, wandering around the gardens, braiding my hair, whatever, not at all worried about that strange old lady in my attic.” What’s worse than these covers, though, are the ones that make this nineteenth-century literary classic look like the next title in the Goosebumps series, or the cover with Jane decked out with red nails and lips, holding a rose. Jane Eyre is many things—spooky, thrilling, passionate, and tender—but a rom-com it is not. If you haven’t read this book, or if you haven’t read it since you were required to read it (and didn’t really read it), give it another try and embrace whatever cover girl you end up with, be she haggard, sultry, or dead in the eyes. They’re all the same on the inside.
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br />   The Martian by Andy Weir

  It got a cool cover. Then it got a movie cover (blech, movie tie-in covers). But before all that, this funny, adventurous novel about an astronaut-botanist stuck on Mars had kind of a boring cover. It was just—Mars. Which, for previously self-published author and NASA enthusiast Weir, was probably really exciting. But I didn’t know how exciting Mars could be until after I read Weir’s book. When I first looked at the cover, it said to me, “Probably about an alien war.” I read it anyway because my big sister told me to and I have to do what she says. If you passed The Martian by because it looked too fantasy, or too sciencey, or too Matt Damony, you missed out on a book that is truly entertaining and informative, and also you skipped book club out of guilt, and they probably talked about you behind your back.

  Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia by James Kaplan

  This is a novel with a lonesome mood, about two high school pals who are living very different lives twenty-five years after graduation, yet each feels sorry for the other. It gives you a feeling throughout that a dark force is looming, in a really good way. So, I kind of get the hovering clouds on the blue cover, but it really makes this terrific novel about friendship and regret look pretty “meh.” And the font bothered me. Why italicize the from? It’s ridiculous that four italicized letters might keep someone from enjoying this novel, but that was almost my fate. What prompted me to open the book jacket was the subtitle, “a novel of suburbia.” Characters from the suburbs have a specific malaise that I’m drawn to as a reader. Anyway, once I opened Two Guys, I consumed it entirely. But I almost didn’t. So now I (mostly) don’t let a book’s font rule my reading.

  Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

  I’ll give the cover artists this: Dandelion Wine is hard to define. It can’t be pigeonholed, which is what makes it so sweeping and tremendous. DW is not Bradbury’s typical science fiction tome. It’s not really a true coming-of-age story either. It’s not a quirky townspeople tale. There are chapters that make you want to roll around in green fields and revel in your aliveness, and chapters that compel you to lock your doors and hide in your bathtub with your kitchen knives. It was probably a real bitch to come up with a book jacket for this masterpiece. The 1957 first edition—a field of dandelions—is vague enough that anyone with a passing interest and a slim recognition of Bradbury’s name would probably be interested enough to pick it up. After that, the covers vacillate between creepy beautiful and weird as shit. By weird as shit I mean a kid in a serious jean jacket oblivious to a dandelion/jellyfish thing sucking his head, or a wine bottle with skulls and jaws and scissors and butterflies coming out of it.

  The Wilds by Julia Elliott

  Elliott’s book of short stories features a beautiful cover of a woman with a cat’s tail and a tree growing out of her head. It’s intriguing and very well done. Still, I don’t think it represents how nuanced and diverse the stories compiled inside are. It looks like a book of strange fairy tales. And there is most assuredly some strange shit inside. There are medical spas with flesh-eating procedures and pirates. There are old ladies with robot legs. But there are also girls and women very much rooted in the realities of their existence. The stories are expansive in subject matter and deal with complex relationships and emotion. Please don’t mistake The Wilds for a book of fantastical fables and put it back on the shelf. We don’t like when patrons reshelve the books on their own.

  Mink River by Brian Doyle

  I was so put off by this cover that I started thinking there had to be something I wasn’t understanding. A crow Photoshopped on top of some water? But the title is Mink River—where’s the mink? I was confused. I’m still confused. In my confusion, I perused the first page and fell pretty hard for Doyle’s novel about the inhabitants of a small town in Oregon and a talking crow (it’s more than that, but I wanted to explain the crow up front). The language is lovely and begs to be read aloud, the characters are engaging, and there’s a little bit of magic. I really adore it. Still, I’m glad I don’t have to look at Mink’s face every time I sit down in my living room, because it feels like when someone you’re dating gets a terrible haircut and you kind of don’t want to make out with them anymore.

  The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

  Specifically, the 1967 paperback published by Dell. The novel, which you may have ignored because you think of McMurtry as a “westerns” guy, is an epic coming-of-age about teenagers in rural Texas in the 1950s. Even the older characters in the town are stunted by inertia. Everyone is yearning for something. It’s a spare and melancholy story. But you will not infer this from the 1967 cover, which reads, in big block letters: “The Savage Lusts of Adolescent Innocence” and pictures a bikini-clad lady leaning up against one of the guys from The Outsiders, in front of a sunset. It looks like a pulp romance. A wild romp in a Texas town! And while there’s a lot of sexual bravado in Picture Show (including some stuff with a farm animal you’ll probably want to skim over), the vibe of the novel—regret and longing—is sort of a boner killer. Take this cover with a grain of truth. Come for the thrills but prepare for the heaving sobs.

  The Cat in the Coffin by Mariko Koike

  The cover of this book, a cat staring at a woman’s foot on a straw rug, is just fine for a book about—I don’t know, a funny stoner story where the cat starts talking and it remembers where the main character put her wallet, but won’t say, and they spend the whole book trying to find it so they can go to the health food store they both like. Koike’s novel is MUCH better than the book I just described. But you might not know it. The story is really about Masayo, an au pair, and her charge, young Momoko, whose only friend is her cat. And Momoko’s father, with whom Masayo has fallen in love. And the woman that the father loves instead. And an ensuing obsession. And some dark deeds. It’s suspenseful. The hijinks are fatal. No one, to my memory, loses their wallet.

  Recovery Reads: A Book Lover’s Hair of the Dog

  I don’t like the phrase “guilty-pleasure read” because I don’t think you should be ashamed of anything you read as long as it makes you happy and it’s not, like, an instructional guide on how to steal and eat kittens. I also don’t like that the genre of the “feel-good read” gives writers a pass to write quickly and shittily (like how I just made up a crappy word to describe lazy writing?) as long as they hit all the “feel good” points. Thus, I offer to you: Recovery Reads. These are the books to turn to when you’re on the mend from a book that gave you nightmares or left you in a dark headspace and you need some lighter fare (but don’t want to give up quality). Recovery Reads are also great books to read before bedtime, especially after you’ve watched the news and you feel like you’re going to wake up in The Hunger Games arena.

  Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

  When I need a time-out from the heavy issues of our society, real or novelized, I like to pick up the most absurd thing within reach. Sedaris’s animal fables of forbidden love, bureaucracy, and fad diets will make you laugh out loud and also put your worries in perspective. As with anything written by Sedaris, it’s double the fun to hear him read his work and Squirrel’s audio edition also features Elaine Stritch, so, c’mon, you’re not going to get better than that.

  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Listen, don’t be above going in the children’s section when you need something to shake off your worldly adult woes. You can find a simple but still beautiful piece of work with an all-but-promised happy resolution and a chance to revisit some of your favorite characters (before you discovered Hermann Hesse and hardened your literary heart). Secret Garden is about another hard and sickly heart, two of them, actually, that are rejuvenated by a hidden garden in an otherwise lifeless English manor. It’s a little word balm for your soul.

  Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business by Dolly Parton

  This autobiography is also a soothing, easy read with substance. Dolly is undeniably smart ’n’ sweet. He
r childhood in the Great Smoky Mountains is the reading equivalent of sticking your bare feet in thick, cool mud (if you like the idea of that—and you will after you read her book). Also, fun fact, Ms. Parton met her husband, Carl, to whom she’s been married for fifty years, outside a Laundromat on one of her first days in Nashville. No matter what twisted Gone Girl read-alike you’re coming off of, Dolly’ll melt down your skeptic’s shield with her warmth and humor.

  Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe

  The British tend to do wit well, and Sutcliffe is particularly good at bright and charming novels that are sure to cure your book blues. In Whatever, three adult men neglect to send their moms cards on Mother’s Day, and the mamas get to talking. They decide their sons need to grow the F up and that the most efficient route to that goal is, obviously, to move in with them, unannounced. Can you imagine? Sutcliffe does, and even though he pokes fun at everyone, there’s some serious humanity to this book. It’s good to read after a Game of Thrones binge, when you’re still in the mood for quirky family dynamics but without the incest and beheadings.

  Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen

  I mean, just look at these ladies—bold colors, huge glasses, and admirable aplomb. After pondering the existence of such evil characters as Annie Wilkes, Patrick Bateman, or Nils Bjurman, you’ll feel better knowing there are people like this walking around in the real world. And there’s a sequel: Advanced Style: Older and Wiser.