Sara R's Picks

Every story in this collection is so different from the one before, and every one is beautiful. No matter the strange or unusual circumstances Wilson creates for his characters, he reveals humanity, truth and often hope, leaving us hungry for more of the worlds he imagines. The variety in these stories makes the collection something a wide array of readers will enjoy. Also check out his fantastic novel, The Family Fang (available August 2011)!

A new addition to my list of all-time favorites, The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken takes two beautiful, unlikely characters and makes their strangeness fit together in a bitter-sweet something, kind of like romance. What is so wonderful about this story is the achingly un-romantic reality of love and connection: how we build families, what we give up for each other, and what we gain. Absolutely beautiful.

This book solidified Jacqueline Woodson as one of my favorite young adult authors. This is a poetic, understated coming of age story - growing up, starting to see who you are, falling in love, learning that people are often not who we expect them to be. Worth reading more than once.

A deeply personal book that doesn’t offer sweeping generalizations like other books about grief, but rather tells a story, a repetitive, somewhat stilted story of living a year with loss. Didion is able to capture, in her style and presentation, the way the brain seems to work in grief. The way we go back to the same things over and over, the what-ifs that haunt us, the “vortexes” that suck us into memory, the way that in grief we may try to avoid certain places or topics to save ourselves pain, but how in reality, there is no way around it; we just get sucked in. Though the book is so personal as to make the reader feel very far outside of the lives being exposed, there is something about seeing the reality of another’s life and mourning that humanizes one’s own.