Here are #10-20 of Amazon’s picks that have not yet made it onto BookMovement book clubs’ radar–For the Amazon picks #1-9 that are also Top Club Picks of 2018, subscribe to our newsletter–see the subscribe box above.
10. The Feather Thief
The title of The Feather Thief smartly echoes Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief, and The Feather Thief has good reason to compare itself to such an admired book. Strange niches of history. Obsessives who refuse to adhere to the law. A writer who stumbles upon a story that becomes an obsession in its own right. All these elements combust to create Johnson’s investigation into the theft of 299 rare bird skins from a British natural history museum. While bird skins might sound like (ahem) dry reading, Johnson knows just how to fascinate the reader, plunging with vigor into exotic bird exploration, the crackdown on rare bird trafficking, and the insular world of fly-tying enthusiasts, all of which lead, almost inevitably, to the theft from the Tring Museum. The most likely receivers of the stolen goods? Fly-tiers with an unquenchable thirst for feathers from blue chatterers, the resplendent quetzal, and birds of paradise so they can re-create outlandish Victorian-era salmon flies. Although the thief is caught, Johnson decides to investigate himself what happened to the 106 never-recovered bird skins, pulling the reader even deeper into the thief’s bizarre world. Clever, informative, and sometimes endearingly bumbling, this mix of natural history and crime opens up new worlds. You’ll never look at a stuffed bird the same way again. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
11. Girls Burn Brighter
I first imagined that the title of Girls Burn Brighter referred to the custom of widows immolating themselves upon their husbands’ funeral pyres. While no women suffer that fate in this contemporary novel, that’s practically the only bad thing that doesn’t happen to best friends Poornima and Savitha, who grow up in rural India. The two young women become soul mates as they work long hours together in Poornima’s father’s weaving hut, but a late-night attack on Savitha forces her out of Poornima’s life shortly before Poornima enters an arranged marriage. Shobha Rao’s writing power builds in the spaces between words, her lean prose making the glimpses she shows of the breathtaking misogyny the girls endure all the more horrifying. This is not an emotionally gentle novel. You’ll be outraged and hopeful, shocked and awakened. And throughout, Poornima and Savitha do burn brighter, fueled by their unshakable determination to find each other again. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
12. The Line Becomes a River
These days, mention of “the Border” stirs both imagination and emotion, what you see and feel depending on how you perceive the world. But how many of us understand this real-world interzone where actual borders shift and bleed, and hard scenes of death, drug smuggling, and human suffering unfold daily? The son of a park ranger, Francisco Cantú grew up in the southwest. When he joined the Border Patrol, he became witness to the stark realities of the desert, where the obligations of his job weighed heavy against his sense of humanity. Dark material for sure, but Cantú is a good no-nonsense writer, and his direct, stoic prose makes The Line Becomes a River a weighty and timely document on one of our most divisive arguments. —Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review
13. The Electric Woman
We all have things that we’re afraid of, from the mundane (spiders) to the profound (boasts about the size of one’s nuclear buttons). Tessa Fontaine’s greatest fear was losing her mother — and after suffering a series of debilitating strokes, this was imminently becoming a reality. Despite her precarious health, Fontaine’s mom decided to defer a dream no longer and tour Italy with her husband — a courageous, if not medically advised, adventure. It was also just the cue her daughter needed to cross off a bucket list item of her own: Join the circus. Like any other job, a certain skill set is required, one that Fontaine (not so convincingly) espoused. But she was a quick study, and over the course of a season with the World of Wonders, the last touring sideshow in America, she learned to eat fire, charm snakes, become a human flashlight, and fit in with her sideshow family (perhaps the biggest feat of all). Turns out, there isn’t much smoke and mirrors involved; to perform these death defying acts, you must “un-train your instincts, unlearn self-preservation.” You have to, essentially, make peace with pain. That also happens to be one of the keys to living a full life and the overarching message of this unique and moving memoir: If you don’t face your fears and open yourself up to heartache, you’re closing yourself off from the best life has to offer. The Electric Woman is a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at carnival life and an ode to unconditional love. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review
14. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara’s compelling investigation of the “Golden State Killer,” who terrorized northern California from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, is one of the best true crime books to come along in a decade. It’s the story of two obsessions: McNamara’s obsession with the criminal, and whatever abhorrent obsession drove him to commit a series of horrific rapes and murders over ten years. The author, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, describes the crimes and examines clues in an effort to uncover his identity. Occasionally, she challenges convention by inserting herself into the narrative (at one point, she even writes directly to the Golden State Killer), and the book acquires even more personal weight when one takes into account the fact that McNamara, at the age of 46, died while writing it. Knowing all of this, and with each chilling description, McNamara’s obsession begins to become our own. She believed that the Golden State Killer would still be alive today. You will discover yourself hoping she’s right, so that you can see him captured and brought to justice. — Chris Schluep, the Amazon Book Review
15. You Think It, I’ll Say It
16. The Overstory
Do you love trees? I thought I did, until I read Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and I realized that my appreciation of trees was lightweight at best. When one of Powers’s characters goes to a small grove outside her office window to determine the tree’s species, “She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering the morphine.” Trees are not exactly an addiction to the wide-ranging cast of characters–an engineer, a Vietnam vet, a college student, a videogame designer, and more—but more like a touchstone that offers tradition and destiny at once. Powers, a National Book Award and Pushcart Prize–winning author, is devious in that he first immerses the reader in the lives of his characters before delicately oxygenating his story with the devastation of Dutch elm disease, the enduring strength of the sequoia, and the communication methods trees use to warn of predators and to lure allies. The Overstory might sound a bit woo-woo—and it definitely is that, though in such a way that it inspires passion instead of eye-rolling. This gorgeously written novel will seduce you into looking more closely at not only our fellow human beings but the towering bio-kingdom that is too often merely a backdrop to our days. Perhaps, like me, you will be inspired to walk out into the night to smell the rain sweeping through the nearby evergreen trees. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
17. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
In this posthumous collection, Denis Johnson’s narrators are often confined to one place as they relate their stories—a couch, the kitchen table, or even prison. Yet images tumble forward, and humor bubbles, and his characters speak out about their hopes and limitations, and some kind of alchemy takes place that can only be achieved by the best writers. You feel like they’ve taken you on a journey, even if you never left their minimum space. Johnson’s characters all have faults, about which they are at least semi-aware. Some of them are criminals, and even more are addicts. But all of them are deeply human, and you will probably recognize a little of yourself in these stories, even if no one else would make that connection. There are lines you’ll want to underline. Memories and emotions will be stirred. This is a great collection for Johnson to go out on. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review
18. How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan, whose curiosity about our eating habits led to thoughtful, culturally transformative writing in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and, most recently, Food Rules, here explores the potential psilocybin and other psychedelics hold for transformation of the spiritual and emotional kind. As he tells it in How to Change Your Mind, a fascinating, sometimes moving look at the history and uses of psychoactive compounds, Pollan avoided such drugs in his youth, but later in life became intrigued by the opportunity “to become more ‘open’—especially at this age, when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable.” And then there was the chance of experiencing a spiritual epiphany—“touching the face of God,” as one ecstatic user put it. Pollan’s natural skepticism and wry humor is a good match for the detailed accounts he includes of mind-blowing, trip-induced revelations. Ultimately, whether such experiences lead to genuine insight into, say, the origins of the universe or what we can expect after death seems less interesting to Pollan than the hope psychedelics offer people suffering from depression, addiction, and acute illness. Can magic mushrooms be used more broadly for “the betterment of well people”? Readers who begin reading Pollan’s book feeling doubtful about the responsible use of psychedelics may find their own minds changed by his engaging, enlightened, and persuasive combination of personal and journalistic research. “I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a wide-open frontier, squinting to make out something wondrous,” he writes, and with him as our guide, so do we. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review
19. Look Alive Out There
In her latest collection of essays, Sloane Crosley demonstrates, yet again, a knack for making the mundane miraculous. Reading Look Alive Out There is like listening to your smartest, funniest friend regale you about their (mis)adventures, be it waging war on a rude neighbor, making an ill-conceived climb up a volcano, or helping a swinger couple pick out a third (as you do). And like a friend, Crosley is not afraid to veer into vulnerable territory, which reveals the growth of a writer who first displayed her sardonic wit and keen appreciation of the absurd in, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. It’s as good a time as any to be reminded that life is full of good humor, but only a select few do that as well as Sloane Crosley. —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review
20. God Save Texas
With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny.
God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities already form a majority (including the largest number of Muslims). The cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king but Texas now leads California in technology exports. The Texas economic model of low taxes and minimal regulation has produced extraordinary growth but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. And Wright’s profound portrait of the state not only reflects our country back as it is, but as it was and as it might be.
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