Book of the Day Roundup: December 11-15, 2023
The Spirituality of Dreaming
Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves
Kelly Bulkeley
Broadleaf Books
Hardcover $28.99 (276pp)
978-1-5064-8314-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The Spirituality of Dreaming repackages dreaming as a life-enhancing, revolutionary act resulting in access to fonts of sacred energy.
Kelly Bulkeley declares that dreaming is the most democratic and accessible of all the spiritual arts: everyone sleeps and everyone dreams, though not everyone remembers their dreams. Drawing on interviews and data analysis, his book details what’s going on in the almost one-third of a person’s life that’s spent sleeping. It also names strategies for aspiring “big dreamers”—people who have intense, memorable, and even transformative dreams. Sensitive and encouraging, it invites exploration of the dream world for wisdom and guidance—but comes with the warning that it’s best to enter this sacred space with an attitude of humility.
The book includes coverage of lucid dreaming, dream incubation, dream-sharing practices, the role of dreams in creativity and cultural innovation, and the impact of digital technologies on dreams. It also explores the roles that dreams play in culture, including how religions lumped them together with witchcraft, sorcery, and astrology. In contrast to those who treat rest, sleep, and dreaming as passive time-wasters, it honors workers’ struggles for time to rest and argues that claiming time for self-care is a revolutionary act.
Among the book’s helpful recommendations are tips for cultivating healthy sleep; learning the language of metaphor and dream interpretation techniques; dream journaling; and sharing dreams with others to amplify individual understanding and foster the growth of communities. While accessing the wisdom of dreams requires consistent effort and the development of personal recall and understanding, the book suggests that its life-enhancing, transformative effects are well worth the effort.
The guidebook The Spirituality of Dreaming touts the amazing, creativity-enhancing benefits of dreaming as a spiritual practice.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 27, 2023)
The Ferris Wheel
Tülin Kozikoğlu
Hüseyin Sönmezay
Crocodile Books
Hardcover $18.95 (40pp)
978-1-62371-721-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Painterly illustrations track the parallel stories of two families in this picture book about the pain of leaving home and the hope of brighter days. A mother warns her son to be careful of road construction as they head to a carnival; across the page, a father issues a similar warning to his daughter as they navigate the rubble of their wartorn town on their flight to safety. A reminder that you never know someone else’s story, this heartrending picture book urges compassion.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 27, 2023)
Forgetting
Frederika Amalia Finkelstein
Isabel Cout, translator
Christopher Elson, translator
Deep Vellum Publishing
Softcover $16.95 (196pp)
978-1-64605-226-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Frederika Amalia Finkelstein’s novel Forgetting, an insomniac grapples with the past and the future of a world perhaps beyond saving.
Alma’s grandfather did not die in a concentration camp, but sometimes she says he did. And sometimes she sits up all night, thinking about the ways he could have died and the people who did die, both in the camps and elsewhere. Unable and unwilling to escape her dark obsessions, she eradicates the line between truth and lies, questioning even the most accepted facts about world history and her own life.
Alma memorizes statistics and compares the timeline governing her past and possessions to that of the Holocaust—her grandfather, for instance, was born the same year as Eva Braun. All these other lives make her afraid to live her own, leaving her trapped in a loop of numbers and pessimistic appraisals of humanity. Numbed and exhausted by the inheritance of memory, she buries herself in her own musings, abandoning a normal routine and relationships in favor of nighttime strolls around Paris and endless hours at the computer.
Among other difficult and poignant questions, Alma wonders if it’s possible to have a meaningful existence when all things must stop existing. Her answers to these questions—such as the assertion that Hitler’s suicide won him the war—can be twisted and seem to defy all logic, yet they make a tragic sort of sense that Alma, when considering the state of the world, cannot ignore. A frenetic final scene at a racetrack, where Alma pins all of her hopes on the outcome of a single race, sees her disparate obsessions tumble together in a phantasmagorical display of delusion and reluctant hope.
Forgetting is a novel about how past events haunt society at large and the individuals within it.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (October 27, 2023)
No One Left but You
Tash McAdam
Soho Teen
Hardcover $18.99 (288pp)
978-1-64129-489-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A party gone wrong leaves a community reeling in Tash McAdam’s mystery novel No One Left but You.
Since coming out as trans, Max has been ostracized by his former friends, including his crush, Danny. A kind teacher takes notice and pairs Max with the rich, beautiful new girl, Gloss. She is enamored of Max, giving him a makeover and letting him sleep over at her always-empty penthouse apartment.
As the school year ends and relationships change, an end-of-year party meant to celebrate the students’ accomplishments becomes a crime scene. But tragedy is a great silencer, and even Max is unsure of what happened—and why he’s covered in blood.
Max is a thoughtful hero, and the close narration gives his feelings immediacy. It is claustrophobic, as if there is no space to think or reflect. But Max’s internal world is also fertile ground for his songwriting. He uses his lyrics, peppered throughout the book, to help him process his feelings of doubt and rejection. They are not a panacea, but a tool. His friendship with Gloss, a confusing whirlwind, is also a tool that helps him understand the depths of secrets others can keep.
The narrative is split into alternating “before” and “after” chapters. When the book opens, on an “after” chapter in a police station, it is clear that something terrible has happened, but the magnitude is unknown. The incongruity between this chapter and the first “before” chapter, in a quiet classroom, is disorienting and intriguing. The tension is immediate, and the impetus to know what happened to land Max in a police station, and the surrounding context, sets the story on its breakneck pace toward disaster.
No One Left but You is a suspenseful mystery novel about grief and obsession.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (October 27, 2023)
The Core of an Onion
Peeling the Rarest Common Food―Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
Mark Kurlansky
Bloomsbury Publishing
Hardcover $27.99 (240pp)
978-1-63557-593-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Mark Kurlansky is the bestselling author of culinary and social histories covering cod, oysters, milk, and salt. His latest book, The Core of an Onion, gives the starring role to the humble yet essential onion, combining beguiling nuggets of literature, art, medicine, botany, and agriculture with assured, bouncy writing and more than one hundred recipes.
Onions and their allium kin have been used as aphrodisiacs, folk remedies, dyes, or comestibles. Introducing rapid-fire facts from ancient civilizations and contemporary cultures, the book covers how onion farmers sway elections in contemporary India; the making of sweet, spiced medieval onion concoctions; and the pungent scents and tastes of Catalan food festivals.
An accomplished cook, Kurlansky interjects some of his own kitchen tips and firm opinions into this work, as when he sets James Bond straight about martini shaking (it chips the ice and dilutes the gin) and decrees that otherwise delightful pickled onions should “not be swimming around in my cocktail.” However, it is his unabashed admiration for historical cookbook writers, women especially, that is most endearing. The “joyfully physical” recipes of British cookbook author Hannah Glasse, the erudition of Spanish countess Emilia Pardo Bazan, and the social activism of Lydia Maria Francis Child are given special focus among the recounting of onioncentric recipes. Onion soups of every description; onion sauces both creamy and au vinaigrette; onions stuffed, braised, glazed and creamed; and even savory and sweet pies make up a toothsome sampler of traditional cuisines and chefs’ particular styles.
A sparkling mix of snappy prose with Kurlansky’s own illustrations, The Core of an Onion is a perfect treat that demonstrates the dictate that “onions have a way of taking on unexpected significance.”
RACHEL JAGARESKI (October 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
