Photo: Retailers When I read a book, I always find myself wondering what books the author was reading while they wrote. I’ve long imagined, for instance, that Alice Walker thought fondly of Zora Neale Hurston while writing The Color Purple, or Nicole Dennis-Benn called on Toni Morrison while crafting Here Comes the Sun.
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss $14 $16 now 13% off $14 Gyasi read a lot of science-centered creative nonfiction while writing Transcendent Kingdom, like this one by Eula Biss. It’s about the author’s — a new mother — fear around immunization and vaccines. “I really liked that she pulled from different places in order to build out this narrative. She’d do things like talk about Dracula and vampires and what it means to be bitten. And then she’d talk about why we call a vaccine a shot.
$15 at Amazon Buy $24 at Bookshop Buy Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukherjee $14 $20 now 30% off $14 Gyasi also name-dropped this book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which chronicles the history of cancer, starting thousands of years ago all the way through to the present day. Gyasi found this one helpful for understanding how a scientist might write about something as technical as cancer in an interesting, compelling way.
$8 at Amazon Buy $7 at Bookshop Buy My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout $14 $17 now 18% off $14 Like Transcendent Kingdom, My Name Is Lucy Barton features a protagonist who has a difficult relationship with her mother, and is as much about what is said as it is about what is concealed. “The main character has this trauma in her childhood that the two don’t really speak about.
Omg please make this a regular feature
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