Books like Blood Flow

The story is now quite a famous one, which has since been made into a TV miniseries.

Yet, my having lived over two decades in a once-occupied country, I’ve become especially sensitive to the toll that foreign occupation brings on conquered nations, their inhabitants and cultures. 

In All the Light We Cannot See, we as readers become instantly immersed in the cultures of two children—one blind and living in Paris; the other a German orphan with little direction in life other than his love of tinkering with machines. The read itself, I found provocative in that it explores the innocents—mostly women and children—caught up in the devastation of war.

The novel’s setting is the current Breton village of Saint-Malo, but in the 1940's, where the paths of two teens—a blind French teenager, Marie-Laure (Loberti), and a German soldier, Werner (Hofmann)—cross after Marie-Laure fled Paris with her father to what… show more.

This narrative read to me like an emotional rollercoaster—one that was both heartbreaking and uplifting.

The explorative core, I felt, was created by the deepening sisterly bonds throughout. In this, the protagonist, Imogen, develops an understanding of what it means to love and be loved. I both liked and related to how Imogen poured her creative energies into her artwork while experiencing her past and present converging and colliding.

What has been described as a real-life fairy tale—in fiction form, of course—is one that sneaks up on Imogen. She literally doesn't see it coming. And the read itself is so whimsical that one like myself could easily get lost in its plot. With that in mind, it’s a fun recommendation.

The memoir is based on a female perspective of being one of an English immigrant couple living, working, and raising a family in challenging and changing South Africa, which I found a riveting read.

Val’s having to play the singular parent—wife, mother, breadwinner—while putting up with her husband's self-centered behavior, I thought, was no less than soul-crushing. Her husband’s badly formed, egoistic decision-making led him to leave her and their family in South Africa to pursue better job opportunities in the Netherlands.

Miraculously, her grit and determination not to be defeated but to rise from such an otherwise devastating separation were, to me, no less than inspiring. Highveld Ways is a great read coupled with an incredible insight into the changing land of South Africa during and shortly after Apartheid. 

I am highly recommending this read which coincides with the theme of regeneration and renewal, which to me are the gifts that are left to us by our traumas.

In The Generosity of Scars, Scott discusses his 30 years of living and working in high-pressure situations, such as when in service as an American Green Beret in Afghanistan. 

Mann has written The Generosity of Scars in the hopes of helping others channel their life’s challenges into meaningful storytelling, while being most interested in what he calls the ‘real human connection’ in a world in which the machinations of AI are swiftly overtaking.

The author has also appeared on TED stages and before Congress. Yet, what is most impressive to me is his successful fundraising for non-profits and the like.

As we explore in my joy trainings, when life sucks, our sweet little hearts want to close in defense. It’s been that way our whole lives.

We learned from experience that an open heart is a vulnerable heart, so it only seems right and natural that we’d want to safeguard this fragile part of us in this way. The problem is it doesn’t work. In walling off our hearts from experiencing pain and mess, we inadvertently block out joy, wonder, and bliss in the process.

In this gorgeous little gem of a book, S.C Lourie shows us what it looks like to bravely wedge open your tender heart, even when circumstances around you would dictate you do otherwise.  

I remember reading a review of Baldwin’s fourth novel in the New York Times, which described this book as “a disaster in virtually every particular—theme, characterization, plot, rhetoric.” Ouch. For me, this novel, though uneven, is an important work in which Baldwin explores his commitments as a queer activist and artist, something that most reviewers missed at the time. 

During the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin was nicknamed “Martin Luther Queen,” and he received vicious broadsides about his sexuality from the likes of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Tell Me writes back to Cleaver and his cohort. As I’ve found with all of Baldwin’s writing, it’s worth sifting through some of the weaker writing to find passages that surprise and delight. “[If] one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally,” Baldwin writes, “we can release each other from… show more.

This book offers a response to a deep longing to be in the world with childlike curiosity. It encourages our direct perception of life through the energetic heart field. Although it is meant as a knowledgeable guide for listening to and communicating with plants, it elicits a poignant call during a time of profound alienation. Encouraging the letting go of top-down linear thinking, Buhner offers a step-by-step somatic path for decolonizing the soul. I discovered by exchanging the word “psoas” for “plant” the book easily becomes a personal guide for increasing our core awareness as it inspires opening the heart by rooting into a reciprocal relationship with the living Earth. To me, re-wilding my relationship with the deepest aspects of self is vitally personal and imperative if all life is to truly flourish. 

Carly is pregnant but her baby has a fatal heart defect. Her brother-in-law knows how to fix this: travel from 1970 to a future time where fetal surgery will save her child’s life. And the portals are all over the place! All you have to do is find one on his computer, go there and step off a roof or ledge. The scientific explanation for this is so believable I was half-convinced it’s real. Of course, it’s not that simple. What will a mother do to save her child? This brought back all the sleepless nights when my kids were sick or going through tough times. Mothers do what we have to do.

Reckless Memories is the first book in the standalone Wrecked series. Ford and Bell will capture your heart with their second chance at love. There’s angst and tension and a swoon-worthy love story brewing amidst suspenseful moments. If you love a good romance with Nora Roberts’ feels, you’ll enjoy this story!

Since zoologist Bill Schutt previously wrote the very popular Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History, you might expect that his more recent expose of the heart would be equally wide-ranging, engaging, and touched with macabre. It is.

With clarity and wit, Schutt describes circulation from worms to bats to whales along with the curious adaptations that explain why frog hearts can freeze solid and resume function and why the blood of horseshoe crabs is favored by researchers. Schutt not only describes this living pump across the animal kingdom but also through time as philosophers and scientists have pondered, and eventually discovered, its true function.

If you have an interest in biology, history of science, or your own inner workings, Pump will make your heart throb.