Here are 16 books that Butts fans have personally recommended if you like
Butts.
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I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?
KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
After building a career as a women’s magazine editor, I left my job in the midst of a complicated and life-altering experience with infertility. Throughout those years I longed for connection—to other women who knew this specific pain, but also back to the person I'd always known myself to be. Infertility had stolen me from myself. The books on this list are not about infertility; rather, they speak to what it means to be a human who is enduring. For anyone feeling lost or despairing on an agonizing road to parenthood, I believe these are the books to light the way back home.
This book is a collection of essays with an almost palpable heartbeat, which is exactly the sort of book I consider mandatory reading.
I found myself leveled by the depth and volume of insights on every page, about what it means to really see and care for one another, to withstand pain ourselves, and to witness it in the world.
I experienced so many moments of recognition, reading an articulation of a human truth I’d perhaps known or felt on a subconscious level but never formed into thought or heard expressed quite so beautifully. It’s as if Leslie Jamison lives at a different emotional frequency, paying attention to the world and distilling what’s important.
One piece of advice: don’t tackle this one intending to make notes in the margins because pretty much every sentence is worth coming back to.
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade…
I love reading about life experiences, however raw or unflinching they get. Many of the books on this list inspired me to be just as honest in my own creative work. While writing Alligator Meat, which began as my English honors thesis and became my memoir, I kept coming back to these books for guidance.
This book not only inspired me to explore the world of memoirs but also pushed me to confront my own fear of honesty on the page.
It is easy to hide behind fiction, yet confronting the culture tied to your own trauma is another challenge entirely. This book left me shocked, tearful, joyous, and empowered, and I returned to it often during my writing process for its sheer bravery.
"My Body offers a lucid examination of the mirrors in which its author has seen herself, and her indoctrination into the cult of beauty as defined by powerful men. In its more transcendent passages . . . the author steps beyond the reach of any 'Pygmalion' and becomes a more dangerous kind of beautiful. She becomes a kind of god in her own right: an artist." ―Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review
A deeply honest investigation of what it means to be a woman and a commodity from Emily Ratajkowski, the archetypal, multi-hyphenate…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
After the loss of my first baby, I became obsessed with understanding the emotions I was feeling and how to find myself again. I began reading memoirs during this time as a way to connect and find myself. While each story carries its own merits and uniqueness, I found I could take away bits of wisdom from each. How does one figure out who they are when they have lost something so important to themselves? How does one reconcile relationships within their own family? And how does one deal with the mental health toll that inevitably life can take? These questions are my focus when I read and write.
Manguso’s book was the first memoir I read that delved into what it is like to live with a serious health condition. Her first-person account was vulnerable, yet she used the formatting of short chapters (vignette style) to carry the story through.
I learned so much about the struggle of long-term illness, but I also found moments within her book to breathe and find hope. Her book really helped me shape my own writing in how she conveys profound topics in a way that can buoy the human spirit.
A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice
The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.
There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.
But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.
I used to be a freelance writer for magazines, but my secret passion was kids’ lit. When I decided to become a children’s author, I wanted to write nonfiction that was fun to read, not the dull, boring books I remembered from my childhood. When I discovered the first three books on my list, I was inspired to free up my funny bone and write to delight. The second two books also showcase innovative formats and humorous writing styles. Reading nonfiction doesn’t have to be a chore. These books will have children laughing while they learn.
Written in a kid-friendly, conversational style, this book is full of scientific information about how animals’ bottoms are perfectly adapted to their environment. It also has surprising facts that kids won’t forget. Did you know that a wombat’s poop is cube-shaped? As Rish puts it, “They produce 80 to 100 caca cubes per night…” At the end of the book, readers are asked to vote for their choice of the best animal butt. This super-fun nonfiction that will keep elementary students reading past their bedtime.
Butts are funny, but they're also useful! Humans use their butts for two primary functions--sitting and pooping. It's the same for most other animals. However, some species have adapted to use their backsides in several surprising ways. Did you know manatees swim using farts? Or that herrings communicate by passing gas? There are animals that use their butts to protect themselves; others build things with their butts; and some breathe through their butts! Focusing on ten different animals and their derrieres, and offering fun facts about their origin, habitat, and "posterior power," this hilarious book captures the wonder of our…
I am a chocolate loving writer, goat yoga enthusiast, and author of several successful children’s books specializing in early learning, along with an award-winning line of gratitude coloring journals. I hope to inspire a love of reading through education and laughter. My latest book, Gomer the Gassy Goat has sold over 21,000 units since 2021, and was recently referenced in The New York Times about the importance of using humor in books for kids to inspire a love of reading. “Not every book has to reach a lesson. Sometimes it can just be fun.” - Mr. Price
This poor little boy thinks his butt is broken because there’s a crack at the back. Told in rhyme, little ones and adults alike will love the silliness of this book as the main character searches for a new butt. The giggles will be plenty... they were in our house.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I don’t read books with explicit scenes, and I don’t write them either. I’ve read hundreds of novels in this genre and written several of my own. I believe closed-door romances can be just as tension-filled and fun as those with spice. I love the closed-door romance community and have a passion for sharing books that make me laugh, cry, and swoon.
I absolutely loved the way that Emma wrote these characters. I related to Seraphina and fell for Rafe’s charm time and time again. They’re a couple that’s perfect for each other.
Some book couples you read and think they may not make it past the last page, but I could see these two together forever. The whole book made me swoon and laugh.
Science Fiction, which used to be used to market all kinds of fantastic fiction (including The Lord of the Rings) was first subdivided into marketing genres like SF, Horror, and Fantasy. In recent years, those genres have been sliced into even smaller portions—into sub-genres like Urban Fantasy, Steampunk, Fantasy of Manners, Cyberpunk, and so on. The reasons that happened? We’ll save that for some much longer conversation. I’ve been a fantasy and science fiction writer for more than thirty years, and a reader and fan of the genre for longer than that—since childhood. My books have been New York Times and Sunday Times bestsellers, and they’re published in more than two dozen languages.
This series of linked novels and stories—start reading at An Alien Heat—would also be called SF. They deal with time travel, the end of human civilization, and all kinds of other science-fictiony ideas. But the science is blurred almost into invisibility: the people living at the End of Time have little to no idea of the eons that have passed before them—nor do they much care about the past, except as a source of themes for their decadent parties. (Their ignorance of historical fact is also where a lot of the humor comes from.) The End of Timers have power rings that draw energy from the “ancient cities”, and with them can basically do magic—rearrange geography, create and destroy apparently living beings, and change themselves into any shape they want. So science is wayback on the back burner; what we have instead is essentially a society of idiot wizards whiling away the…
Enter a decaying far, far future society, a time when anything and everything is possible, where words like 'conscience' and 'morality' are meaningless, and where heartfelt love blossoms mysteriously between Mrs Amelia Underwood, an unwilling time traveller, and Jherek Carnelian, a bemused denizen of the End of Time.
The Dancers at the End of Time, containing the novels An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs, is a brilliant homage to the 1890s of Wilde, Beardsley and the fin de siecle decadents, satire at its sharpest and most colourful.
Ever since I was a kid, I felt a strong desire to do the unexpected: A 9-year-old girl watching the World Wrestling Federation on TV and then recreating the action with her neighbors, a 5’2” volleyball player itching to play the front row, that same petite player wanting to join the army after high school. That last one didn’t end up panning out but I’ve always wanted to break out of whatever box I felt society put me in as a female. I love to write stories about women who broke barriers and made it possible for me, and the next generation, to continue to challenge expectations.
My first introduction to Selena Quintanilla was back in 1997 when Jennifer Lopez played her in the movie, Selena. So, when I saw Silvia López’s book I quickly picked it up. This book is as stunning as it is informative. The text is lengthier than many picture book biographies but it is so well done that the reader is eager to be immersed in this amazing life story. Not only did Selena break barriers within Tejano music, as it was traditionally performed by men, but she also crossed over into mainstream American music which helped open doors for future Latinx entertainers. One of Selena’s favorite sayings was, “Always believe that the impossible is possible,” and that’s definitely a message all kids need to hear.
"There's a lot of text in the book, but it's smartly framed within two-page spreads, and very little of it feels extraneous. ...A worthy picture-book primer on the Queen of Tejano music."-Kirkus Reviews
This is a moving and impassioned picture book about the iconic Queen of Tejano music, Selena Quintanilla, that will embolden young readers to find their passion and make the impossible, possible!
Selena Quintanilla's music career began at the age of nine when she started singing in her family's band. She went from using a hairbrush as a microphone to traveling from town to town to play gigs.…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am the first in my family to go into business for myself. Now, it took me years of thinking about it before I made the jump. I was scared to take that step, but I did it. My expertise came from 25 years of managing hundreds of clients in numerous industries. I loved how successful people can be with the craziest of ideas. How can you find your passion so you are happy and loving what you are doing in life? How do you overcome the fear of failure, move forward with your desires, and become abundant in doing it?
This book is about overcoming life’s challenges and achieving success in your business and personal life. Life is tough. The age-old saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” is present in each of these ladies' stories.
Reading about their challenges made me stronger to get past mine. Even though my challenges were far from theirs, they gave me strength in my daily business and personal life to continue to move forward. To not only be inspired but help inspire others. The result of our challenging journeys is always health and happiness.
Life After Heartbreak: 13 inspiring examples to encourage and inspire you. Simply Amazing Women continues celebrity radio host K. C. Armstrong's theme of human resiliency. Each of his 13 interviews showcases a woman who courageously faced severe challenges and ultimately used the experience for the benefit of others. It's not just about being a survivor; it's about surviving to ease the path of people facing their own life challenges: addiction, discrimination, poverty, violence, and more. You will see yourself in these women and relate to their qualities of self-preservation and empowerment. Armstrong (formerly of the Howard Stern Show) uses his…
