Books like Eternal Echoes

This is a beautifully written book that immediately brought me into Helen’s world of grief and uncertainty.

Her decision to take on a stubborn goshawk named Mabel seems at first to unnecessarily complicate her struggle to cope with her father’s death.

As the author trains Mabel, the scenes become so compelling that I found myself flipping pages as if I were reading a thriller. Mabel’s stubbornness, beauty, and wild independence fly off the page.

I first met this book on the last visit Gary and I made to a beloved bookstore in Seattle. After he died, I remembered it and tracked it down. It is an accordion book, its folded pages nested in a sturdy box. It was made, Carson writes, as an epitaph for her brother.

Among the folds, we find ephemera evoking his memory, and hers: fragments of notes, torn photos, drawings, paintings, scribbles. Running through the pages—a portion appears on the left side of each spread—is Carson’s translation of a poem by the Latin poet Catullus, written after the death of his own brother. The result is an assemblage that testifies to the chaos of grief and the curious beauty it can hold.

After Gary’s death, reading became unexpectedly painful. We had both loved books and reading together. The loss of that connection, combined with the brain fog that often accompanies grief, made reading difficult for a good while.

Poetry, though, was different. It wasn’t that it was easier than prose; I was still capable of losing my way mid-sentence. But poetry’s spaciousness—its distilled economy of words surrounded by large and quiet margins—helped the pages feel less overwhelming.

I love this collection by Tess Gallagher, written after the death of her husband, the short story writer and poet Raymond Carver. It is luminous. These poems do what poetry does best: speak what seems unspeakable, and make room for us to breathe as it speaks.

Kevin Young traces the inextricable bonds of death and love in this poetry collection that encompasses the accidental death of his father and, in the thick of that loss, the birth of his son and the beginning of his own fatherhood.

I am drawn to how he writes about the repetitions and informal rituals of grief—the necessary ones involved in the immediate aftermath of loss, and the ongoing ones that ask for our attention again and again, becoming a doorway into what still waits for us. Young is wonderfully stubborn in keeping his eyes open to the searing awfulness of losing as well as to the breathtaking, complicated wonder of life that persists.

I love this anthology by women over fifty because it offers such a wide range of truths about our experiences with sex and intimate relationships.

More than fifty essays and poems cover a variety of honest reflections on the exquisite, the good, the not-so-good, and the challenging parts of older women relating sexually to men, to women, and to themselves.

Feelings expressed range from the ambivalence, disappointment, and ecstasy of dating, to the pleasures of being single, to the joy of long-term sex and commitment, to the acceptance of the sometimes sudden movement between these states. Can be read in one or two delicious gulps! 

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

Faith is a good friend of mine, a prayer partner, in fact, and she knows what she writes. I always appreciate a writer with gravitas and lived experience of wilderness seasons.

Faith has gone to deep, dark places but remained incredibly hopeful and faithful. This book is filled with wisdom, fresh biblical insight, and an invitation to a deeper connection with God, even in difficult seasons.  

When I began researching love, one concept that blew me away was attachment styles: the theory that how our parents show us love—or don’t—determines how we love others. I learned that my style was to avoid intimacy; it was too scary. Understanding my style and my partner’s lets me begin to respond to him in ways that he needs instead of the way that feels natural to me.

This book explains how each of us is wired for relationships and how we can get past our unconscious needs to give partners love the way they need it. It includes little scenarios that helped me understand how our styles play out and made the book fun to read. It offers principles that codify the couple's relationship and exercises for couples to do together. 

This is an excellent book about relationships and attachment theory, which describes our attachment styles in relationships. I loved reading this book because it taught me about my own attachment style and how I am in relationships.

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn about themselves in relationships. I enjoyed the concepts in the book and how relatable it was. I recommend this to every human being who would like a relationship. It is a great way to learn about yourself.

This book from the early 1990s continues to speak volumes about society today. In completely accessible writing, it helped me to see how major historical developments (the spread of democracy and belief in human equality) occur in tandem with people’s daily lives (marriages that pursue the ideal of “democracy in intimacy”).

Couples who pursue “pure relationships” founded on sexual and emotional equality are doing something revolutionary—in a revolution that has been gathering momentum for over two centuries. Each of Anthony Giddens’s chapters illuminates different aspects of this large story, and each gave me insights into what it means to be a man or a woman seeking love and happiness in a changing world.