Books like Golem

I will remain forever astonished at the epic feat of world-building in The Arrival. It thoroughly pulls me into an immersive experience where I am learning along with the main character how to navigate the new world into which he has immigrated. As he learns, we learn. I find myself so emotionally involved with his success in his hopeful new reality. The art is amazingly detailed and conveys the complex and richly visual world, yet also sets a strong emotional tone that brings us into the action.

While Spring Story is the first book in Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series, all eight of them are bursting with sumptuous, hyper-detailed illustrations of a pastoral mouse society in the English countryside. Barklem’s watercolors are jam-packed (literally – so many jars of jam) with mouth-watering baked goods, flowers, and trees that any gardener would envy, and one of my favorite illustration techniques ever – the cutaway – to show the layout of the mice’s treehouses, flour mill, and other buildings that keep the tight-knit mouse village running smoothly. If you've ever salivated over the feasts of Redwall but been less-than-enthusiastic about the possibility of a weasel massacre, let the ever-sunny Spring Story scratch that itch in full, vibrant color.

James Gurney originally intended this to be a children’s book, but strong interest by adult readers changed his mind, and the three subsequent tales were developed as young-and-old-alike books. The stories are textually brief, but that lack is more than compensated by Gurney’s many illustrations, which tell much of the story visually.

The artwork initially attracted me, but I also found the reading quite engaging. Central to the story are father-and-son castaways Arthur and Will Denison, storm-tossed onto an uncharted south-sea island where dinosaurs still hold sway.

I found the notion of intelligent, peaceful, talking dinosaurs to be conceptually engaging and very unlike Jurassic Park’s huge, uncommunicative, and superlatively dangerous beasts.

Richard Scarry books are nostalgic gold. There’s so much going on on every page, and I remember it all like it was yesterday (which it probably was, because half of the illustrations are on Twitter as memes).

The little vignettes cover all the traditional kids’ book themes—firemen, policemen, ship voyages, road construction—but then go further. Everyone is a Worker talks about how money flows through the economy, and Wood & How We Use It discusses a supply chain, from raw materials to production and manufacturing to transportation (albeit in grossly unrealistic trucks). 

I read somewhere that Franz Kafka would laugh so loud when writing his stories that he woke up his neighbors. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I get it. It’s not what is commonly thought of when someone talks about Kafka’s stories. I mean, his name has come to mean a certain style. “Kafkaesque” is used to describe stories that are absurd, nightmarish, offensive, and heavy with bureaucratic pretentiousness and deceit.

Where is the humor? Oh, it’s there. I think sometimes readers get caught up in the horror and bizarreness of it all that they miss the subtle, absurdist, dark, and very dry humor dripping in all these stories in this collection.

There are several books I could recommend written by adults who were imprisoned as children in Terezin during the war, but this one stands out because of its artwork interspersed with factual accounts of daily life. Indeed, it’s the factual perspective she takes in her descriptions that makes them so heart-wrenching. Her map was my primary tool in writing descriptions of the camp, and her artwork, imitating her writing style, comes across as stark and factual. Written as a diary, not a novel, I cried at the cruelty with which her life unfurled before her. At the same time, however, she manages to capture the beauty of being a child, full of hope and promise. That balance makes the book a jewel.

In 1950, McCarthy-ite red-baiting is at its height and communists are being hunted across America. When a US government official is accused of being a spy by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he abandons his family to flee the country. His apparent defection seems to confirm the allegations that he was a Soviet Bloc spy. Almost 20 years later, his son goes behind the Iron Curtain for a painful reunion. Kanon’s novel is written as a thriller, yet it captures the paranoia of America in the early Cold War, the drabness of Soviet-occupied Prague, and explores profound issues of love and betrayal. 

Karou is caught in a war between angels and demons (the ultimate simplified description). And Karou is a main character I love to cheer for. She's just so witty and full of angst on a totally relatable level. She's having the mother of all identity crises and feeling the ultimate tug of war between the human world and a dimension inhabited by the strange creatures that raised her.

Pair that awesome premise with Laini Taylor's incredibly lush writing, and the story is just fantastic. I kept turning page after page not only to immerse myself in Taylor's beautiful prose but also because this story is just compelling. I've reread this entire series, and I loved it even more the second time through.

It is not only that I have read many times Milan Kundera's only collection of stories—I have read it aloud to each of the ten generations of my students in a creative writing course I taught at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, from 2007 to 2017. They should have read themselves stories by Kundera and other grand masters of literature that I recommended, but since I couldn't rely that they all would do that, I had no alternative but to read them myself.

Seven stories from this book were very useful and instructive to my students because they contained the very quintessence of the storytelling. It was just enough to listen attentively my readings and comments and many secrets of the prose writing would have been revealed…

I’m deeply affected by the poetic, haunted quest of a Korean adoptee who seeks his place in the world, shifting back and forth in time— Tee’s present in a Massachusetts rehab facility with his time in Prague. 

I respond to how present the awareness of being other is, while I can occasionally pretend to forget mine. I share the question about the past.

Tormented about being an adoptee, Tee left his family behind after facing the tragedy of an uncle’s suicide and a disturbing revelation from his father. In Prague, he has newfound happiness interrupted by a forced evacuation because of an epic flood that comes every 100 years.

Tee decides to remain with his lover: “If the water did rise and cut them off from the rest of Prague, they would be unreachable,” Tee thinks, “even from his pasts.”