Books like Information Desk — picked by fans

Framed by a scholarly appraisal of an actual archaic text, this novel, in verse, proceeds to tell a story of love, from boyhood to death.

It’s the story, amazingly, of a monster, a mythic creature with wings and red skin, but you forget about the myth when you’re reading. And you forget about poetry. Or you wonder, what’s the difference between poetry and a beautiful narrative of longing, of heartbreak, of hope and friendship and family ties, and when you get to the end of the life of this kid, which, like all our lives, is a story of love, you feel you understand a little more clearly what it is. 

I heard about this delightful book from a friend and knew I had to read it. It is a meditation on the color blue. Each of Nelson’s “propositions” explores blue metaphorically, literally, historically, emotionally.

Reading this book I immersed myself in blue and all its facets, and through doing so I discovered the worlds of other colors, so that when I step outside, I see not only green but all greens, not only brown but all browns, and blue, of course, everywhere.

Sometimes, I have so many ideas happening in my mind at the same time that it’s hard to keep up with myself. And I get lost. Here’s a book by a writer with a mind that’s bursting with ideas, about how we communicate with each other, about how the culture controls how we communicate. And about how culture works.

Ideas sprout in the author’s protean mind, twirling and spinning and evolving, pushing him toward a black comedy, forcing him to the edge of madness where his thoughts, heated, become something closer to emotion until, by the end of the book the abstract ideas come home, settling, becoming quiet, and personal, and the story connects us back to ourselves.

As weird and self-indulgent as an actual person, this “novel,” about a failed filmmaker who finds, in the failed life of Simone Weil, a worthy doppelganger, takes some getting used to. But the author’s honesty doesn’t let go, and pretty soon, I found myself wondering along with her, what is worthy? And who gets to decide what’s worthy? Who gets to decide anything in a world that seems to make no sense?

Weil, an ersatz saint who starved herself to death, is just one of the triggers raising the questions that are raised by a book that, appropriately, fails to answer them. But it does so with humor and an often exhilarating disrespect. 

I love pretty packaging, so it's no surprise that Mans' Black Girl, Call Home stopped me in my tracks. The cover art, an over-the-shoulder shot of a young Black girl, her head bedazzled in a rainbow assortment of brightly colored barrettes. For me and Black women across the globe, the image evokes instant nostalgia. Luther on the radio. Me between my mama's legs. And the smell of Blue Magic hair grease slathered on the back of her hand.

Both painful and empowering, Mans' candid approach to feminism, race, and LGBTQ+ identity is wrapped in undeniable realness. Whether readers identify as Black and queer or simply as women on the path to healing, Mans' rhythmic collection of truths inspires self-acceptance and sisterhood. Do yourself a favor — order the audiobook and be blown away by Mans' heartfelt spoken word!

This collection teaches me as well, by taking me into the experience of growing up in the Black, rural Appalachian South.

The poems are part memoir, as in writing about the experience of her mother visiting her where she lived with her grandparents, “(We) held hands like we thought/mothers & daughters should/but neither of us knew for sure.” 

They are also part love song to home-cooking, “Every morning of my childhood, my grandmother, who stood a little/ under five feet tall, donned an apron and cooked breakfast. Slow. Precise./ Deliberate. She equated food with love, and she cooked with both a fury/ and a quiet joy.” 

And finally, they are part Black feminist manifesto, “My black body is a boulder, a stop sign. Sometimes i think my body is/ graceful, a song of freedom. Sometimes i think it is something that every/ eye casts away. I must concentrate if i… show more.

A heroic poem woven around the tides and spires of North Norfolk.

Jess Streeting tells her own story of returning as an adult to Cawston in Norfolk and remembering fun-filled childhood days with her father, an inspirational vicar, in the mid-70s. One single terrible event ripped her father away from her, and only now is she confronting what happened. There are shy girls, smart lads, and a great hammer beam church roof with carved angels.

The foreword is by one of those smart boys, Sir Stephen Fry.

A series of poetry lectures not intended for publication, they combine to form an astounding journey into language and art. You don’t need to be a poet to love the casual way she delivers bomb after bomb, and to wish you’d been her student. I guess this is as close as I’ll get, and it’s taken a long time (I’m still not done) because I can just sit on a phrase or a page for an entire subway ride. Definitely would have failed her class, but having the lectures written out is like getting an extension without needing to grovel for it.

The poems in this book made me feel glad to be alive in a world that feels like it’s ending. I loved how Jones situated personal grief within disasters of national and international scale; grieving a mother is as monumental as grieving a world. 

I also found it compelling how Jones consistently maintains a musical quality to the poems’ language. The first two lines of, 'Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude', are: "And then, night neons itself inside me / and I begin missing you in loud new ways.”

Multisensory with pleasing consonance, these lines are a small sample of Jones’s linguistic verve. Full of wit and sincerity, these poems made me want to write my own defiant love letter to the apocalypse. 

If you love Borges, and thought you’d read everything he wrote, this is the book for you—a collection of his “lost lectures,” delivered at Harvard in 1967-68 and finally published in 2000. And if you want to hear the actual voice of a creative genius, as if risen from the dead, the recordings are also available. Best known for his intricate short stories and essays, Borges was also—perhaps foremost—a poet. As he puts it in the book, “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.” Starting from the creation of poems, Borges explores the creation of metaphors, meaning, and life’s irreducible mystery.