Here are 2 books that It's Only Drowning fans have personally recommended if you like
It's Only Drowning.
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It's a quiet book, about a child spending time with a grandmother on an island. It's told in separate scenes that give a sense of nostalgia and deep love. There isn't a wasted word in it. It's more like poetry than prose.
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
A monster story, in the voices of those who knew and loved the monster.
Quick digression: Every pedant loves to say that "Frankenstein," contrary to popular belief, is not the monster; Frankenstein is the *scientist* who *made* the monster. But of course, Shelley's novel reveals that Dr. Frankenstein *is* the real monster: it's his careless act of creation that's monstrous, not the poor suffering thing who was thereby created.
Anyway, back to Labatut's book: here, the creature is artificial intelligence, or the computer itself, or maybe our whole mad digital age -- and the monster who birthed it is a real historical mathematician.
From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AIJohnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control…
