Books like Pigeon Feathers

When I was a teenager, I would have felt very much at home at the vintage record store in London where this story is set. (In fact, my hometown is named London, except my London is in Canada.) The quirky clerks who work there adore their boss, Rob Fleming, and spend their days attempting to outwit one another with music trivia and compiling funny and far-reaching Top Five lists.

As Rob negotiates a recent breakup, he must sort through his ex-girlfriend’s belongings and the emotional baggage he’s collected over the years. Though Rob is an adult, this still feels like a coming-of-age tale. I came away from the book resonating with the bittersweet awareness of what it means to become an adult with a list of careers if time and money were no object.

How could I not love this book? It’s set in the lovely (really!) city of Pittsburgh, and it’s about a lost weekend of literary hijinks and stoned debauchery.

The protagonist, Grady Tripp, is a young male writer making something of an ass of himself, but Chabon makes him so sympathetic, I can’t help rooting for him even as he digs himself in even deeper.

The dialogue crackles, the supporting characters are vivid and colorful, and the plot sweeps the reader up into a whirlwind of incredibly fun trouble.

The phrase “girl in a band” in the title got me to pick this book up off a table in the bookstore. I am the kind of guy who will pick up five or so books at a bookstore, take them over to the most comfortable spot I can find, and read the first few pages to see if I want to buy any of them.

The writer Kim Gordon was in an indie post-punk band called Sonic Youth, and I had just barely heard of them. After three years in Sonic Youth, Kim marries one of her fellow band members, and they stay married for 29 years. This book starts when the two of them take the stage together for the last time as they head for divorce and the band's breakup.

“They say when a marriage ends,” Gordon writes on the first pages, “that little things you never… show more.

The cover of this book has a stack of mix tapes on it and that’s what got me first: that the writer was going to explain love using the metaphor of a mix tape. As a person who has made hundreds of mix tapes myself—and later burned CDs and after that arranged playlists on Spotify—that the phrase mix tape was in the title was enough for me to pick up the book. Plus, I remember back in the 80s when I sat around waiting for a song to come on the radio so I could record it, and that was how I made my first tapes.

Each chapter in this book starts with an image of a mix tape with the songs listed on it. The writer uses the songs on the tape to write about his relationships. The first chapter ends with this line: “I’m going to be up… show more.

I love the Timber Creek K-9 Mystery series and Mizushima’s latest book was one of my favorites. As a retired K-9 handler, sometimes books with working dogs get facts wrong. I could tell that Mizushima put a lot of research time into each of her books. I love the fictional K-9, Robo, and Mizushima’s accurate portrayal of the bond between handler and dog. 

Mattie Cobb, the main character, is intriguing and makes the reader cheer for her. The dashing veterinarian, Cole Walker, adds a little romance to the storyline. I would recommend starting with the first book, Killing Trail. While each book stands on its own, reading about the mystery of Mattie’s family makes the conclusion of Standing Dead even more thrilling. 

Set in the past and based on real people, this is a gripping story about an unofficial relationship that crosses class divides.

The closeness between poet Elizabeth Barret and her maid, known by her surname, Wilson, is never properly acknowledged as a friendship. But that’s what it is, as Wilson gradually gets to know everything about her mistress, particularly her forbidden love for fellow poet Robert Browning, and Barret comes to increasingly rely on the dependable Wilson.

This book is a fabulous and creative imagining of these real lives, and of a deep friendship that is horribly betrayed when things go wrong.

I once asked Agnes Nixon, the creator of All My Children and other legendary daytime serials, how she became so good at plotting them. She replied, “I am a very good eavesdropper.”

I suspect O’Hara was, too. His 1959 epic (900 pages!) about a social-climbing, status-mad banker and the fashionable coterie of vipers he navigates to attain success at any cost is dipped in old-money style and privilege masking an ever-rotting core.

It’s packed with the one thing any great beach read needs: people keeping secrets who will do anything to protect them.    

Brandt cuts through the mystique that “writing can’t be taught” and encourages writers to discover the creative and rational aspects of their consciousness—an approach that excites me as a writer and a teacher.

Brandt’s approach is useful for beginning writers and also for writers going through a dry period. I recommend it to all my students.

At first glance, this book of short stories is about Denver gentrification, but the volume is much more – a series of studies of how Native and Mexican women remember and revisit the “lost territory” of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado when they head to the Rocky Mountain metropolis.

I love that rather than look back East or out West when seeking home, the women of Fajardo-Anstine’s work look northward and southward, to the past and to the future. I was not at all surprised to learn that Fajardo-Anstine consulted with Prof. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez for her work. Fonseca-Chávez’s Following the Manito Trail oral history project let me keep listening for similar voices.

This novel's compelling cover reeled in this reader straightaway and, indeed, delivers with a plot that captures the gothic folk horror genre in a tidy and well-written package.

As I read it, it felt like Harvest Home and The Wicker Man were seated on either shoulder. Overarching the story is also a "morality play" at work, expertly woven in. Bonus points for historical roots and an English village setting.

So original, so folky horror, so good and, simply put, a treat.