Hello, reader, and welcome to Recommended Reads! In this monthly column, I recap my reading for the previous month and talk about what’s been going on in my bookish life. Then I end with 3-5 “Recommended Reads,” or books I think you’ll want to check out. I’ve been writing this column monthly in The Swarthmorean since August 2022, and I’m now posting it here on my book blog. Let’s get to it!
Courtesy of The Swarthmorean…
When I look back at what I read this past month, I’m struck by how all of it was nonfiction. Just a few years ago, I was intimidated by reading nonfiction. I thought I better stick with fictional stories. Now, if you were to ask me what I’d rather read for the rest of my life, fiction or nonfiction, I think I might say nonfiction!
So here’s what I’ve been reading!
The Best Minds: A Story of Madness, Friendship, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (NF)
I finished The Best Minds at 1:14 a.m. a week ago, and I still can’t get it out of my mind. In this aching, absorbing memoir, Jonathan Rosen recalls his close and competitive childhood friendship with Michael Laudor and its progression throughout adulthood. Laudor was a sharp thinker who excelled in academics and aced Yale in just three years. Not long after, he started exhibiting bizarre behavior and confessing distressing, increasingly psychotic thinking. Laudor was then hospitalized for months with a schizophrenia diagnosis. Rather than succumb to the condition when released, Laudor matriculated at Yale Law School. After his graduation, Laudor was profiled in the New York Times, a feature that catapulted him to fame and fortune with a book deal and his life rights sold to Hollywood. But Laudor’s path took a tragic twist when he murdered his pregnant girlfriend in the midst of violent delusions. Laudor’s book sifts through the wreckage of another man’s life and his alternately brilliant and disordered mind, trying to see where he himself lands among the community of good-intentioned allies who put their faith and promise in Laudor, elevating him to heights that were impossible to live up to given the severity of his illness. This story was 524 pages long, by far the longest book I’ve read in a while, and, yet, I tore through it, inhaling the final hundred-or-so pages in no time at all.
Want to know more about my take on The Best Minds? Read my review here on the blog!
How to read it: Purchase The Best Minds on Amazon
[Backlist Boost] The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang (NF)
This Backlist Boost—in which I feature an older book—is for Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, another Mental Health Awareness Month pick and an excellent companion read to The Best Minds. In this book, Wang offers a glimpse into her experience of living with schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, a mental illness that shares some of the same features that Michael Laudor experienced as reported in The Best Minds. With clear insight and exceptional candor, Wang has penned essays on a variety of topics related to her condition, such as fashion, higher education, and who gets to be “low functioning.” If you’re reading The Best Minds, pick up this book, too, which offers a voice to someone who, like Michael Laudor, has battled with the demons of a schizophrenia-spectrum illness.
For more books about schizophrenia, check out my list of the best schizophrenia books here on the blog!
How to read it: Purchase The Collected Schizophrenias on Amazon
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger (NF)
In this engrossing memoir, New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger explores the complicated life and legacy of his grandfather, Karl Gönner, who was the Orstgruppenleiter (local Nazi group leader) of the Alsatian village of Bartenheim during World War II. Gönner was unquestionably a Nazi member, yet when he was tried for war crimes, more than a dozen of the Bartenheim villagers sent in character testimonies in his favor, telling of how he deliberately overlooked and didn’t report “illegal” behavior, fought through bureaucracy to reunite families whose members had been imprisoned, and refused to send any residents to death camps. So how do his children and grandchildren reconcile his complicity with evil, and his alternate efforts to thwart it? In answer, Bilger arranges each of the eighteen chapters with different roles Gönner inhabited, as contradictory as they were: Soldier, Ghost, Believer, Traitor, and more.
How to read it: Purchase Fatherland on Amazon
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann (NF)
In this engaging book, David Grann brings to life the astonishing story of the Wager, a British ship that left England in 1740 only to be shipwrecked on an island on the Chilean coast. After a few months, a mutinous crew flee in a makeship vessel, abandoning the captain and his close confidants and eventually finding civilization again. Then, after a remarkably twisty and turny adventure, the captain and his remaining crew make it out alive, too, and return to England. It’s there where the abandoners are put on trial for mutiny, and the captain is charged with murder. Grann is one of the best narrative nonfiction writers around, and The Wager is just as riveting a story as you can read.
How to read it: Purchase The Wager on Amazon
Have a recommended read you want to share? Email me: sarahsdaviswrites@gmail.com.
