What about the Water: 101 Dervish Tales

Written by: Jami Milan

First line: A dervish in the village customarily told a tale each evening after dinner, wherever he was.

Why you should read this book: Dervishes, or Sufis, are a group of mystics whose philosophy emphasizes living in the moment, releasing that which does not serve, and recognizing the divine in all things. These stories read much like parables, with many levels of meaning, alone with a quiet humor, overt messages, and useful advice. Dervishes talk to inanimate objects, learn powerful life lessons from small happenings, help their neighbors, and seek out simple solutions and simple truths.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You have proprietary feelings toward your anger and discontent.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Written by: Max Brooks

First line: it goes by many names: "The Crisis," "The Dark Years," "The Walking Plague," as well as newer and more "hip" titles such as "World War Z" or "Z War One."

Why you should read this book: It's a highly readable socio-political deconstruction of global culture and military and disaster preparedness, cleverly disguised as a zombie story (cleverly disguised as an oral history). While it does have its gory moments, the story itself is about the human element, how individuals, governments, and armed forces in various countries personally experienced and responded to the walking dead, and it's much more about hope, perseverance, and the indomitability of the human spirit than it is about eating brains or scaring readers. Life persists, says this popular novel (which was made into an apparently unrelated and unwatchable Brad Pitt vehicle) although death pursues it relentlessly, and the question is not how to survive, but how much we want to survive and what we are willing to sacrifice to remain human.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Zombies, death, guns, fire, decapitation, dead animals, walls of bodies, cannibalism, lies, betrayal, abandonment, and it's still not really a horror story.

Lucy and the Anvil

Written by: Adam Kline

First line: The anvil had never made a friend prior to Lucy.

Why you should read this book: Beautifully and whimsically illustrated, this labor-of-love picture book was funded by 560 separate benefactors (or which I was one) on Kickstarter, and was billed as an effort to create a perfect bedtime story. In the unlikely friendship between a little girl name Lucy and an apparently inanimate but sentient anvil, there is no lack of love, but the immobile and limbless anvil soon begins to question its own suitability for friendship due to its inability to play or give hugs. Of course, the anvil finds that it still has something to offer Lucy, and that, sometimes, it is better to receive than to give.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You are a colossal grouch and you don't want to cheer up.

This book is not available for purchase on Amazon at this time. Some material may be found at the illustrator's online store.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Written by: Alison Bechdel

First line: Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed upon for a spot of "airplane."

Why you should read this book: Bechdel, whose name has become synonymous with the act of determining whether a work of cinema treats female characters as actual human beings or set pieces to illustrate a male hero's masculinity, has aptly named this memoir a "tragicomic," as it is written in the graphic novel medium, and has its (wry) comic moments, but ultimately demonstrates the tragedy of life in the closet. As Bechdel matures and discovers that she is a lesbian, she struggles with the new understanding that, throughout his entire marriage to her mother, her father has carried on affairs with much younger men. Through an examination of letters, journal entries, classic literature, the details of her family's house and business, and certain episodes throughout her life, the author comes to terms with her father's reality and his legacy to her.

Why you shouldn't read this book: The tragedy. Also, if you will lose your mind upon witnessing tasteful illustrations of cunnilingus.

Hush

Written by: Donna Jo Napoli

First line: "Mel, hurry up!" Brigid calls, splashing through puddles, heedless of the mud that has come up through the wooden-plank paving of the road.

Why you should read this book: Diverging somewhat from her typical novelization of fairy tales format and magical themes, Napoli creates a nearly whole cloth tale and a wide swath of the ancient world from a snippet of an old Norse saga. In Melkorka's world, slaves are simply unprotected people walking in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the young princess and her little sister, escaping a potential war in their own kingdom, find themselves lost to their homeland and destined for servitude. But Melkorka learns there is great strength in silent beauty, and while she cannot recover what has been lost, she can forge a more hopeful existence for herself once she embraces her own power.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Although it is handled with grace and euphemisms, this young adult novel contains several accounts of rape, with the princess eventually developing affection for her rapist.

The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution

Written by: Pagan Kennedy

First line: Michael Dillon, a bearded medical student, fiddled with his pipe and then lit it nervously.

Why you should read this book: Over a decade before Christine Jorgenson came out as the first person to use surgery and hormones to change her expressed gender, Michael Dillon succeeded in becoming the man he’d always wanted to be using testosterone and an unusual surgical technique pioneered to help soldiers injured in World War I. Although Dillon was more or less able to completely pass as a man for most of his adult life, and even helped a male-to-female friend obtain surgery that was, at the time, illegal, his brother, an English baron, suppressed the story long after his death. Here is the history of a man determined to refine himself into a person of superlative body and spirit, and the difficulties encountered in a life lived according to his own principles, regardless of what others believed.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You’ve ever told a family member not to show their face around the old homestead ever again.

Dance Hall of the Dead

Written by: Tony Hillerman

First line: Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet.

Why you should read this book: When a Zuni boy dies and a Navajo boy disappears, Lt. Joe Leaphorn is sent to the reservation to look for the missing youth, who is definitely a person of interest in a seemingly motiveless murder. Leaphorn is a true and dedicated detective, willing to do the plodding work it takes to unravel this case: stake out a hippie commune from a cold and snowy cliff, examine all his knowledge of comparative mythology to understand the characters involved, get shot with an animal tranquilizer dart and spend the night hallucinating in a crack in a rock beside a beautiful high school dropout. It becomes increasingly clear to Leaphorn that no one cares about the death of one Indian boy and the disappearance of another, except as they pertain to a big narcotics bust, which makes him all the more determined to discover the truth, even if there will be no one left to share it with at the end of the book.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You’re really, really wrapped in your Ph.D. dissertation.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Written by: Mary Roach

First line: In 1968, on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, six young men undertook an irregular and unprecedented act.

Why you should read this book: With her usual dose of offbeat humor and increasingly shameless puns, the author approaches the topic of human feeding and digestion in a most unorthodox fashion, beginning in the nose (smell being a major component of taste) and moving all the way down. In her travels, she encounters professional pet food tasters, flatulence researchers, competitive eaters, and all manner of historical oddities, hoaxes, and medical mayhem. Roach is unafraid to tackle such dangerous topics as Elvis’s megacolon and chronic constipation, whether or not one animal can eat its way out of another animal’s stomach, and why Americans are reluctant to consume organ meat, creating a fearless book about topics that are, frankly, slightly difficult to stomach.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: Well, you certainly shouldn’t read it while you’re eating.
   

Nevada

Written by: Zane Grey

First line: As his goaded horse plunged into the road, Nevada looked back over his shoulder.

Why you should read this book: An outlaw with a heart of gold and a spine of steel, vicious gunslinger Nevada has been tamed by the kindly love of wild horse hunter Ben Ide, and his incomparable sister, Hettie. When Nevada draws his gun and kills again to save Ben’s life and livelihood, his shame at the Ides learning his true identity is so great that he rides off into the wilderness, leaving his friends heartbroken and determined to reunite with him at any cost. In the superlatively dangerous (and beautiful) canyons of Arizona, the characters play a deadly game with the most conniving rustlers ever seen in the wild west.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: The end is pretty much a foregone conclusion.