American Animism: Stories

Written by: Jamey Gallagher

First line: She returned to work at the cryptid museum a week after the attack.

Why you should read this book: This one's a wild ride, and although there are certain themes that seem to recur through the unconnected stories, every one direct the reader to a different place with a different conclusion. Strange creatures, doomed relationships, tourist attractions, ghosts, and drug-fueled escape, both casual and chronic populate these fast-past short stories. Often, I have trouble with short fiction because I have to work to get into the story and then suddenly it's over, but these stories allowed me slip immediately into each world and then seemed to conclude at the perfect moment.

Why you shouldn't read this book: There is a fair amount of violence toward women, not gratuitously so, but not exactly pleasant either.

Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

Written by: Virgina Roberts Giuffre

First line: Picture a girl sitting alone on a curb, her face stained with tears. 

Why you should read this book: This is the brutal and hard-to-read memoir of one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims, who spent several years of her childhood being repeatedly sexually assaulted and trafficked by the notorious billionaire. Giuffre speaks with frank honesty about her history of abuse, beginning with her father and his friend, continued at the facility for troubled youth where she was sent when her psychological issues overwhelmed her parents, and furthered by a different rich man who picked her up by the side of the road before she eventually found employment at Donald Trump's Mar-a-lago resort and was collected by Ghislaine Maxwell. Sometimes, but not always, naming names, Giuffre recounts her painful truths in excruciating details, not only the crimes committed against her by wealthy, powerful men, but her escape from their orbit and her quest to bring her abusers to justice. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's very heavy and almost everything that happens in it is terrible. 

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

Written by: Terence McKenna

First line: A specter is haunting planetary culture—the specter of drugs. 

Why you should read this book: I suppose this will be the last of my COVID reads, but this is another book I've owned for close to two decades without cracking it open. McKenna's now-classic treatise on  psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and related plants delineates his theories on how they guided the development of human consciousness, archaeological evidence for their importance to ancient civilizations, how and why psychedelic experiences fell out of favor as civilization "progressed," what was lost in the transition, what was found when westerners rediscovered them, and what this all means for the future of our species. The book is, at times, heartbreakingly prescient in its discussion of the forces that continue to suppress the knowledge and practices that could heal humans, individually and as an animal species connected to a vegetable world, and yet containing kernels of hope that seem to pop every time another city, state, or country relaxes restrictions on marijuana and psychedelics. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You are a cryptofascist, or you work for the CIA, or you have a financial interest in the alcohol industry, or you really fell for that lazy D.A.R.E. information someone spewed into your head in the '80s or '90s. 

Beneath a Meth Moon: An Elegy

Written by: Jacqueline Woodson

First line: It's almost winter again and the cold moves through this town like water washing over us.

Why you should read this book: Poetic and haunting, this is the brutal story of a high school girl's descent into and ascent out of meth addiction. After losing her mother and grandmother in Hurricane Katrina, Laurel tries to create a new life for herself in a new town, but from the first hit of "moon," her hold on life begins to slip away until her demise seems inevitable. Shines a light on the stark reality of loss, addiction, and the meth epidemic in small town America.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Content warning for meth. Lots and lots of meth.

P.S. Be Eleven

Written by: Rita Williams-Garcia

First line: You'd think that after flying six-odd hours from New York to Oakland, then flying six-odd hours back, Vonetta, Fern, and I would be world-class travelers, and those bumps and dips would be nothing.

Why you should read this book: Picking up where One Crazy Summer leaves off, this book follows Delphine and her sisters as they return to New York, much changed from the girls who went to visit their mother at the beginning of the summer, thanks to their new revolutionary mindset. But New York has changed too: their father has a girlfriend, their uncle is a different person since his return from Viet Nam, and while their grandmother has stayed the same, they can't help but see Big Ma in a different light after hanging out with the Black Panthers. While still trying to manage her sisters, Delphine has to navigate a new grade, a very new teacher, new boys, her very serious feelings about a new boy band called The Jackson Five, and a series of letters from her unusual mother, which don't feel very helpful now, but might be later on.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I thought it was a little disingenuous of the mother to constantly tell Delphine to "be eleven" when Delphine became the parentalized child solely because her mom didn't want to be a parent.

VALIS

Written by: Philip K Dick

First line: Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had an Nembutals.

Why you should read this book: It took me 30 years and a pandemic to finally get through the first book of this trilogy, in which we meet a depressed, suicidal addict called Horselover Fat (who is also Philip K Dick, who is a character in the story, the narrator of the story, and the author of the story) yanked from his downward spiral by the delivery of a blast of superconcentrated information in the form of a pink light. Despite knowing that it was a science fiction novel, my brain kept insisting that it was merely the narrative of a man's descent into schizophrenia, up until the moment that other characters started to affirm Horselover's "delusions." While it's an unconventional read that makes the reader work hard to follow the arc, the payoff of this story is tremendous.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Without a grounding in world history, world mythology, and psychology, along with a passing knowledge or alchemy, gnosticism, mysticism, and philosophy, it might be hard to follow this narrative.

Bad Gateway

Written by: Simon Hanselman

First line: This place seems cheap and is OK.

Why you should read this book: It will break your heart, in a good way. It's about a drug-addicted, welfare-cheating witch named Megg; her drug addicted, trust-fund hippie boyfriend cat named Mogg; and the assorted other creatures who flit in and out of their drug haze. Megg's life is bleak, and she is determined to hang on to the bleakness, seeming to put as much effort into staying in a bad place as it would take to get her to a better place, but the volume ends with her going back home to see her mother and, presumably, examine the path that brought her to this bleak place.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Sex, drugs, violence, often all at the same time.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume Three: Century

Written by: Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

First line: Fraters and Sorors...beloved Frater and Sorors...we are gathered in the profess-house.

Why you should read this book: A magician who definitely isn't Aleister Crowley has a very drawn out plot to create a moon child and usher in the end of the world, something like that, and Mina, Alan, and Lando have to stop this, probably. It will take them an entire century to get to the bottom of things but they all have immortal youth and their opponent can acquire new bodies whenever he feels like it. There's a rock star who definitely isn't Mick Jagger and a guy who travels through time but not space and gives almost perfectly useless advice, and there's sex and drugs and nudity and all kinds of weirdness and of course, since it's Moore, ten million references that will make you feel smart if you get them and confused if you don't.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Still trying to track down a copy of the Black Dossier. Plus this book is kind of a literary mess, padded stylistically but without a lot of story.

Parable of the Sower

Written by: Octavia E. Butler

First line: All that you touch/You change.

Why you should read this book: Published in 1993 but set in 2024-27, this speculative fiction novel presents a chilling, but plausible, picture of a near future in which human life has lost much of its value, corporations hold most of the power, and only a dwindling few people are able to band together to protect their version of civilization in walled communities under constant siege by a brutal, impoverished outside world. Lauren Olamina is one of the fortunate ones, a teenager protected by the walls of her small neighborhood, whose father is still employed, and who lives in relative comfort, despite her nagging belief that things outside the walls are getting worse and worse, and that no matter how they defend their borders, they will not be able to hold out indefinitely. Lauren begins exploring her own perception of reality, discovering a new religion she calls Earthseed, which addresses the types of change she anticipates, and preparing for the inevitable collapse of civilization, which is scheduled to take place even sooner than than she anticipates.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You would totally take a drug that turned you into pyromaniac with no regard for human life, and/or you think debtor's prisons and indentured servitude are valid options for addressing poverty.

Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

Written by: Jarrett J. Krosoczka

First line: C'mon, get behind the wheel.

Why you should read this book: In this graphic memoir, Jarrett recounts being raised by his grandparents, with his addict mother periodically making brief and confusing appearances, while any information about his father's identity remains conspicuously absent. As he grows older, he begins to understand his mother's illness and moves through the complicated emotions around it, while also finding comfort in his artistic talent and interest in drawing comics. A powerful and satisfying story that plumbs the depths of the author's life in search of comfort and meaning.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You'll never forgive either of your parents.

The Walls around Us

Written by: Nova Ren Suma

First line: We went wild that hot night.

Why you should read this book: This dark and cunning ghost story weaves a tangled thicket of murder and revenge, twisted through time and sprouting from the fertile soil of the Aurora Hills Juvenile Detention Center in upstate New York, almost all the way to the Canadian border. Told in dual point of view, the story splits between the quiet and detailed observations of Amber, a girl long locked up in the facility for the murder of her abusive stepfather, and Violet, a talented ballerina with her sights set on Julliard, with nothing in her way except for the memory of her one-time best friend, Ori, who was sentenced to Aurora Hills for murdering two girls behind the dance studio. In the place where their worlds collide, both girls will find justice, although perhaps not in the way they hoped to find it.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You've forgotten your own crimes.

Last Look

Written by: Charles Burns

First line: This is the only part I'll remember.

Why you should read this book: The X'ed Out trilogy is collected here in one volume, which is good news for readers, because I can't imagine how frustrating it must have been to read this story in pieces without its conclusion. It's the kind of book where you're trying to piece the story together right up until the last couple pages, when all the threads comes together, and then you have to start again at the beginning so you can read it and understand it at the same time. Our protagonist, Doug, seems trapped in his relationships in the real world even as he bounces over and over again back to a hallucinatory nightmare landscape that mirrors his deepest fears with cunning distortion.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You can pinpoint the exact moment in your life when everything went wrong and you can't stop reliving it. 

Justice League: Gods and Monsters

Written by: Bruce Timm, JM DeMatteis, and Thony Silas

First line: The dream. How many nights did my brother wake up...confused and disoriented..feeling death all around him.

Why you should read this book: It's a prequel to an alternate-universe direct-to-DVD DC movie I didn't see, but it's still a surprisingly good read. In this world, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Women exist, but not as the characters we know: Superman, raised by Mexican harvesters, develops a sense of anger toward and disdain for humanity; Batman is not wealthy, but he is a vampire who usually kills his underworld victims, and Wonder Woman hails from the tackiest place in the DC Universe, New Genesis, and gets caught up with a bunch of dirty hippies. They all get caught up in a crazy scheme perpetrated by a crazy dude intent on turning the ultra-rich into meta-humans, and even when they narrowly avoid becoming completely evil, they're still ripe for some schooling from the real Justice League.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Lots of moral issues for a one-off comic book.

Batman Arkham Scarecrow

Edited by: Whitney Ellsworth et al. 

First line: Across the Batman's horizon moves a new and terrible figure--a fantastic figure of burlap and straw with a brain--cunning and distorted!

Why you should read this book: This retrospective volume collects a dozen comics spanning the past eight decades, all featuring the protagonist Scarecrow, a demented supervillain obsessed with fear. Motivated primarily by money, which he wants to buy more books and persuade others to stop picking on him, the Scarecrow is a psychology professor with, apparently, a strong background in chemistry, who uses drugs to induce fear in his victims (and, in one story, to completely eradicate their fear). Batman, the man who has mastered fear and counts it among his arsenal, defeats him again and again, in a variety of stories and styles that highlight the development of the character and medium over the years.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Some of that Comic Code era storytelling is pretty castrated.

Nod Away

Written by: Joshua W. Cotter

First line: (It's not exactly clear what the first line of this book is.)

Why you should read this book: Fans of the author have been waiting a long time for this first volume in a planned seven-book series. Dr. Melody McCabe has been reassigned to work on the space station Integrity, where she'll continue studying the hub, a clairvoyant child whose mind has been exploited to connect the billions of "innernet" users who employ a neural interface to tap into each other, all the time. Melody is sincere and serious, but nothing going on around her is exactly as it seems, and terrible things are about to happen in minute and astonishing graphic detail.

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's big and full of confusing moments that probably won't be resolved for thousands of pages.

(george)

Written by: E. L. Konigsburg

First line: Only two people knew that George was probably the funniest little man in the whole world and that he used foul language.

Why you should read this book: A small story about big ideas written by an award-winning author, this book recounts the sixth grade year of Ben Carr, a gifted science student who possesses an unknown academic advantage: a little man named George who lives inside him, makes hilarious jokes, and helps Ben remember all the hard words in chemistry. Ben, George, and their oppositional defiant little brother Howard have always been close, but this year, Ben's obsession with being liked and his admiration for the polished senior who used to be his lab partner has driven a wedge between Ben and his useful inner voice. If Ben can't figure out what really bothers George about William's behavior, he might lost his best friend forever.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You took a couple psychology classes in college and now you're an expert who diagnoses other people's children with serious psychiatric disorders after a couple hours of observation.

It's Just a Plant

Written by: Ricardo Cortes

First line: Jackie loved to go to sleep at night.

Why you should read this book: When Jackie walks in on her parents smoking a joint, her mom decides to take her on a educational bike ride to talk to Farmer Bob and Doctor Eden about marijuana. Jackie receives honest and factual information about some of the plant's most interesting properties, how and why people have been using it for a very long time time, and the reasons that children shouldn't try drugs, even if it OK for adults. Later, watching an encounter between the police and some pot smokers, she learns even more truths about the political reasons for marijuana prohibition and the fact that the government sometimes makes legislative mistakes, which can be rectified through the democratic process.

Why you shouldn't read this book: One time your cousin's roommate's neighbor's daughter took marijuana and her eyes exploded out the back of her head and she died and you know that the only way to protect people from danger is to prohibit the spread of any information on the subject.

A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola

Written by: Ricardo Cortes

First line: One story about the origin of coffee is that of a goatherd, tending goats on a mountainside in Ethiopia.

Why you should read this book: Brought to you by the guy who wrote a level-headed and informative picture book for children about marijuana, this story discusses the world's love affair with stimulants, beginning with the controversial coffee bean but eventually evolving into a discussion of how the Coca-Cola company is basically the world's largest importer of coca leaves, despite the fact that importing coca leaves into America is illegal for everybody else except the people who sell flavoring extracted from the leaf to the Coca-Cola Company. Meticulously researched from declassified Federal Bureau of Narcotic files, this book is unique in both the way it constructs a social history of prohibited substances, and also in that it's still, essentially, a children's book. A perfect present for the ten-year-old skeptic/history buff in your life, the grown-up conspiracy theorist, and anyone who loves caffeine.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You refuse to believe that the government would make any decision that wasn't in the best interest of its people, or that it would ever cater to big business at the expense of the disenfranchised.

Songs Only You Know

Written by: Sean Madigan Hoen

First line: The aluminum bat leaned against the garage wall, next to a rake and a hoe and four bicycles with flat tired and rusty chains...

Why you should read this book: A brutal memoir of a family torn apart by alcohol, drugs, and mental illness, it's told through the eyes of a young man whose rage and suffering is so deep that not even screaming lyrics for a punk band can take the edge off his pain. Sean tears his way through road trips and relationships, throwing himself into anything he senses might smooth the path, believing that he can protect his family best by shielding them from his own truths. Through some trick of fate, he survived his attempts to obliterate reality and emerged to pen this eloquent novel, which oozes raw emotion and bleeds heartbreak, all the while propelling its author to the next promise, the next possibility, the next hope.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Substance abuse. Death. Morbidity on every page.

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.