Davi (he/him)
Davi has had his dream job of bookseller since he was legally old enough to work and strolled into a Borders Books and Music.
He reads anything that’s well-written and quite a lot that isn’t!
An American expatriate is chilling at a friend's cottage outside of Paris. One day, a weird rich Irish couple arrive with their trained hawk Lucy. This is one of those books that feels like an extended metaphor but you don't care because you want to read every other sentence out loud to the nearest bystander. It's a tiny, under-the-radar American masterpiece from the 1940s and a fascinating look at strange love and the mad energies it can bind people with.
This book made me uncomfortable in all the right ways and challenged me on some pretty heavy subjects: sex, relationships, monogamy, power, gender dynamics, you get the picture. On each of these the author is startlingly clear and confident. I turned the last page with a better understanding of certain aspects of the human condition. What more can we ask from a novel? A bunch of explicit sex scenes? Cuz there's also a bunch of explicit sex scenes in it.
"I got the sense reading All Down Darkness Wide of a man carefully constructing a work of art from his life that he can live inside, and invite the world into, and eventually walk away from. Every page is full of care and consideration - the right word to honor a feeling, respect the gravity of an event - so that I read it in a delicate state of close attention. Pain, beauty and sadness are all bound up in this meditation on self, queerness, poetry and, most powerfully for me, depression. It is also so much more, a gentle and generous span of time with someone who's been through the fire and now carries forth more light than burning."
"Again and again I am drawn to tales of the down and out, to narratives that admit poetry into dim and demeaned existences. Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling is one such remarkable drama, set all along the west coast in places rough, dreary and inhumane. Published in 1966, it follows a couple hard-luck protagonists who make desperate attempts to get out from under their circumstances. They're trying to make a life out of the detritus swirling down society's rusted drain, and maybe find love and redemption surrounded by harshness, poverty and the crushing indifference of the capitalist machine."
"Some dude from a century ago has a hundred things to say about love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion and death? And I agree with 99 of them? For some probably cynical reason I have until now neglected to read this miraculous little volume but if you find yourself with the opportunity to read it please read it. If you find yourself, like I do, overwhelmed with a sense of uneasiness and unsure how to proceed in life with both awareness and joy, unable to discern what truly matters, please read it. There is enough wisdom and humane sentiment in it to soften the hardest heart and reorient the most wayward soul."
What a dark and gnarly little book! With lots of frank, unsettling descriptions of pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, female friendship and mental health. The protagonist is on a visceral postpartum quest to un-annihilate herself. This procreation stuff is WEIRD, man.
"Ominous, elegant, and damn near perfect. A short, haunting tale full of menacing nuance, about a poor family in Bangalore whose fortunes suddenly change, and whose bonds and allegiances begin to shift and fray. Unforgettable!"
Lauret Savoy chips away at the American story sometimes gingerly, sometimes with ruthless efficiency, to excavate narratives and voices deliberately excluded from the official record. I find something so compelling in a personal quest to locate one’s place in the world as well as in time. Even more compelling the desire to rescue from oblivion stories that give greater truth to the character of our nation and its peoples. Trace is a service to the American story, a corrective, as well as just a wonderful read that has expanded my consciousness.
Wow. Just... wow. Bird people rejoice! My favorite creature photographer delivers an absolute stunner on the avian world.
A charming voice, fascinating scientific discovery, evocative prose and a quirky personal history: everything you could possibly want from a book like this. A unique (the author is an ecology professor and former logger) and worthy addition to the growing library of books about trees.
Despite being broken up into a million pieces and scattered across continents, centuries and languages, Cloud Cuckoo Land just works, and works so well, as a gripping, moving story about humans, books, and the power and precarity of both. If you're in the mood for a cleverly constructed epic that ponders the biggest questions, but stays grounded in sensitively written characters and their struggles for survival and understanding, then Cloud Cuckoo Land is your book.
As difficult to classify as it is to put down, this was just so much fun to read. McBride is a natural storyteller, a natural entertainer. Man, I wanted to spend a lot more time with these characters!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions
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“A gripping, sinister fable!” —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
NPR • GLAMOUR • GOOD HOUSEKEEPING • LIT HUB • THRILLIST
"Beautiful yet devastating. Academic yet accessible. Original scholarship in the service of powerful narrative and vice versa. Feels truly groundbreaking."
Another one of my favorite creepy, open-ended, beautifully written "thrillers." Doesn't easily fit into the genre but it's definitely full of mystery and suspense. It's like that unsetlling realization you've gotten on the wrong bus and won't be able to get off till the end of the line.
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What a beautiful, powerful, devastating novel, full of a humanity we so desperately need right now. This one will stay with you for a long time.
A harrowing and illuminating reframing of the American horror story and a rhetorical masterwork from the author of The Warmth of Other Suns.
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Creepy, absurd, deeply moving, and chock full of unforgettable characters, ridiculous situations and beautiful, haunting prose.
Did not expect to fall so deeply into this elegantly observed, melancholic novel about David Hockney, an artist I honestly didn't know anything about before picking this up. Just goes to show you the power of great writing and great storytelling to open up doors and windows where there previously weren't any. A gorgeous gem.
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Hands down my favorite contemporary crime series. Wise-cracking, substance-abusing, pop-culture-referencing Catholic cop on a Protestant police force in 1980s Northern Ireland. This series just works, and gets better and better with each book. There's also a great sense of humor and a devotion to devilishly and classically constructed mysteries.
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Shout-out God-Level Knowledge Darts, number one book on late-night, only illustrious pages!! YERRR YERRRRRR!!
"What can I say? From page one it has that Ferrante magic, pulling you into its detail-rich world, balancing an abundance of external events with her signature mesmerizing interiority. My very high expectations were met and exceeded with this new novel."
"Beautifully written vignettes about birds and the natural world and so much else, destined to be an offbeat classic in the genre. An essential on your nature writing shelf."
"Oh man, this book got me good. I felt wrung out and raw after it loosed its grip on me. If you've read any of Hanif Abdurraqib's writing before then you have already made up your mind to purchase this book. Here he crowns his heroes, lifts luminaries from the gloom, shines light into neglected corners of pop culture history, and grapples poetically with a host of demons both internal and external. In an age of bullshit and artifice, this book feels shockingly genuine, and therefore is a gift to anyone who reads it."
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"Yes, some physical distances are covered in the course of this marvel of a book, as implied by the title. But from page one it is clear that the journeys that matter most to protagonist Krishan are through time and memory, the space his mind is prepared to traverse as it pendulates freely through the past, lingering on joys and traumas alike in order to make sense and give meaning to the present. A Passage North was a tonic to me, a book I could luxuriate into with its pages-long paragraphs and slowly unfurling sentences, with its disregard for the conventional machinations of plot or movement. It persuaded me to slow down and acclimate to a depth and pacing of thought unusual in my reading adventures and modern life in general. And it brought me to a part of the world, Sri Lanka, unfamiliar to me, brought to life its history and the lived experience of its people. So happy I crossed paths with this book and can't wait to start selling it."