Nine Books to Reset Your View of the World
Books rise to the level of enduring art, I believe, when their writers take something ordinary and reintroduce it in a way that radically transforms it. The right work can make a subject that’s never crossed my mind, or that strikes me as aggressively boring, into something incantatory, pulsing with meaning. I’ve read many books animated by someone’s desire to show me a new manner of thinking; they’ve placed me inside the minds of animals entirely unlike me, made me look into the faces of strangers with fresh curiosity and empathy, or reminded me that we are all floating through outer space. This kind of writing partly inspired my new novel, Earth 7, in which I try to portray common beach sand as the transcendent substance I’ve discovered it to be.
Each of the nine books below modified my understanding of something I had considered mundane. More important, they widened my perspective, giving me original insight and vision. I offer them here in the hope that they do the same for you.
Swimming Studies, by Leanne Shapton
I find swimming laps in a pool—trudging up and down a colorless lane—painfully dull. So I was surprised to fall in love with Shapton’s recounting of her childhood as a competitive swimmer. Shapton trained for the Olympic trials twice, almost making the Olympic team, her time long by mere seconds. But this isn’t the story of a loss or a win. Instead, the book is a collage of outtakes, nonsequential essays, and lists. Most interesting are several series of paintings and photographs that feel as repetitive as lane swimming across pages and pages of half-forgotten teammates’ blurry faces, swimming pools’ rectangular shapes, and almost-creepy old bathing suits on a dressmaker’s dummy. You may be tempted to flip by them, but if you slow down, they begin to reveal themselves as the building blocks of Shapton’s young mind, full of variation and subtlety. My favorite series is a group of watercolors that show a body swimming through water, full of light, movement, distortion, and freedom.
Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
A philosopher of science wrote this book, so readers should expect some pretty heavy intellectual lifting, but I promise it is well worth the effort. In Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith—a lifelong, nearly fanatical snorkeler from Australia and, most recently, a scuba diver and a world-class underwater videographer—attempts to understand the inner life of the octopus, not by observing them in captivity or for a short summer in their habitat but from the perspective of a man who’s spent many years observing octopuses in the twists of reefs and along the sea floor. The book goes beyond analyzing their behavior: As a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith considers the nature of consciousness, using the animals’ evolutionary development to theorize about the similarities between their minds and ours. At one point, in what felt like a long, mesmerizing tangent about cuttlefish, I realized I was actually reading an explanation for why animals, including us, die. I was challenged again and again, scribbling in the margins, gasping. If you are going to read one book this year, I’d suggest this one.
Split Tooth, by Tanya Tagaq
You may know Tagaq, an Inuk artist from the Canadian high Arctic, for her innovative improvisational throat singing, or from her appearance on the fourth season of True Detective—but she’s also a writer. Of all the books on this list, this one surprised me the most. Although published as a novel, Split Tooth is a collection of essays, stories, songs, poems, prayers, drawings, and passages lifted from her journals, all inspired by the small Inuk town she grew up in. Memoiristic explorations of lemmings, foxes, childhood violence, and pregnancy give way to a sequence of love stories dedicated to the northern lights, diving into mythology and spirituality. Most exciting is how Tagaq decenters the human race, openly wondering whether it would be so bad if our species died off. Are humans better or more important than any other creatures or nonliving objects? she asks, writing, “Is the air more enlightened than we are?” I love having my assumptions disrupted in this way, and she does it with electric, offhand confidence.
[Read: The race to safeguard the Arctic’s natural heritage]
A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras
In 1934, the Austrian painter Christiane Ritter, tired of her husband leaving her at home while he went off hunting in the Arctic, packed a bag and boarded a ship to follow him to Spitsbergen. I picked up this memoir feeling half-expert on the topic of the beauty of the island, after spending three weeks there, and was immediately humbled. Ritter describes an astonishing land of giant icebergs, gleaming pack ice, powerful storms, shining mountains. She is attuned to the sounds of the pounding wind—“insane music,” she calls it—eerie green moonlight, unending night, and the moment a glimmer appears on the horizon after months of darkness. She writes absorbingly about humans’ utter subjugation to the elements in this otherworldly place. After one tremendous storm that she has to face alone (because her husband has disappeared, again), she manages to dig out of the hut where she nearly froze to death. The quiet and tranquility of the world outside unnerves her. “Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature?” she asks. I felt her awe at the ferocious turning calm.
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Anyone who tells you they don’t like story collections likely has not read either of Chiang’s. His stories ask the reader to grant the most delightful, ridiculous, imaginative premises: Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we found a race of humans without belly buttons. Or, say, we could breathe only through external mechanical lungs that we have to lug around like air tanks and refill. Then each story becomes an engrossing thought experiment, leading you into unexpected philosophical terrain—the meaning of life, the identity of God, the existence of free will. As the protagonists painstakingly untangle deep mysteries about time and fate, about future generations and ancient ones, you will find yourself contemplating similar questions. Does free will exist? you may wonder. If so, am I embracing it, or am I being a lemming? We see our own lives echoed in these stories, for we, too, are surrounded by labyrinthine problems that might take a lifetime to solve. We, too, must untangle ourselves and escape.
[Read: Ted Chiang is wrong about AI art]
The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit, by Elias Canetti
I’m suspicious of anyone who goes to a foreign country for a few weeks, comes home, and writes a book about the journey, but this little-known volume of essays by Canetti, a brilliant Nobel-winning, German-language writer, is an exception. First published in 1967, this short book documents, through Canetti’s powers of contemplative observation, a Marrakesh long gone. He depicts its camels as having the gentle faces of old English aunts, describes the rooftops as places for women and the ground as places for men, and explains how haggling is a matter of dignity. A minaret, he writes, is different from a church spire; it is “more like a lighthouse, but with a voice for a light.” Canetti is an expert in how to listen and how to look. Every person and animal he describes becomes an unforgettably unique individual with their own beauty and suffering. You might wish the book were longer; certainly you will look more carefully at any city you walk through.
Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, by Yiyun Li
Li has written so many books that I fear this gem is sometimes overlooked. In this collection of essays about the books she’s reading, Li is ostensibly traveling for work. She always carries a book with her, we learn. She sits reading by a fireplace at an inn; she turns pages on a rock by the river. Soon she reveals that she is struggling with suicidal depression and is between hospitalizations. She tells us bits of what pushed her into crisis, along with stories from her past, such as memories of growing up in Beijing. Running through these reminiscences is her inner monologue about the authors whose work keeps her company in a deeply lonely season: Katherine Mansfield, John McGahern, Marianne Moore. She talks with them in her mind, turning them into friends and talismans, as she tries to figure out how to stay alive—and whether she can manage it. In the gorgeous, revelatory closing chapter that should be anthologized everywhere, “Reading William Trevor,” she rejoins the breathing world, telling the story of her friendship with Trevor on and off the page. Her book might make you weep over the power of artistic connection.
[Yiyun Li: Some have yoga. I have Montaigne.]
Little Lazarus, by Michael Bible
Little Lazarus turns on one pivotal moment: Two teenagers, drunk and in love, speed down a dark country road. An old man in a seersucker suit, with a magnificent giant tortoise beside him, walks into their path—and the consequences are far-reaching. I read this beauty in a book club devoted to short, strange books. The novel returns to the tortoise again and again—revealing how he wound up crossing the road at that moment, where he came from and who accompanied him—but its scope extends far beyond the car crash. The story stretches back 2 million years to show the tortoise’s earliest relative, and goes forward into the future to look at his last. This is a quiet but explosive book, full of emotion and erotic desire. I don’t want to ruin the plot, which keeps unfolding like a sprawling puzzle, but every detail is a clue: the seersucker suit, the car, the distant lake, the night. The book is an argument for how much meaning each distinct moment can contain.
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
In Harvey’s radiant novel about six people aboard the International Space Station, the characters simply go about the mundane tasks that make up most of their days: eating from their food packets, exercising on machines, recording the results of the various experiments they are conducting, and gazing out the windows at the vivid view of Earth. All along, readers can never forget that the crew is soaring around the planet at 17,500 miles an hour. From their vantage, everything becomes unfamiliar—time moves strangely, nationality seems to drop away, language appears to lose its referents, food becomes flavorless, and even their bodies feel drastically different. The astronauts have to will themselves to hang on to their ground-bound selves, and they each come to different conclusions about their time in the sky. Harvey began Orbital before the pandemic but wrote most of it during lockdown, when the world seemed to come to a stop. As her travelers would know, though, the Earth was still spinning. To get that kind of perspective—what a great gift, what a thing to strive for.