72 books like Dear Darkness

I am so impressed with Caitlin’s work on demystifying funeral practices (The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and opening up our eyes to new possibilities through her writing and her Order of the Good Death. With this book, I was so engaged with the sheer variety of the death and funeral practices that she details.

We need this kind of writing: engaging, funny, and grounded while teaching us that we are not as bound as we might think we are. I left this book more resolved than ever that we can die differently, and especially if we can use our imaginations better to explore alternatives. The world is wide and beautiful: this book teaches us that we can see that beauty even in—maybe especially in—death. 

I am so humbled and grateful for the death professionals of all stripes who help families with the transition of their loved one, whether it’s the hospice care doctors, nurses, and staff who think about the right cues and context or, as explored in this book, the folks re-thinking funerals and burial practices.

I have been to several in the last few years—a home funeral and a green burial stand out in particular—that have really deepened my sense of what we can do better. Reading this book opened up my imagination of what is possible for this crucial community experience. It triggered deep emotions from my personal experience, but in a way that helped me imagine a new path forward. 

I love books that see ways to bridge domains of experience and understanding normally kept apart, and this book does that brilliantly. I was so touched by the author’s personal story of grief and its relationship to her experience of art in the rural community in which she was raised.

But I also learned immensely about how this talented neuropsychologist channeled that experience into studies that helped me understand the neurological components of grief, including how to diminish their amplitude through thoughtful practice.

For me, it provided a new conceptual framework for “learning to die,” a new sense of the ancient maxim of philosophy. 

Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by “inner vision”: what do people think, feel, and experience in extreme states that they struggle to describe to others?

This book is based on such an approach to the question: a palliative care doctor and team gather the stories of people experiencing visions while undergoing the massive transformation of dying. By re-thinking these deathbed visions not as feverish delusions but as insights into human experience, I was deeply moved on multiple levels. You can sense the dying person’s powerful drive to connect with the past and sometimes with the present, which makes the “hallucinations” quite real emotionally. You can also sense how important sharing the stories is to the loved ones in their grieving process. 

When I started playing guitar, all I wanted to do was play the blues. Why a working-class Scottish boy would be so entranced by music so culturally and geographically remote is curious even to me but this book gave me a way in, a key to unlock the skills required to emulate the sounds of the blues greats I loved to hear. As an autodidact, clear explanations, technical advice, and background information were essential to my development and I still use this book with students to this day. 

This retelling of the Book of Hosea reminded me that love is meant to be unconditional. Patient, healing, hopeful. No matter what Angel does, Michael loves her. I read this entire book in less than two days. I laughed, I cried, and while I couldn’t put the book down, I dreaded closing the cover for the final time. I had a book hangover for days.

If I could choose one book to reread for the first time, it would be this one. I haven’t experienced things that these characters have, but this story still inspired healing and sparked hope. It broke me and put my back together. I walked away with a clearer view of how much God loves me and the lengths He will go to prove it.

The forthright honesty and the audacity of Nora Simms, narrator of Erika Mailman’s Woman of Ill Fame, is stunning and nearly as compelling as the murder mystery at the center of the novel. Set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, the novel takes us into the city’s bordellos, which, like the rest of the state, have been infected by a get rich quick at any cost ethos. The cost for many of Nora’s colleagues is high. Women of ill-fame are being killed, one by one, and only Nora is capable and willing to wade through layers of deception to discover the identity of the killer and to save her own life. 

Nora is not your typical damsel in distress and that might be why I love this book so much. She’s not a “good” woman, by society's standards, but she is one of the most surprising… show more.

The difference between urban fantasy and horror is that in urban fantasy, the supernatural elements may be benign, not scary. In Tea With the Black Dragon, the fantasy element is Mayland Long, a black dragon converted to Buddhism and transformed into human form to search for a Zen master. In San Francisco, he meets middle-aged Martha Macnamara, violinist and zazen practitioner, and assists her in looking for her daughter. Amateur detectives (one of them a dragon) vs. computer criminals; there’s no magic and not much violence.

After wading through and translating the verbosity of Proust, she challenged herself to write very tiny stories. She is a pioneer in contemporary American literature and her work deals largely with the experiences of women, particularly those in domestic situations. Her work is sharp and pointed, often poetic and resonant. Her use of language really makes you interrogate how many words you truthfully need to tell a good story. This collection combines several of her earlier collections.

An interesting thing about reading this book is that I had read a novel about Dorothea Lange only months earlier. But when Darznik’s publicist reached out and asked me to read it, I couldn’t resist! Why? Because I love Dorothea and can’t get enough of her.

Dorothea is exactly the kind of woman I want to be BFFs with. But whose story would give me the intimate connection I was looking for? Jasmin Darznik, in her enchanting new novel, The Bohemians, that’s who.

On page one, I stepped into the relationship of two daring and talented women who seem different as night and day. Dorothea, a blond from New York and Caroline Lee, a black-haired Chinese American, raised in an orphanage.