100 books like The Office of Historical Corrections

Through friendships with Borinqueñxs and interest in the island, I don’t consider myself wholly ignorant about Puerto Rico. Like the Philippines, Puerto Rico was claimed by the US following the Spanish American War, but once again, when I tried to learn more about that era, I ran into a brick wall. Marisel Vera recovers that history while offering all the pleasures of a traditional family saga. She brings the reader close to the daily lives and loves of a family of coffee farmers who struggle first under Spanish rule and then the system established by the US. Vera also taught me something I’d never heard of: the deceptive recruitment that carried newly impoverished but still hopeful Puerto Ricans off to Hawaii to labor in the sugar fields. 

Sometimes I read a book and wish I’d written it. With Insurrecto, I cheered and gave thanks that Gina Apostol did write it. Decades ago, I became obsessed with the US conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish American War and how the people of the islands fought back to liberate their country. I knew Mark Twain protested the occupation. I found military histories of the war against Spain. At that time, I couldn’t find anything from the Filipino perspective. Where were books to challenge the American belief we’ve never had colonies? Apostol brings this lost history brilliantly to life with a contemporary filmmaker and a translator who create dueling narratives while trying to make a movie about a 1901 massacre. Insurrecto is a remarkable work, complex enough to repay rereading.

I fall hard for novels about intense friendships and loyalty. I’ve never been to Korea, but it was easy for me to relate to the protagonist, Jung Yoon, whose personal growth is influenced by her study of European culture, much as my own immersion in Latin American culture continues to inform my life. 

Here again, a gap in most Americans’ knowledge gets filled in. Shin’s haunting and poetic novel offers a bracing account of the student protests in South Korea in the ’80s, with repression, deaths, and disappearances at the hands of the US-supported dictatorship. The politics are eye-opening, but just a backdrop to the characters’ pursuit of love, friendship, intellectual development, and the tender way they must mourn many other losses as they grow up and apart.

For decades, Holocaust denial was widespread in Arab countries. That’s beginning to change, and Sansal’s harrowing novel – inspired in part by a Nazi officer who escaped to Algeria and became a hero in the war for independence – aids in writing that history back into consciousness. We gain extraordinary intimacy with two brothers as they contend in different ways with the challenges of North African immigrant life in France, the massacre by the Algerian military that claims the lives of their parents, and the discovery of their father’s horrific past. Sansal was attacked for comparing Islamist fundamentalism to the Holocaust and for visiting Israel, but I think it’s clear his intent is to condemn any ideology based on an unyielding and violent intolerance of difference.   

Away from the 2011 disaster itself, Fumio Obata’s Just So Happens is a wonderful graphic novel again exploring that borderland between konoyo (this world) and anoyo (that world). And it just happens to be another story that bridges Japan and the West, this time Japan and the UK. Central character Yumiko travels back to Japan for a family funeral, and is immersed in a world of ritual, Shinto temples, Noh theatre – at once both familiar and strange to her. Word and image combine beautifully to draw on themes that have obsessed me for years. 

Happiness is a gentle, insightful, poetic depiction of the politics of nature in London, England—specifically, the treatment of urban foxes in the midst of human activity. The layers of life (children, adults, foxes, falcons, street cleaners, psychiatrists, immigrants, landowners) interact here in ways deeply moving and insightful, reminding me of the central question in much of my writing: the boundaries between our private, poetic perceptions and the politics of survival.

Love is made more possible by every violence it has overcome.

Throughout Summerhill’s sophomoric collection, I found myself turning toward play, both in the pause that suddenly arrived after a line that hits and in the music I turned on after a line that urged reconsideration.

Even for the avid fan of Frank Ocean’s discography, this book serves as a vital push toward questioning what it is we deem valuable. A must-read for self-declarations of grace and hope in the face of racial, historical, and social brutality. 

I am always on the verge of returning home. Sometimes, it’s the food; other times, it’s the memory. I am not from New Orleans, but this book is phenomenal in its guidance of a city and what it means to name any place home.

From its onset, this collection moves through music and mythology as a means for sorting through devastation while placing life a step ahead of it.

I’d recommend this book to any seasoned (or first) reader of poetry on the search for beauty around the corner and a reminder of how close we are to it.

While books that hit death right on the nose can be a meaningful resource for kids, sometimes stories with a softer touch are what meets the moment.

That’s where the magic of this book comes in. A kid and his grandpa go on one final adventure together to a magical world of their making before the Grandad decides to stay, sending Syd back to the real world alone.

This whimsical storytelling leaves me with that exact right feeling of wonder and heartache that comes with an honest grappling with death. It’s that emotional center that allowed our kids to sit with their own questions: where did Grandad go? Why couldn’t the boy stay there, too? Will they see each other again? Getting to explore these questions in the light instead of keeping them anxiously buried under the surface has been a real gift for our crew.

The useful thing about this book is that it breaks down the different types of losses we can experience and examines those. Sibling loss, parental loss, loss of a child, etc. You can connect to your type of grief and learn specifics about how to manage it. It is also filled with compassion and wisdom from one of the grief experts in the world.