Here are 61 books that Two Lives fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have lived primarily in Vermont, but my relationship to a remote portion of Maine wilderness is the one geographical consistency in my 81 years. Trained as an academic, I did have literary influences, but my chief influences derived from my early decades among men and women whose arduous existences in the great North Woods preceded electricity, power tools, and modern household conveniences. These men and women had to make their own entertainment, and they did so by way of storytelling, and their stories became a kind of community property. Whatever the genres of my 24 books, I have sought to emulate the timing and precision that these masters commanded.
One of biologist Heinrich’s books, an extended nonfiction essay, may seem an eccentric choice here, but–like other works of this writer’s–it has had a profound effect on the way I regard the natural world in northern New England, my home territory.
There are life-scientists who write well and ones who command a patent, deep knowledge of their subject matter. None comes to my mind who so magnificently combines a fine novelist’s sensitivity to language with so broad and detailed a scientific awareness as Heinrich does. And he is bold. It takes a mind and writer of his caliber, for instance, to make a thumb-sized golden-crowned kinglet the hero—and a doughty one at that, one obliged to eat thirteen times his body weight to survive subzero nights–of his study.
The particularity of Heinrich’s vision is exemplary, something that I, a writer obsessed with the ecology of the region he shares with…
From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, and from torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human counterparts, who must alter the environment to accommodate physical limitations, animals are adaptable to an amazing range of conditions.
Examining everything from food sources in the extremely barren winter land-scape to the chemical composition that allows certain creatures to survive, Heinrich's Winter World awakens the largely undiscovered mysteries by which nature sustains herself through winter's harsh, cruel exigencies.
I have lived primarily in Vermont, but my relationship to a remote portion of Maine wilderness is the one geographical consistency in my 81 years. Trained as an academic, I did have literary influences, but my chief influences derived from my early decades among men and women whose arduous existences in the great North Woods preceded electricity, power tools, and modern household conveniences. These men and women had to make their own entertainment, and they did so by way of storytelling, and their stories became a kind of community property. Whatever the genres of my 24 books, I have sought to emulate the timing and precision that these masters commanded.
What I admire so deeply in Ms. Robinson’s work is her capacity to tackle immense themes (from abolitionism to free will) in prose that is deliberately understated and yet stirs me deep in my soul and elicits my deep concerns for her characters, in this case, the title figure.
When I first read Robinson, I thought of B.B. King’s comment on the guitarist Johnny Winter, famous for his prolific, note-opulent solos. When asked about these tours de force, Mr. King diplomatically said, “Sometimes it’s not what you put in but what you leave out.” I know that, as primarily a poet, I can become seduced by the “lyrical” capacities of style; Robinson serves as a good check on that yen for excess and shows how presentations that might seem artless can shake the very earth.
'Grace and intelligence . . . [her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' BARACK OBAMA
'Radiant and visionary' SARAH PERRY, GUARDIAN
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.
Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard…
I have lived primarily in Vermont, but my relationship to a remote portion of Maine wilderness is the one geographical consistency in my 81 years. Trained as an academic, I did have literary influences, but my chief influences derived from my early decades among men and women whose arduous existences in the great North Woods preceded electricity, power tools, and modern household conveniences. These men and women had to make their own entertainment, and they did so by way of storytelling, and their stories became a kind of community property. Whatever the genres of my 24 books, I have sought to emulate the timing and precision that these masters commanded.
Alice Munro is, I believe, my favorite living author (written before Alice's death on May 13, 2024). As with Marilynne Robinson, the choice of this particular collection, as opposed to others of Munro’s, verges on the arbitrary. Her capacity to render inner lives–which more often than not are quietly turbulent–seems to me matchless and she achieves her effects without straining for effect. She always seems to find the pluperfectly concise language to draw us into the small maelstroms of a character’s life.
As one who is persistently intrigued by the way in which pasts and presents can conflict with, interfuse with, and complement a character’s view of her/himself and the ambient world, I am also much taken by Ms. Munro’s frequent recourse to achronological presentation. Her plots tend not to be that in any conventional sense of the word; things seem to happen suddenly and simply, and while these things…
A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected…
I have lived primarily in Vermont, but my relationship to a remote portion of Maine wilderness is the one geographical consistency in my 81 years. Trained as an academic, I did have literary influences, but my chief influences derived from my early decades among men and women whose arduous existences in the great North Woods preceded electricity, power tools, and modern household conveniences. These men and women had to make their own entertainment, and they did so by way of storytelling, and their stories became a kind of community property. Whatever the genres of my 24 books, I have sought to emulate the timing and precision that these masters commanded.
In both my novels I explore the cultural, almost exclusively oral history of Maine woodsmen and -women. An old man now, I knew people who worked as loggers, river drivers, and so on before the advent of power tools, electricity, or motorized hauling.
A non-writer friend told me about this book, which is concerned with the same culture across the New Brunswick border, mere miles from where my novels are set. His evocation of that arduous, raconteur-populated, dangerous world bolstered my own seat-of-the-pants knowledge and offered a wealth of specific physical detail and a sense of storytelling’s central importance in the old logging communities.
The book, then, served as a model for my own explorations of a culture whose likes we will never see again and whose preservation in words is among my own most passionate aims.
In his major new novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune, Richards explores the dying days of the lumber industry in the mid-twentieth century. This is a transfixing love story of betrayal, envy, and sexual jealousy, which builds to a tragically inevitable climax. It is also a devastating portrait of a pre-mechanized time, and a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world. Rich with all the passion, ambition and almost mythic vision that defines David Adams Richards' work, The Friends of Meager Fortune is a profound and important book about the hands and the heart; about true greatness and true…
Grief is something I grew up with. I was a toddler when my infant sister died and it devasted my family. They weren’t able to grieve her death properly because the family code was not to talk about our losses. Now, as a psychologist, I treat patients who are bereaved. Many books have been written about grief, but few focus on what happens to the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved. I wrote a book about grief because of my research on the human brain as a faculty investigator at Harvard Medical School, my understanding of grief through my clinical work, my personal life, and my review of the grief literature.
A searing, short memoir translated from French that captures the life-shattering changes that begin for the author as he hears that his wife may be one of the victims of a terrorist attack at a concert she was attending in Paris. Leiris writes how he wants desperately to stay in the present—hoping that his wife is not one of the victims—but the present swiftly changes to the past as he learns that, despite his hope that it was not so, his wife is one of the victims who was killed. Leiris turns to face life with his toddler son without his beloved wife.
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - "On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate."
On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris's wife, Helene Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife's killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son's life be defined by Helene's…
I have been writing books on public art and memorials since the early 1990s and served on some major public commissions that select memorials and/or determine the fate of problematic memorials. These markers in our public spaces define who we are as a culture at a certain point in time, even though interpretations of them may evolve. They are our link to our history, express our present day values, and send a message to the future about who we are and what we value and believe in.
We rarely stop to think about memorials in terms of what emotion might have prompted them.
That is what Doss does here, covering a wide range of subjects and geographic sites. It is clear from her analysis that grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger have inspired a range of works representing a range of motivations for commemoration.
After reading this book you will never look at memorials in the same way. I had never thought of memorials in terms of emotional affect before and now consider it a major factor to be considered.
In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of communism, have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now, less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly…
I am an optimist. I jump out of bed in the morning ready to read and write. With my dog and cat by my side and a cup of coffee in hand, I lose myself in whatever I am working on. I am deeply curious about a gamut of subjects and constantly challenge myself to learn more. I am persistent and not afraid of hard work. Nature and animals are my bottomless well of inspiration and joy. I very much believe life is a journey and I try to enjoy each step.
If you read one book in your life, read Bel Canto.
Ann Patchett’s writing is always sublime but her characters in this book are unforgettable. She stages a hostage situation in an undisclosed South American country. Over time, the young terrorists and the group of international strangers find a way to live and even thrive together.
The novel revolves around the one female hostage, a beautiful opera singer. Her singing charms the most hardened terrorists and most skeptical politicians.
Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The poignant - and at times very funny - novel from the author of The Dutch House and Commonwealth.
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honour of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerised the international guests with her singing.
It is a perfect evening - until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves…
As a commercial sociologist who studies drinking cultures by day and a cocktail lover who partakes in those same cultures by night, I have always been fascinated with the rituals and traditions of hospitality. As a child, my parents disliked taking me to restaurants because my attention would always be focused on the other diners rather than whatever was on my plate. Academically, I am fascinated by the social construction of fact and how the documentation of what we understand to be true in science or history can be heavily influenced by such factors as class, gender, and race. It’s putting these two interests together that led me to research and ultimately write a book on how women have been systematically excluded from the historical record of the cocktail.
Alice Lascelle’s Ten Cocktails is not so much a recipe book as it is a musing on the ten drinks that have defined one woman’s personal journey as a drinks journalist. Part travelogue, part memoir, part historical tour, the book explores the author’s own experiences with drinks while diving into their broader social contexts.
The accounts are meaningful, engaging, and surprisingly entertaining. I particularly loved the description of her British parents’ inadequate storage of ice and the woefully poor gin and tonics they served up as a result. An all too familiar scene from my own household growing up - I now understand why I disliked this drink for so long.
In Ten Cocktails, The Times drinks columnist Alice Lascelles uses ten of her favourite cocktails to distil the stories, recipes and tips she has amassed in more than a decade in pursuit of the mixed drink. Join her as she dodges the washing lines of backstreet Havana in search of the perfect Daiquiri, scours the cocktail bars of Tokyo for the world's best ice carvers, harvests juniper in the hills of Umbria, goes sipping Sazeracs in New Orleans and unearths the mixological secrets of The Savoy.
What makes a G&T glow in the dark? Who threw the world's first cocktail…
I’ve just spent the last few years writing Return to Valetto, about a nearly abandoned village in Umbria and the last ten people who live there. In 2018, I received an NEA grant to conduct research in Italy and I visited about a dozen abandoned and nearly abandoned towns all across Italy. While I was traveling, I immersed myself in books about Italy—from history and biography to memoir and fiction. The books on my list were stepping stones in my education about all things Italian and I hope you find them as transporting as I did!
If you’ve ever fantasized about restoring a crumbling medieval Italian villa, then you’ll get to live that experience vicariously through this memoir.
The author has a wonderful sense of the absurd as she recounts her family’s multi-year efforts to turn a roofless villa into their dream home, complete with a complicated teenage daughter who is trying to find her way in the rural Italian countryside where the family has been transplanted.
Brimming with idiosyncratic and endearing characters.
The author recounts a year she spent in San Orsela, a small town in the Umbrian hils of Italy, sharing portraits of her Italian friends and a celebration of the seasonal cycle
I grew up in Ireland, where I was surrounded by stories, modern and ancient. Irish myths and legends formed the basis of the history curriculum for most children beginning the subject. Irish children are incredibly familiar with "The Children of Lir" and legendary heroes like Cúchulainn – we even have a rollercoaster named after him in our only proper theme park! As a teacher, I continued to retell these stories to my young, receptive audiences. When I was given the opportunity to write my own book of fairy tales, myths, and legends, I jumped at the chance. The research, including the reading of the books on this page, was almost as much fun as writing my book!
This book, for younger readers, is a collection of retellings of some of Ireland’s most well-known stories like Oisín in Tír na nÓg, as well as less famous ones like Son of an Otter, Son of a Wolf. Doyle writes terrifically well, perfectly pitching his tales at a young audience. Illustrated by Niamh Sharkey in her distinctive style, this is a collection to be treasured. I loved the pronunciation guide for the Irish names, as well as the introduction and the page about Doyle’s sources.
This book features tumbling tigers, happy hippos, rumbling rhinos and more! These lively animals and other creatures will help youngsters to count from one to twelve with the clever cockatoos. A delightful companion to Stephanie Bauer's "Alligator Alphabet", "Counting Cockatoos" also includes a colourful counting frieze.
