Since June we've asked our team for their reading recommendations to celebrate a diversity of voices.
This month, our sixth recommender Listener Poet Elle Klassen offers reviews and provides links to purchase each of these books.
November 2021 image & reviews by
Listener Poet Elle Klassen
The Vegetarian
by Han Kang
Fiction
I read this book while traveling during the holidays a few years ago. I was on a plane when I finished it, and I immediately scribbled down my existentialist stream of consciousness on a scrap piece of paper. I love this feeling: when my brain, inspired by a creative work, fires off waves of thoughts I can’t keep up with, like electricity continuing to spark from a conductor after the source is long gone.
In literal terms, The Vegetarian is the chilling and unsettling story of a young South Korean woman who decides to stop eating meat after she has a troubling dream. But what makes the novel so compelling is its unabashed integration of the taboo, its complication of the boundaries of sanity and morality, and its expansion of the concepts of agency and selfhood. Due to some of the disturbing content, I would recommend researching trigger warnings before reading this book.
Migratory Birds
by Mariana Oliver, translated by Julia Sanches
Non-fiction essays
This collection of short, prose essays is beautifully written. Cherishing small moments of history with a contagious fascination, Oliver weaves stories of movement and migration together with personal philosophical ruminations.
She moves poetically through a series of seemingly random historical moments, subverting the reader’s expectations of linear storytelling and delighting them with charming reflections. I found myself savoring every sentence and reading paragraphs several times with careful attention to the language.
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