Community Reads: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Melissa Broder, Ottessa Moshfegh & more
Get to know our community and their reading highlights.
Community Reads is back with a fresh list of book recommendations from our community. And let us tell you, it’s packed with inspiration from people whose literary taste we truly admire. Enjoy exploring their reading worlds!
Title: Braiding Sweetgrass
Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Publisher: Penguin Books
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
a short piece by Connor Boshuijer
Growing up in a city, I never had that much connection to nature besides the occasional walks in a forest or park. The same could very much be said for my Eurocentric worldview. I had often visited the United States, but had never meaningfully encountered its natural landscapes or engaged with the histories and presence of Indigenous peoples.
Many years later, into full blown adulthood, however, I picked up Braiding Sweetgrass on the advice of a friend. And what a journey it would prove to be. The author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, takes us by the hand as she walks us through different facets of Indigenous culture, be it language, rituals, tradition, or, most of all, how the different cultures and tribes commune with nature.
Parallel to that Kimmerer teaches us several valuable lessons about biology, nature, ecology and more. Interwoven like a braid of sweetgrass, Kimmerer manages to perfectly balance between explaining the scientific, the cultural and even somewhat spiritual using anecdotes from her rich and eventful life.
One would think a book filled with anecdotes and scientific explanations could become somewhat dry, but the opposite is true. The book is filled with soul and a passion, an energy for nature and all of its miracles. Through giving back we can become richer ourselves, and everyone can contribute, in whatever small way.
This was a book that instantly left an impression on me, and I caught myself thinking about the different chapters in the days and weeks after finishing it. I was happy to finish it, and already looking forward to my next reading of it, whenever that may be. But read it again I will, as many others have before me. Attached is a photo of my new copy, and my friends’ copy, who has read it many many times. Definitely a recommendation.
Title: Do Pause: You Are Not a To-Do List
Author: Robert Poynton
Publisher: Publishers Group UK
This is one of those books I return to every year, to remind myself to pause and make space for thoughtful breaks in my life, whether it’s during the workday or at the turn of the seasons.
More and more, I notice how society (especially social media) encourages us to always be productive, to constantly push our limits as if the moment you stop, you break the rhythm.
A while ago, I reached a point in my life where everything felt like too much. I only took breaks when my body was completely drained (aka, when I got sick). This book had a profound impact on me.
Do Pause isn’t just about stopping; it’s about giving yourself access to abilities you might not realize you have. It’s about understanding yourself better and honing your skills and judgment. Disconnecting and stopping to please other people's calendars is also a thing.
If you're looking for a bit of peace and a shift away from hyper-productivity, this book is for you :)
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Send us the title, a short text (it could be a summary, a quote, why you picked it or your personal thoughts – whatever helps others get a feel for it), plus a photo.
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Title: Karina Papp
Author: Zungenbrecher
Publisher: etece buch
Karina Papp’s debut novel Zungenbrecher is one of the most vibrant texts I’ve read in quite some time. In it, Papp writes about life between languages (Russian, English, German), about war and desire, queer self-discovery, translation, and writing. She weaves the act of writing into the narrative in a way that’s as fluid as it is original, joyfully pushing the boundaries of (auto)fiction. Rarely have I encountered such striking and inventive imagery in a text, such a precise yet playful handling of form, language, perspective(s), desire, and identity. And all of it with a lightness and alertness that shows just what language is capable of.
Title: Haus aus Wind
Author: Laura Naumann
Publisher: S. Fischer
Think of a vacation in Portugal. Of attractive women, sunrises, endless hours of surfing, flings and forest raves. The images you’re picturing right now offer a first glimpse into Haus aus Wind. But beneath this idyllic holiday atmosphere lies a certain heaviness. Because Johanna isn’t enjoying a carefree trip to the Algarve. She‘s struggling to get over her breakup with her ex-girlfriend. And on top of that, there are complicated family dynamics, mental health issues and eventually autumn arrives too.
For me, the novel was a real surprise. It kept heading in different directions than I expected and felt like a wonderful coming-of-age story for adults. I
t’s just a shame that the book is such a quick read – and that Laura Neumann hasn’t written another one. No pressure but my next vacation is coming up soon.
Title: Emily Witt
Author: Health and Safety. A Breakdown
Publisher: Pantheon
A breakdown is an analysis of a situation. But it is also a complete collapse. Emily Witt's memoir Health and Safety describes both. Originally, she intended to chronicle the nightlife in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and her own drug experiences. Due to her sharp observation, her socio-economic circle and, above all, the period she describes, it has become an essential book for understanding why even people who once tended to be progressive turned to Trump.
In the book, not only does her partner breaks down after taking too many drugs and a traumatic experience during the Black Lives Matter summer, but also her neighborhood and her scene, which on the one hand does not survive the self-induced gentrification, and on the other is also shaken by the pandemic and, of course, political upheaval. And with exactly these political and social upheavals, it is also the entire country that is experiencing a breakdown.
“The new right-wing politics of transgression were unfamiliar and initially difficult to comprehend,” Witt observes at one point. The hedonistic, sometimes nihilistic party scene, which is so interested in this transgression, in part proves to be surprisingly susceptible to Trump's rhetoric, fueled by the Covid lockdowns. While the first, most detailed part of Health and Safety is primarily about Witt's own life and nightlife, there are two crass political cuts, first with Trump's election and later the year 2020.
At times, the author runs the risk of not being fully aware of her own privileges, but thanks to her self-reflection, she always manages to turn things around quickly. And so her memoir is a quite astonishing book, a snapshot of this strange period of the late Obama and early Trump years, that simultaneously tells, on a personal level, the story of the end of a great love.
Title: Death in Her Hands
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
I read a lot of essays and theory, so I always need a novel to balance it. A novel that takes me along its sentences effortlessly, without being too light, too dull, too badly written. After I picked up a copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation years ago, I know that Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories and novels are just what I love: Beautifully written, clever, and with female main characters that are far from being heroines: alienated outsiders, whose thoughts and actions are not always moral or kind. Characters that are not written to be understood or even liked – but that begin to love nonetheless.
Death in Her Hands is no exception. Walking her dog at dawn in the birch forest near her isolated cabin, Vesta, a seventy-two old widow, finds a handwritten note. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.“ There is no body, and Vesta first shrugs if off as a prank. Yet Magda has entered her thoughts, and is not leaving them again. What starts as a familiar crime story – the lonely woman in the haunted wood – increasingly turns into something else, when reality and fiction start to blend. Thriller? Murder history? Exploration of isolation and loneliness? Comedy? – All of them. Death in her Hands is haunting and suspenseful, written beautifully and with cruelty and honesty. And it is intricate and unsettling. It might leave you in a void with more questions than answers. A void that holds space for the complexity and beauty of a novel that might not be meant to be understood, either.
Title: Death Valley
Author: Melissa Broder
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reality flows into hallucination and ridiculousness in true Broder fashion, so subtle that it all seems completely normal, until you’re left questioning if the whole book might end as a metaphor, and if it does, if that’s a good or bad thing? But before you can answer this question, you keep on reading just to find out what happens next. If you’re not familiar with Broders’ work, this is a pretty good one to start with. It’s loopy, fun, emotional, unhinged and relatable. I loved the context and found that it’s easy to read, sucking you in – it feels like you’re standing right there in the Best Western too, or can hear her husband’s breathing patterns. You’re left questioning which parts are real, which are not, and which might be metaphorical after all.
Death Valley makes despair feel oddly psychedelic – and like maybe, just maybe, we’re all lost in the desert together. Bring water. And therapy.
Title: Dream Count
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
I was listening to an interview with Brian Eno the other day where he spoke about the simulating power of art. You don’t have to go through a bad divorce, he says, to understand what it feels like. You just have to read the right book.
This felt especially true for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count. Throughout the book’s interconnected narratives, I glimpsed into lives of the Nigerian 1%, of growing up in a rural Guinean village, of cleaning hotel rooms of the rich and powerful in Washington DC. I also met a lot of shitty ex-boyfriends.
This is what makes Adichie’s writing so infinitely worth reading, the way it sweeps you away with crisp storytelling into the lives and loves of four African women. In just a matter of pages, I was fully invested, walking in their shoes, encountering the hypocrisies of the American academic class, a medical system that doesn’t respond to their pain, aimlessness and extreme privilege and so much more. If you’re looking for your summer escape, this is it.