Its crunch time to find that perfect holiday gift! If you still have shopping to do, we’ve got you covered with book picks from Nicole Merola, head of the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She joins Rhode Island Public Radio’s Elisabeth Harrison with suggestions of books to give as gifts… or gift to yourself!
1. Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Yoko Tawada
This is Merola’s suggestion for that person in your life who just can’t stop talking about the election.
“I recommend fiction, always fiction. I think that taking a step back from the political landscape right now, especially over the holidays is a really great move.”
In this book, Tawada imagines the lives of three different polar bears, weaving between the mundane and the surreal. Merola’s take:
“She has this great way of imagining what a polar bear might be worried about as an author or a circus performer. So its a little bit of escapism, but it also, I think, has some serious critiques of life under Soviet and East German regimes, and it thinks also about humans and the way that we treat other animals.”
“An amazing book… A kind of imagination of things that are unimaginable, in ways that I think are really compelling.”
2. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
This book is on a lot of top 10 lists for 2016, and it just won the National book award. It’s also one of Merola’s latest book obsessions.
“An amazing book… A kind of imagination of things that are unimaginable, in ways that I think are really compelling.”
“Quintessentially Delillo, the language is really interesting. And the way that he realizes the premise is totally fantastic.”
3. Zero K, Don DeLillo
After taking a break from DeLillo, Merola recommends his latest novel, about a son, a father and his terminally ill wife.
“The book is really about the relationships between the characters, and it thinks also about end of life and technology”
“Quintessentially Delillo, the language is really interesting. And the way that he realizes the premise is totally fantastic.”
4. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel
A new release about women “computers” of the 19th Century, hired to interpret astronomical data collected by male scientists. Merola calls Sobel’s writing an “excavation” of these little-known histories.
“She pulls out the different kinds of contributions that each of these women made to astronomy. And also, she talks about some of the women benefactors whose financial support underwrote the activities of the observatory.”
5. The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf
A story of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in South America, collecting specimens and studying ecology.
“It’s a book that I think does a really nice job of tracing the historical underpinnings of some of the ways that we think about the natural world.”
6. LaRose, Louse Erdrich
Merola calls Erdrich’s recent novel “moving, very disturbing in certain parts, but it was one of the most astonishing books I think I read this year.”
7. Some Possible Solutions, Helen Phillips
A collection of short stories by a lesser-known author, another of Merola’s picks for 2016.
8. Blackass, A. Igoni Barrett
“It might not be for all readers,” Merola says, but this tale of a black man, transformed overnight into a white man — with the exception of the anatomy referenced in the title — was one of her favorite books of 2016.
