Books loved, shared, and suggested by our community
These are books that have lived in our community - titles that readers have returned to, quoted, pressed into one another's hands.
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989
A masterful meditation on dignity, regret, and the roads not taken by an English butler reflecting on a life of service.
"What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took?"
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929
Ten letters of extraordinary wisdom on creativity, solitude, love, and the inner life - written to a young aspiring poet.
"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart."
Italo Calvino · 1972
Marco Polo describes fantastical cities to Kublai Khan - each city a meditation on memory, desire, loss, and the imagination.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd."
Joan Didion · 2005
After losing her husband suddenly, Didion chronicles the first year of grief with ruthless clarity and quiet devastation.
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks."
Milan Kundera · 1984
A philosophical love story set against the Prague Spring - a meditation on fate, freedom, and the unbearable weight of our choices.
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body."
C.S. Lewis · 1961
Written after the death of his wife, Lewis uses his private journals to wrestle honestly with grief, faith, and the silence of God.
"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything."