Sunday, December 23, 2018

Book Your Stocking with Aileen Keown Vaux

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 23

Clearly, you're standing in the bookstore reading today's book recommendation because this is the last Sunday before stockings are stuffed, and because you're using Book Your Stocking as your virtual book-list. Good. 

Now that we have that established, please welcome today's reader, Aileen Keown Vaux, with your day-before-the-eve book-wish.

Prepare your stockings.

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Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala cover
The book I would want to see in my stocking this year is Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala a memoir written by an economics professor who lost her family (parents, husband, and two sons) to the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami. Wave is exacting in its recall of events from that day, along with memories of Deraniyagala's past life, and her subsequent recovery. 


I checked this book out from the public library last fall on a whim and haven't stopped thinking about it since. The book is as much a celebration of her family as it is a chronicle of devastation and those two aspects combined make for one of the most haunting reading experiences I've had in awhile.

Wave is a testament to one woman's strength, but also a record of how important language is to convey our realities to others.

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Aileen Keown Vaux
About today's reader:

Aileen Keown Vaux is an essayist and poet whose chapbook Consolation Prize was published by Scablands Books in 2018.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: 

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Book Your Stocking with Maya Jewell Zeller

Book Your Stocking 2018

Book Your Stocking: December 22

'Tis the last weekend for book-buying before the biggish day, so it's good you're here for another reading recommendation for your stocking and the stockings of people you love or like.

Maya Jewell Zeller is here to help.





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Daniels explores subjects with a lyricism I admire; her deft weaving of Sergei Esenin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Leonard Wolf, and her own narrative offers a poetic rendering of the topic of mental illness. She also portrays the images of the world through a lovely slanted lensing. 







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Maya Jewell Zeller
About today's reader: 

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya teaches for Central Washington University and edits poetry for Scablands Books.

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Check out more recommendations from Book Your Stocking contributors: