Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends a memoir on motherhood, a book on mushroom capitalism and newly translated ruminations on Rome.
The Motherload
By Sarah HooverSimon & Schuster$29.99January 2025Purchase
From the publisher: “The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Welcome to Sarah Hoover’s candid take on motherhood where she turns the ecstatic narrative women have been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal discovery—on its head.
Like most of us, Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a certain life for herself, and when she moved from Indiana to New York City to study art history, the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got her degree in art history, landed a job in a gallery, made friends, and met interesting artists, one of whom became her husband. But when Hoover got pregnant, everything in her life began to unravel.
At its core, “The Motherload” is about learning to forgive yourself. It’s a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. And it’s an honest, propulsive, and often funny take on the vicissitudes of marriage, life, and parenting—a motherhood memoir unlike any other.
From Jenny Douglass, staff: “The Motherload” is a relatable memoir about author Sarah Hoover’s challenging experience with the identity of Motherhood and struggling through severe postpartum depression. As an art historian and partner to a well-known artist, Sarah has a different life experience than those of us who work in bookstores, but the way she writes about how hard it was for her to sort through her feelings about motherhood, marriage, and her identity made me feel like we were the closest of friends. Recommended for anyone who’s ever felt like being a mom isn’t all sweetness and instant, unwavering love. You’ll want to meet Sarah in person after reading this, so head on up to Explore Booksellers in Aspen on Feb. 15 at 4 pm to say hi.
The Mushroom at the End of the World
By Anna Lowenhaupt TsingPrinceton University Press$18.95June 2021Purchase
From the publisher: Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, “The Mushroom at the End of the World” follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism.
By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, “The Mushroom at the End of the World” presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on Earth.
From Lisa Frank, staff: What happens to a place after capitalism has moved on? Anna Tsing finds surprising answers to this weighty question through a delectable study of one of the world’s most valuable mushrooms: the matsutake. No economics textbook, this relatively short book explores ever-changing global supply chains, the search for community undertaken by immigrants and Vietnam war veterans, and what grows in forests razed by logging or raked by caretakers through well-described encounters with people living in precarity.
Last Summer in the City
By Gianfranco CalligarichPicador$18August 2022Purchase
From the publisher: In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between rundown hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At 30, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich—but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever. Rather than toil and spin, isn’t it better to submit to the alienation of the Eternal City, Rome, sometimes a cruel and indifferent mistress, sometimes sweet and sublime? There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her.First discovered by Natalia Ginzburg, “Last Summer in the City” is a forgotten classic of Italian literature, a great novel of a stature similar to that of “The Great Gatsby” or “The Catcher in the Rye.” Gianfranco Calligarich’s enduring masterpiece has drawn comparisons to such writers as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Jonathan Franzen and is here made available in English for the first time.
From Clare Pearson, book buyer: I love it when a place so thoroughly seeps into a novel that it begins to feel like its own character. In this rediscovered Italian classic, the city of Rome and its influence is richly communicated by a listless and fatalistic narrator. Populated with sharp, hilarious dialogue and incisive observations of mankind, this novel is well-deserving of its comparison to “The Great Gatsby” and other classics.
THIS WEEK’S BOOK RECS COME FROM:
Explore Booksellers
221 E. Main St., Aspen
(970) 925-5336
explorebooksellers.com
Twitter Instagram FacebookAs part of The Colorado Sun’s literature section — SunLit — we’re featuring staff picks from book stores across the state. Read more.
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