june 2018 – good to read

Ayelet Waldman
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from “Lewis Carroll,” Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month–bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity–she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it.
Penguin Random House, January 2018

Tao Lin
While reeling from one of the most creative — but at times self-destructive — outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin’s first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?
Knopf Doubleday, May 2018 (eBook)

Chuck Palaniuk
The author’s first novel in four years is an ingeniously comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Smug, geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war in an effort to control the burgeoning population of young males; working-class men dream of burying the elites; and professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future. When Adjustment Day arrives, it fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche: the author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire.
W.W. Norton, May 2018

Clemantine Wamariya & Elizabeth Weil
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbours began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognise the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks.
Doubleday, April 2018

Anadi Martel
Beginning with sun worship in prehistory and sunshine therapies in ancient  Egypt, Greece, and India, light has long been associated with the sublime, the divine, and healing. Yet only recently have we begun to understand how different parts of the light spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, can affect our physical and psychological wellbeing. Sharing his 30 years of research, Anadi Martel demonstrates light’s incredible effects on the physical, energetic, and cognitive dimensions of life. He examines several forms of light therapy and explains how to get optimal benefits from sunlight and avoid the health risks of new artificial lighting such as compact fluorescents.
Healing Art Press, May 2018