Deserted Island List Mania: 5 More Favorite Books - Return to the Island

     It's spring cleaning time again, and that means I'm thinning my personal library, packing up and donating those books that I just don't forsee reading again. This is a tough process. Books are such wonderful things in an infinite number of ways. They hold the promise of worlds beyond our own realities. And the stories within form bridges between those worlds and our own inner lives so that they are forever connected. Giving certain books away feels like severing connections, making the notion so difficult.
     So, these 5 books are more of those that I'd never put on the chopping block. I'd add them to my deserted island collection and be forever happy paging through each as the soothing sound of the ocean waves on the shore accompanies some great uninterrupted reading.

In no particular order:

1. ...And The Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomas Rivera

     A fictional account of Mexican-American migrant workers in the '40s and '50s, this book hums with stunning realism. I've often heard it said that there is more truth in fiction than facts, and this perfect blend of precise poetry and lyrical prose makes that case ever stronger.








2. The Subsequent Blues by Gary Copeland Lilley

     "...Lilley's verse weaves stark realism with the spiritual, crafting myths of honest witness to the good, the bad, and all the shades of in between coloring this earth. Quietly lovely and then brazen and arresting in the exhilaration emitted. Drugs and booze, love and hate, life and death all sing inside the covers of this collection. And, after putting it down, one is left sensing a renewed and refreshed contact with the world." - Excerpt from my 06/16/14 review of the collection.





3. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua

     A powerful collection of essays and poems by a Chicana Texas-borderland native, this book draws together the personal and political into something extraordinary and unique. Anzaldua explores complex issues of identity - including race, gender, sexual orientation, heritage, and family - through a skilled weaving of language that is sure to leave readers with a heightened sensitivity to the great and varied diversity present throughout the human race.





4. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

     "Moon Tiger is a gorgeous, sprawling novel about one woman who never hesitated to write her own way through history. Claudia's life has taken her from the English seaside, the Egyptian deserts of World War II, the Central American jungles to the cusp of death.  This final place is the setting for her journey through that past and that of the entire known world..." - Excerpt from my 4/6/14 review of the novel.






5. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

     Such a strange book. So hallucinatory and mirage-like. Bradbury penned the dreamscape of Mars with such precision and frightening beauty. The stories within chronicle the many attempts of the human race as men return again and again to colonize this red planet that neighbors our own, always beckoning with possibilities and mystery. What they find there serves only to deepen and expand that mystery, all beneath the glow of long-extinguished stars and galaxies, spreading out to the limits of infinity.