National Book Lovers Day is Aug. 9. And to honor this luddite holiday, the CityBeat editorial staff has compiled a list of our favorite books to read — and reread — time and time again.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Novels written by Toni Morrison, including Paradise and Song of Solomon, are the ones I find myself returning to over and and over again. That’s especially true for Morrison’s most famous book, Beloved, which is based on a true story that happened in what is now Lower Price Hill. I first read it for extra credit as a freshman in high school. The presentation I gave to my Butler County classmates on Morrison’s devastating masterpiece was… intense… and may have cemented my reputation as the weird kid in class.
It’s very hard to describe Morrison’s mastery of words with my own lesser ones. If reading a good novel is about trying to see just a little into another person’s thoughts, Beloved is about being thrown fully and unceremoniously into their deepest experiences, seeing every feverish hallucination (or are they real visions?) and feeling every cool breeze in the novel’s consequential sun-dappled clearing. Morrison seamlessly bridges a painful physical world that is all too real with a vivid but disorienting metaphysical one. At times, she leads you to wonder which is which.
Morrison leaves the namesake character in Beloved perfectly balanced between these worlds — and creates a vengeful, caring and ambiguous spirit representing America’s tortured racial history. As she does, she explores joy and the bonds of family, friendship and love.
Morrison passed away Aug. 5, taking with her the incredible ability to transport us to a place where we might imagine other peoples’ — specifically, black women’s — joys and pains in a troubled and troubling America. That ability will be sorely missed. 
— Nick Swartsell, News Editor
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
This collection of short stories is devastating and cathartic — like throwing up. I don’t know why that’s a good thing, because I hate barfing, but I’ve read Birds of America like three or four times since I first discovered it in college. And sometimes when I’m just sitting blankly in traffic or taking a shower, slices of Moore’s stories will just pop into my head. For example: a phrase about a masseuse pushing psychic pain out of someone like a grape through their toe. I frequently think about grapes shooting out of my toes, like an emotional super power.
It’s like 12 (a good number) of stories in which Moore drops readers into the middle of human lives — sometimes inappropriately — where we can spy on intimate moments and interactions. There are dead babies and affairs and freak accidents and cancer, people realizing they don’t know people they thought they knew or not knowing themselves, etc., with all the humor and loss and barfing and crying that comes along with it. Would recommend. Especially if you want to think about grapes in a weird way forever. — Maija Zummo, Editor-in-Chief
Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy
I get into Wilco off and on, dipping into new albums kind of randomly, and this spring I went through a pretty heavy Jeff Tweedy phase, drawn in more by his personality this time than his music. He played a remarkably entertaining solo acoustic show at Music Hall’s Ballroom in April that was as much a stand-up comedy show as a concert, with Jeff doing roast-worthy crowd work that would make Don Rickles proud. I was so charmed by the show that I finally go around to reading his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), which goes over not only his life in music, but also gets personal on subjects like his drug problem and family life (when he writes about his father’s death and his son’s reaction to it, if you don’t cry, you’re probably Jay Farrar).
I love music books in general, but Let’s Go is different — Jeff’s personality really guides the book, his voice conversational and often hilarious. Its poignancy is heightened by how it feels like you’re just listening to a friend tell stories sitting around the fire pit in his backyard. I’ve also been reading the Beastie Boys Book, which is a wild and weird collection of stories (and more, like comics, playlists and recipes) that, like Tweedy’s book, really gives a sense of the people behind the art. And it’s kind of like a kaleidoscope version of The Beatles’ Anthology book, in that you can pick it up and just start reading anywhere. — Mike Breen, Music & Managing Editor
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
There are only a handful of books that have adhered themselves to my psyche, but none has done so quite like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go. Equal parts brutal and sentimental, there have been several moments since first reading it as a high school senior that I’ve returned to specific passages — the prose itself is so, so enchanting. It’s a book best read with little prior knowledge as to what it’s actually about.
What first unfolds as a story of children who live at a boarding school — Hailsham House — in an alternative late-1990s England slowly reveals itself to be an absolute gut punch. Literally. Upon first finishing it, I promptly threw the book at my bedroom wall.
Narrated entirely through the lens of Kathy H., we’re taken through her odd, but idyllic and sheltered, childhood at Hailsham. We’re given a glimpse into the lives of her friends Tommy and Ruth, and later the love triangle that embroils the three as a young adults. But none of that matters because all of the students’ fates have been mapped out and decided for them. It doesn’t matter if they’re passionate about art or have anger problems or even that they love one another. Their purpose in society has been decided since birth: As clones, they only exist so their organs can be harvested. As a whole, Never Let me Go is a meditation on morality and humanity that poses questions I’m still trying to answer all these years later. — Mackenzie Manley, Arts & Culture Editor
This article appears in Aug 7-14, 2019.