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The Four

Brilliant Books For Readers Who Like ‘Thinkers’

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When it’s this chilly and kind of miserable out, the perfect place to be is curled up with a blanket and a great book.

Anthony Ascione, with , has some more great reads for your bookworm friends who like to expand their outlook with books that make them think.

‘The Only Harmless Great Thing’ by Brooke Bolander

“This is definitely getting into adult picks, this is a historical revisionist sci-fi book about Topsy the elephant who was electrocuted on Coney Island,” Ascione says. “Kind of a famous piece of film, a lot of people mistakenly attributed it to Edison, saying he was doing it to test electricity and he was showing how his competitors were so dangerous and his was so safe. But it’s also about the women who painted radium dials on watches back when radium was first discovered and who were subsequently poisoned by their work and died as a result of radiation poisoning. So in this book, the women who paint those dials actually train elephants to do it for them. Elephants are bigger, they have a higher tolerance for the radiation, and in this the elephants are sentient creatures who communicate through sign language and through interpreters. But it will make you think about your place as a human in the grand scheme of nature and its one that makes you think about humanities and environment what we’re doing to the world around us.”

‘Cove’ by Cynan Jones

Sometimes picking up a book can feel like a commitment.

But Ascione says this choice won’t take weeks to finish, and it’s another one that makes you think.

“Actually it’s a prose narrative, so it’s written sort of poetically, it’s not the typical long-form paragraphs that you would get in a novel,” he says. “A man is out fishing in his kayak and he gets struck by lightning. It fries his phone. When he wakes up, he can’t use either of his arms. He’s lost his paddle and all he can think about is that he left his pregnant wife at home with a note that said ‘gone to get fish, be back later.’ So the rest of this is his attempts to get home get back to shore, the things he sees, and the things he experiences. It’s a dark winter night book, for sure, and the nice thing is you can knock it out in a couple of hours. It’s really short, but will stay with you. And it’s one you can read over and over and you’ll get different things out of it each time you read it. A very quiet, contemplative (book). It’s about trying to hold on to the things you love most and just feeling them slip through your fingers. I really like this one a lot.”

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