Ten Absorbing Books For You This Spring.

By Karen and Erica

We’ll soon be spending lots of time outdoors, but we’ll still be reading. Here we suggest ten of the best books we have read recently.

• The Great Reclamation, Rachel Heng. The British are about to depart Singapore, and a young boy growing up in a tiny fishing village is about to change his world, having discovered metaphysical gifts possessed only by him. Even so, history sweeps over him, and his family, and his culture. A beautiful book.

• Picasso’s War, Harold Eakin. How did Picasso conquer the U.S.? Could it be that a lawyer put on a show that burst on the scene and propelled New York City to the forefront of the art world? And how did Picasso’s work survive the war? This book is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, an extremely unlikely history of a frightening and exhilarating time in the art world, and a fascinating look at the players ruled by passion.

• First Lie Wins, Ashley Elston. This tale is a hoot. A very smart young woman who is not what she seems gets involved with a very smart young man who is not what he seems. They have some adventures, many of questionable legality, with amusing characters who are not, shall we say, mainstream. Enjoy!

• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. A magnificent story of wonderful people and wicked people—a childless Jewish matriarch and her entrepreneurial husband, a young Black child sheltered by a Black mother of many, loan sharks and criminals and horrifying institutions. Also murder and mystery and mayhem. And tragedy. Superb writing. You will fall in love, you will laugh, you will cry, you will not be able to put this book down.

• Madison’s Music: On Reading The First Amendment, Burt Neuborne. Neuborne is a poet masquerading as a prominent legal scholar. This book is a poem to the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, and a paean to the men who wrote them. Lyrical and lovely, and a brilliant new approach to reading the document that defines our key freedoms. Your brain and your soul will be nourished.

• The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco’s Beloved Restaurant, Judy Rodgers. Yes, it’s been around since 2002, and yes, it is a cookbook. But what fun to read about the cafe, and how Ms. Rodgers came to food, how she thinks about it, how she cooks it. A mouthwatering delight that resonates with the atmospheric origins of the foodie era.

• The Round House, Louise Erdrich. Not new, but new to us. Superbly written, and evocative of a time and a place. Something terrible happened. It happened in the Round House, a place of worship for the Ojibwe community. The victim’s young son and his friends try to figure out who and what hurt his mother so badly. Riveting and heart-rending.

• The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh. A young American scientist of Indian heritage seeks a rare dolphin. She travels to the Sundarbans, a delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal. She, and her unlikely partners, undertake an epic journey to find the dolphin and themselves. A brilliant story, in an extraordinary geographical and historical setting.

• The Hot Zone, Richard Preston. Do not read this book for fun. But if you have an interest in how diseases start, are tracked down, and are brought under some control, this is a fascinating account of where Ebola originated, the amazing bravery of those who deciphered its origins, and the complexity of stopping a deadly pandemic in a connected world.

• The Prince of the Skies, Antonio Inturbe. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pilot in the earliest days of air mail, when the world was changing in so many ways. His story is unforgettable, and informs our understanding of how The Little Prince was born.