NWNY Winter Reading List

Here are the books our team is reading this season

Winter is officially here. What better way to spend the cold and snowy days than with a stack of good books? We asked our staff and our team of volunteers for winter reading suggestions connected to the immigrant experience. Our selection is as diverse as our community and includes only newly-released titles. The list has fiction and nonfiction — novels, memoirs, poetry, cookbooks and children’s books.

Whether you’re searching for an easy read, something to enjoy with your little ones or a more thought-provoking title, we’ve rounded up 6 books to keep you company during the season. Select your favorite genre and enjoy! All books in this list are available for free at the New York Public Library. Apply for a library card here.

MEMOIRS
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
Mira Jacob, Penguin Random House, 368 pages, $20*

A funny, witty and heart-wrenching memoir that is both a fast read and a thought-provoking title. It alternates scenes from the author’s coming-of-age as a first-generation American (her parents immigrated from India) with her 6-year-old half-Jewish, half-Indian son’s questions about everything. The boy’s inquiries become increasingly complicated when tensions spread from the media into his own polarized family: “How brown is too brown?” and “Are white people afraid of brown people?”, he wonders. Portraying a family’s struggle to find common ground amidst the current political climate, the book sparks reflections on race, identity and multicultural parenting.

POETRY
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky, Graywolf Press, 96 pages, $16

Author Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in 1977. His family fled the anti-Semitism of post-Soviet Ukraine in 1993 and was granted asylum in the United States. His just released poetry book is haunted by his personal experience and by the atrocities of our own time . It starts in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers kill a deaf boy, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear, all have gone deaf. The story follows the private lives of people engulfed by public violence and by collective silence, including a newly married couple expecting a child and a woman instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater. 

COOKBOOKS
Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking: From Everyday Meals to Celebration Cuisine
Maanganchi and Martha Shulman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 488 pages, $50

This comprehensive introduction to Korean food is welcoming and unpretentious. The author, a Korean living in New York City, respects tradition, but is willing to adapt it to broader audiences. The recipes include easy-to-make spicy soft tofu stew and traditional temple food like rice and nuts wrapped in a lotus leaf. Pictures and instructions are followed by Korean names and characters.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS
I Miss My Grandpa
Jin Xiaojing, Little, Brown, 40 pages, $18.99, for ages 4 to 7

Although it doesn’t literally address the immigrant experience, this beautifully illustrated book takes on the feelings first-generation children might have about a grandparent they never got to meet. The narrator asks her family about her grandfather, and learns that he took on many “voices”, from a lion’s to a cloud’s, when he told stories. Xiaojing, a Chinese illustrator based in New York City, makes crayon-like illustrations, subtly changing them from page to page to convey a wide range of feelings.

NOVELS
Quichotte
Salman Ru, Random House, 393 pages, $18.43

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, an Indian-born writer living in America, author of a number of unsuccessful thrillers, creates Quichotte, a salesman who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to try to meet her. Quichotte and Sancho experience contemporary issues of the United States, including immigration, racism and the opioidcrisis. Meanwhile, his creator faces his own midlife crisis and has urgent challenges to deal with. Both character and his creator’s lives intertwine as the story progresses. 

Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli, Random House, 401 pages, $15.26

The experiences of asylum-seeking children from Latin America serve as a central theme in Mexican Valeria Luiselli’s book about a family road trip across the United States. As an unhappily married couple travels from New York to Arizona, the bonds between them begin to fracture. Through ephemera — songs, maps and a Polaroid camera — the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one on the news: the stories of thousands of migrant children trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained or lost in the desert along the way.

*Prices refer to paperback and were informed by publishing houses