Reading Radar

Visit our Reading Radar pages when you need help choosing your next great read. Every couple of months we feature a different celebrity reader’s recommendations. Take a moment to browse through the Local Celebrity reading choices, then scroll down to see staff picks.

Local Celebrity Reader

Alice Fogel

NH Poet Laureate (2014-2019), author of several books of poetry and a poetry-reader’s guide.

Starting with Harold and the Purple Crayon, I have always craved books that are (or address the) strange in order to bring us home to great truths. I seek books that will move or awe me so much that I struggle between not being able to take in one bit more and not being able to stop.

I want books that awaken me, make me learn and think about the world, people, nature, art, thought, life, death. I want to be lifted out of my normal reality, ricocheted down previously unknown corridors of consciousness, surprised with an insight I might not have come to otherwise. It can be done simply (The Wishing Bone Cycle, Howard Norman) or spectacularly (His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman).

Magical realism
So my favorite fiction often has elements of magical realism—including thin places, spirit visitations, mystery, or mysticism, and my favorite nonfiction often has elements of realism that feel magical—like the science of astrophysics, the growth of forests, or the behaviors of all sorts of creatures from mammals to extremophiles. My favorite poetry reaches from the concrete near at hand, into the world out far, and touches me somewhere in deep.

Living outside my limits
Often, literature from or about other cultures (Latin American, Inuit, African, Eastern European) fascinates me, because of the similarities in our humanity, in the context of the differences in our environments and belief systems. Likewise, in further pursuit of living vicariously outside my own limits, I get excited when writers find new approaches to form and language, when hybrid combinations convene to expand the experience of reading, or when I feel challenged to participate in creating meaning, the way Harold did by drawing with his purple crayon to make sense of his dark world.

Reading helps me to go places I don’t normally get to go, to step outside my own head and into another place or time or mind. I am grateful for books that provide this kind of transportation.

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