Ruth Ozeki

“This book does two things really well. The first is shifting to the hallucinatory world to the context of loss and grief. Lots of people experience these sorts of things following the loss of a loved one, and that happens to Benny as well. Secondly, this is a book about books. It’s steeped in books, much of it unfolds in a library, and in a way it’s about how we create different worlds constantly. We can move between them, and they shape how we think. The boundaries between these fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate.” Read more...

The best books on Hallucination

Ben Alderson-Day, Psychologist

“It’s brilliant. It’s a really amazing book, and it’s very feminine. It’s really how women experience meat as often the cook for the family, but also perhaps as the daughters and wives who are given meat, and it’s about what meat means to different cultures and how we try to sell one culture to the other. The central character is a Japanese-American woman making a documentary for the Japanese market about American meat. In Japan they haven’t got a history of eating a lot of red meat but the Americans were trying to sell it to them, so trying to change their culture. It makes you think about why we eat meat: a lot of it is because of cultural reasons. Think of the Sunday roast. We think we are more cosmopolitan now but even in Britain today, meat is for men, and in many places for a man to become vegetarian is seen as maybe a little bit effete. Isn’t that ridiculous?” Read more...

The best books on Eating Meat

Louise Gray, Environmentalist