Every other month, all the team members at Lunstrum Electric have the opportunity to suggest a book recommendation that they think others in the company might be interested in reading. After this list is compiled, everyone gets to choose one of the books from the list of suggestions and the company purchases that book for them. Picks for January are listed below.
The Darkest White
By Eric Blehm
On January 20, 2003, a thunderous crack rang out and a 100-foot-wide tide of snow barreled down the Northern Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia, Canada. More than a dozen skiers and snowboarders were thrust down the mountain, buried beneath several tons of rock-hard snow and ice in the Durrand Glacier Avalanche. A heroic search and rescue ensued. Among those buried was Craig Kelly—“the Michael Jordan of snowboarding”—a man who had propelled the sport into the mainstream before walking away from competitions, to rekindle his passion in the untamed alpine wilds of North America. The Darkest White is the story of Craig Kelly’s life, a heartbreaking but extraordinary and inspiring odyssey of a latchkey kid whose athletic prowess and innovations would revolutionize winter sports, take him around the globe, and push him into ever more extreme environments that would ultimately take his life. It is also a definitive, immersive account of snowboarding and the cultural movement that exploded around it, growing the sport from minor Gen X cult hobby to Olympic centerpiece and a billion-dollar business full of feuds and rivalries. Finally, The Darkest White is a mesmerizing, cautionary portrait of the mountains, of the allure and the glory they offer, and of the avalanches they unleash with unforgiving fury.
Light Bringer
By Pierce Brown
The Reaper is a legend, more myth than man: the savior of worlds, the leader of the Rising, the breaker of chains. But the Reaper is also Darrow, born of the red soil of Mars: a husband, a father, a friend. Marooned far from home after a devastating defeat on the battlefields of Mercury, Darrow longs to return to his wife and sovereign, Virginia, to defend Mars from its bloodthirsty would-be conqueror Lysander. Lysander longs to destroy the Rising and restore the supremacy of Gold, and will raze the worlds to realize his ambitions. The worlds once needed the Reaper. But now they need Darrow, and Darrow needs the people he loves—Virginia, Cassius, Sevro—in order to defend the Republic. So begins Darrow’s long voyage home, an interplanetary adventure where old friends will reunite, new alliances will be forged, and rivals will clash on the battlefield. Because Eo’s dream is still alive—and after the dark age will come a new age: of light, of victory, of hope.
American Gods
By Neil Gaiman
Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a stranger offers him a job and Shadow, with nothing to lose, accepts. But a storm is coming. Beneath the placid surface of everyday life, a war is being fought – and the prize is the very soul of America.
An inspired combination of mythology, adventure, and illusion, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.
Lincoln in the Bardo
By George Saunders
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
By Roger Deakin
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing by Roger Deakin For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations about and around his home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world. 'Marvellous, wonderful, lovely, remarkable . . . to be read and reread and treasured' Elizabeth Jane Howard, Daily Mail 'Very funny, sharp-eyed. To look at the world through Deakin's eyes was to see somewhere that was more wonderful than it often appears' Sunday Telegraph 'Thoughtful and invigorating, full of humour, timeless . . . will take its place among the classics of Nature diaries . . . to be read alongside Frances Kilvert, Gilbert White, and Dorothy Wordsworth' Mail on Sunday 'Gentle, straight, honest, inquisitive, funny, melancholic' Spectator 'So busy and bustling with life' Observer 'A secular saint' The Times Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment.He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the river Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in Wildwood. He is the author of Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.
Emotional Intelligence Mastery
By Eric Jordan
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of writing by Roger Deakin For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations about and around his home, Walnut Tree Farm. Collected here are the very best of these writings, capturing his extraordinary, restless curiosity about nature as well as his impressions of our changing world. 'Marvellous, wonderful, lovely, remarkable . . . to be read and reread and treasured' Elizabeth Jane Howard, Daily Mail 'Very funny, sharp-eyed. To look at the world through Deakin's eyes was to see somewhere that was more wonderful than it often appears' Sunday Telegraph 'Thoughtful and invigorating, full of humour, timeless . . . will take its place among the classics of Nature diaries . . . to be read alongside Frances Kilvert, Gilbert White, and Dorothy Wordsworth' Mail on Sunday 'Gentle, straight, honest, inquisitive, funny, melancholic' Spectator 'So busy and bustling with life' Observer 'A secular saint' The Times Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment.He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the river Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in Wildwood. He is the author of Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.
Comments