It was with great anticipation that I approached BlogHer 2014 – both in terms of the bloggers and celebrities I would get to hear speak, as well as ten hours of in-air time I would have to read. I made my book selections carefully.You know you’ve chosen correctly when the person ringing you up reviews the books and says:

At bookstore, clerk reviews my books & says “Read this one first. It will crush you. Then this one. It will restore your faith in humanity.”
— Kate (@katespov) July 22, 2014

The first book, the one that would, and did, crush me was Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. By no measure that I would typically use to evaluate this book is it worth recommending. It us heartbreakingly sad and bleak. It shares war and poverty and the cruelty of man in such a way that I almost want to forget I’ve ever read it. But I think that is sort of the point of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena – to show us that life can be difficult and horrible, but it’s still life.

The definition of life that Marra shares is perhaps one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.

Life: a constellation of vital [phenomena – organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

It summarizes life perfectly. And the book. And while I could offer you a more through explanation of the book, I don’t think I could possibly do it justice, so I will just say that you should read it.

– – –

A welcome surprise was The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. When the bookstore clerk said the book would restore my faith in humanity, I was expecting a story full of grand gestures and big moments. Rather than being some macro view of humanity, Zevin takes us into one bookstore on Alice Island. A. J. Fikry is running the store to the best of his ability, but the recent loss of his wife and his general view on life, which is oppositional to running any sort of storefront, makes things difficult. Enter a small child name Maya, left in his store with a note from the birth mother reading:

I want her to grow up to be a reader. I want her to grow up in a place with books and among people who care about those kinds of things.

And so Zevin shares how one man stuck in his misery and one child seemingly plucked from thin air come together. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is a light book. A happy book. It didn’t leave me cheering and to say it restored my faith in humanity would perhaps be a little lofty of a statement. But it did remind me that there is good and love in the world.

A bookstore clerk told me that one book would crush me and that the other would restore my faith in humanity. He wasn't far off.

What have you been reading this week? I’m always looking for my next read!

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.