New Year, New Reading List: What Book Would You Recommend to Richard Armitage?

I had one of those moments yesterday that happen to book lovers every once in a while. I’d just dropped oldest and her BFF at the movie theatre so they could see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 and when I came out there was a FedEx truck parked behind me. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for a while so I went into a second hand shop that normally has a great book selection. Within a few minutes I had a few books in my hands and then found a copy of Floating In My Mother’s Palm by Ursula Hegi, one of my all-time favorite writers, on the shelf. I picked it up and said aloud, “Oh, I love this book!” at the same time another book lover slightly down the stacks said the same thing about a book she’d found. We chatted a moment, exchanged books, and I walked out with The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

When Richard Armitage talks about a book he’s reading many of us put it on our reading lists, too, so he’s kind of the Recommender-In-Chief for us. What if it happened the other way, though? If you ran into Richard Armitage in a book shop, what one book would you want to put in his hands?

I managed to narrow it down to two. The first is A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, which has always been one of those books that is kind of a bonding experience for me: if someone mentions that they read and loved it we’re going to get along just fine. Ackerman is a philosopher, poet, and naturalist and her writing here is luscious and graceful about what it says on the tin, our senses. I devoured most of this book in two days but took a week with the last chapter because I didn’t want it to end.

Another one that I didn’t want to end the first time I read it was Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I went looking for a good plot summary because there’s so much happening in this book I didn’t want to forget anything. At Wikipedia I found this: “Beets and the god Pan figure prominently.” They do indeed. Robbins is not for the faint of heart but I think he’s a national treasure.

So now it’s your turn and the comments are open: if you could recommend a particular book to Richard Armitage, which one (or two, or more) would it be?