Books to survive a desert island with Ingrid Haring-Mendes

If you had to bring three books on a desert island with you, which would you bring?

Hi friends,

I feel like I have said this before, but one of my favorite things about writing a newsletter on Substack is the community that you cultivate through the platform.

Through Substack, I have been exposed to so many creative and thoughtful writers, and one that I discovered along the way is Ingrid Haring-Mendes, who writes one of my favorite newsletters, Book Letters.

Book Letters is a newsletter aimed at book lovers, and in every edition Ingrid shares updates on new releases, personal reading recommendations, and her honest opinions on all of it. She has great taste and isn’t afraid to tell you exactly how she feels about a book, which, if you know me, you know I’m here for. We’ve had some books on both of our lists that we loved, including Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. She has also pointed me toward a few new additions for my TBR, including Flesh by David Szalay, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, and Every Happiness by Reena Shah.

So I reached out to Ingrid with a question:

If you could only bring three books with you to a desert island, what would they be and why?

I tried to answer it for myself first, and let me tell you, it was not easy. I landed on I’m Down by Mishna Wolff for humor, The Color of Water by James McBride for comfort, and for length I’m still torn between The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

Here are the books Ingrid is bringing:

The first book is one I recently finished reading called Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy. It is about a father and his four children who live on Shearwater Island, a research island close to Antarctica. When the book starts they are the only human inhabitants left on the island until a woman, half dead, washes onto its wild shores. I say human inhabitants because the island is also home to seals and penguins. Charlotte McConaghy based the island on Macquarie Island, where, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, seal hunters wiped out the fur seal population and hunted elephant seals and royal and king penguins to almost extinction. It is now a world heritage site and home to four million seals, penguins and seabirds.

Why I’d bring the book: firstly because it’s so well written, I’d read it a second, third and fourth time. There’s so much to learn from it about writing. It’s a novel that is not only told in multiple points of views but also in perspectives. The father, each of his three children and the woman who washes up on shore are given a space to tell the story from their POV; the father and the woman are told in first person, the three children in third person. Secondly: a big part of the novel is about the island and its unpredictable environment. The family is at the mercy of nature. The island is wild and beautiful, but it is also merciless. It moves to its own rhythm, with no consideration for the needs of humans living on it. At the time of the story part of the island is being swallowed by the ocean, which adds in a time stamp giving it even more tension. There’s a sense of how small a single person can be against the force of nature.

Now, I know you said Desert Island, and the island in Wild Dark Shores is a subantarctic island. But still, I like getting a reminder of how both insignificant and significant a single story is within the grand scheme of things. The book does this to perfection.

Book two would be something completely different. I’d take the book by my favourite writer Jhumpa Lahiri called In Other Words. Jhumpa, who won the Pulitzer for her short story collection, An Interpreter of Maladies, set about learning Italian as an adult after a trip she took to Italy with her sister. Not only did she learn the language, moving to Rome with her family, she started writing exclusively in Italian and has since published four books in Italian. In Other Words is her first published work in Italian. It is a collection of short biographical snippets that are accompanied by their English translation, translated by Ann Goldstein. There’s a page of Jhumpa’s original Italian writing and on the opposite one, the English translation. I could use a good chunk of my time on the desert island, when not foraging for food or swimming in the ocean, learning Italian from the Jhumpa’s beautiful writing.

And Book three… let me think…. would most likely be something lighter… probably a romance, for the really taxing days when I was being chased by a shark or scraped by the bark of a coconut tree, and all I wanted to do was to sit back and relax. I’d take either a Julie James romance, one from her FBI/US Attorney series. I think my favourite was the first one: Something About You. That’s the one I would have with me on the island. I haven’t read a Julie James book in a while, but I know she always has the right ratio of plot, witty dialogue, enemies to lovers tension, and spiciness for my liking. OR I would take one of Marsha Canham’s Pirate Wolf series for some swashbuckling fun and to dream of being rescued off the island by a pirate.

See? I love Ingrid’s list.

Be sure to subscribe to Ingrid’s newsletter, here.

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Curious to know, if you were to bring three books to a desert island, which books would you bring?

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Here are a few other things worth sharing this week:

• Tayari Jones’ new novel, Kin, is out today, and it was such a beautiful read. I just finished it on Sunday and the book focuses on friendship, sisterhood, and motherhood. As imagined, Tayari’s writing is beautiful. The book has multiple POVs and themes that run throughout the storylines of different characters.

• Also out today is Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke. The book is described as a page turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work and journalism. Very excited to dive into this book later this week.

• I’m still making my way through Moonchild’s new album, Waves and also through Baby Keem’s album, Ca$ino, but so far enjoying both.

• I did however make my way all the way through collaborative album, Spiral Staircases, by Larry June, Curren$y, and The Alchemist and I loved it. As you’d expect, the production is good and I always enjoy the mix of Larry and Curren$y.