Explore Booksellers picks focus on human lifespan, noir fiction, boxing

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends a book of life-affirming nonfiction, a noir novel set in Colorado and a tale of eight women boxers.

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From the publisher: In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over 40 years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than 80 years. As a species we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity. “Extra Life” is Steven Johnson’s attempt to understand where that progress came from, telling the epic story of one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

From Zoe Locke, Staff: “Extra Life” is no drab historical narrative. With a refreshing sense of optimism, Johnson highlights lesser-known heroes, challenges common misperceptions about social change, and offers a perspective on 21st-century life in stark contrast to the hyper-negative and apathetic outlooks that tend to overwhelm modern discourse. My pick for nonfiction-lovers, it’ll leave you simultaneously in awe of human accomplishment and pondering new paradoxes of progress.

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From the publisher: During the 1950s, Gold Medal Books introduced authors like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and David Goodis to a mass readership eager for stories of lowlife and sordid crime. Today many of these writers are admired members of the literary canon, but one of the finest of them of all, Elliott Chaze, remains unjustly obscure. Now, for the first time in half a century, Chaze’s story of doomed love on the run returns to print in a trade paperback edition.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: I thoroughly enjoyed this noir set in Colorado. A quick read, what carries this book along is not the fast-moving, high-stakes drama—though there is plenty of that. It is the sharp and existential musings of the main character that occupy the novel’s interstitial space.

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From the publisher: An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

From Mo Kirk, membership coordinator: I went to boxing matches with my dad as a kid in the intermountain west so was interested in the premise here. There is certainly the thrill and dread of being inside amateur boxers’ heads during scrappy serious matches in some dumpy gym. But the glimpses of their lives, fears and grit that get woven throughout are more than I expected and will stick with me.

Type of Story: Review

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