In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. This month, we’re highlighting our favorite books that we caught up on last year. What Are You Reading This Month?
Against The Country by Ben Metcalf
Novels that don’t read like novels are some of my favorite novels. The promise of a problem, its complication, and eventual resolution can feel pat, too blatantly telegraphed from the get-go. Against The Country by Ben Metcalf, published in 2015, forgoes such trappings in favor of something much more interesting: a book-length counterargument to America’s idyllic image of rural life that creates tension through rhetoric rather than plot. The book’s short chapters are divided by subject, like the central family’s massive trash pit, murderous chickens, and ill-fated dogs, and the narrator’s vulgar, and convincing, explanation for not naming his characters. He constructs long, tortuous sentences, each stuffed to the gills with qualifiers, modifiers, and asides, his prose picking up more and more energy with every clause he adds on. It’s caustic and profane and very, very funny. [Laura Adamczyk]
Zeroville by Steve Erickson
After seeing encomiums to it steadily grow in number over the past decade, I finally decided to give Steve Erickson’s Zeroville a try, and yeah—it’s excellent. It’s not just the bold, jackhammer-through-a-needle’s-eye writing style Erickson manages to pull off, nor the narrative, which is tailor-made for A.V. Club types, focusing as it does on a film-obsessed man who stumbles, almost Forrest Gump-like, into becoming one of the most acclaimed and divisive film editors of the auteur era of Hollywood. No, it’s that the book features an obnoxiously violence- and sex-attracting weirdo in the Bukowski vein who doesn’t make me want to fling it out an open window. It’s that good. (And no, I won’t be watching the misbegotten movie adaption.) [Alex McLevy]
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Confession: I read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere when it came out in 2017, but I reread it recently to prep for the upcoming Hulu adaptation. I was once again floored by Ng’s ability to turn the common story premise of a stranger—in this case, two strangers, mother and daughter Mia and Pearl—into a suspenseful exploration of families and the familiar. I can’t wait to see how this turns out on the small screen. [Danette Chavez]
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Almost done with Gilead by Marylinne Robinson. It’s taken me three tries (it’s fairly slow), but it’s beautiful and well worth it.
“The Secret Commonwealth”, book 2 of Philip Pullman’s sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. It is largely international intrigue, with fantasy, set in Central Europe and Constantinople (sic). Not a children’s book: sexuality and profanity appear here and there. I am 3/4 of the way through and have no idea what’s going to happen next.
I’m about 2/3 through and have heard it’s a cliff hanger. Hope we don’t have to wait too long for the final book.
Maybe he never planned this but it’s fascinating how this links up with that little “Lyra’s Oxford” apocrypha book he publishe 15 years ago. I went back and re-read that and then also the *other* short story be put out–”Once Upon a Time in the North”–wondering if maybe that will also get incorporated at some point.
Yes, I read Lyra’s Oxford last May, it totally went out of my head so I re-read it, and presto! It needs to be read just before “The Secret Commonwealth.”
Read “His Dark Materials” and just couldn’t get into it.
Christmas and my own lack of discipline have placed a giant pile of books on my nightstand. I’m currently reading Gore Vidal’s Julian, a Christmas present along with Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas. And because I couldn’t help myself, I picked up The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Exhalation. I had to stop myself from ordering You and Hidden Bodies yesterday.
If you’re a big Twin Peaks fan then The Secret History is a real treat, especially if you have a physical copy (though having the actors read their portions in the audiobook is also very cool. It’s also one of those books that’ll have you going back and forth to Google things that you thought must be invented for the narrative, but turn out to be authentic bits of American history. It’s a fun read.
I’m finally cracking into Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, but since January 1st I’ve knocked out (and loved) How to do Nothing, The Dark Dark and From Here to Eternity. (Also read Vinegar Girl but found it quite off-putting).
Just finished McSweeney’s Keep Scrolling ‘Til You Feel Something, covering 21 years of their stuff. It’s . . . sort of telling really. They start out funny. They end up being fairly not-funny. Which tallies with everything I’ve experienced using their site. Compare, say, the enduringly hilarious Bad Names for Professional Wrestlers (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/bad-names-for-professional-wrestlers) with, well, anything from the past like 5 years..None of their political stuff is really funny (even if, like me, you agree with it). None of their race or gender stuff is really funny. More and more it seems like an outlet very, very consciously by and for adjunct English professors (which explains a lot about their money problems). So now I’m re-reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (no, not the Tolkien version, just the regular Penguin translation) just ‘cause I once read it but now can’t remember how it ends.
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements by George Woodcock. It’s an interesting survey of different anarchist writers, but it has the extraneous verbosity and loose terminology common to scholarship from the 50s-60s. At the very least he could use an editor to clarify his structure.
I just finished Carl Wilson’s *Let’s Talk about Love*, an entertaining exploration of Wilson’s (former) disdain for Celine Dion’s music and the nature of music taste and criticism in general. It’s made me think a lot about my own aesthetic taste/snobbery.And I just added that Ben Metcalf book to my reading list. I’ve enjoyed some pieces of his in Harper’s, including this great condemnation of the Mississippi River that also appeared in The Baffler here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/american-heartworm
Michel Faber’s “Under the Skin”. Very different from the movie.
“The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin” by Douglas Smith. This is a fascinating (although at times gruesome) book about how in the 1921-1923 famine in the Soviet Union, the US came to the aid of starving (often to the point of cannibalism) Soviet peasants, despite the fact that 1) The US didn’t technically recognize the Bolshevik government and 2) had actively aided the competing Mensheviks during the Russian Civil War. Also surprising was the guy in charge of the aid program — Herbert Hoover, later the US President who wasn’t quite so charitable to the US poor during the Great Depression.
I’ve been rereading Catch-22. Last time I read it was in college, but I kept the book because I really liked and wanted to reread it. I am just now getting to that. So far, it’s as good as I remember.
I really loved Catch-22 when I first read it, but on my second read through it didn’t have that impact on me. Still a great novel though. Enjoy!
Not to besmirch it as I think it’s a true classic, but, Catch-22 is undoubtedly the most impactful when you’re younger
I haven’t ordered it yet, but I’m thinking very seriously about picking up The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. One of the open questions that I’ve never really dug into is when and how the thing we know as “race” really got going. This book looks like it can fill in some missing centuries.Most of my studies are in the later Ancient and Classical eras and the adjacent periods, and while the Greeks and Romans had no lack of ethnocentric views and were aware of the differences in skin color and their geographic connections, they do not seem to have had the ideas of race that we have today. They’d make judgments based on your place of birth (anyone not from where I’m from is suspect) or the language you spoke (“barbarian” comes from the Greek word for people who make bar-bar-bar noises instead of speaking a real language), but judgments based strictly on skin color are uncommon.
I’ve started rereading the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m reading it in in-universe chronological order, and already got through Shards of Honor and Barrayar. I’m most of the way through The Warrior’s Apprentice now, and I’d forgotten how much fun it is. Miles Vorkosigan is probably my favorite character in all of fiction. (We would have named our first son Miles except my wife and I both have names that start with “M” and we didn’t want to make family initials any more confusing than they already are.)If you like adventurous, clever SF, and haven’t read these books, I urge you to do so. They’re fantastic.
Bukowski, just like every other month.
Because I’m apparently a masochist I decided to read Splinter of The Mind’s Eye, the first “sequel” to Star Wars in novel form. It’s pretty bad and at odds with what Star Wars became later. (The sexual tension between Luke and Leia is mentioned. a lot.)
For Graphic Novels I am flying through Black Hammer which is an intriguing look at golden and silver age heroes living on a mysterious farm. I like it so far after two books in.
I just found out that Adrienne Miller has a memoir coming out in February, so I may be emergency-scheduling a long-overdue reread of The Coast of Akron in the next couple weeks.
About a quarter of the way through I Heard You Paint Houses and I already dig it far more than the movie.