In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?
Appropriate: A Provocation by Paisley Rekdal
Like Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, Appropriate: A Provocation (February 16, W.W. Norton) is a valuable resource for understanding systemic inequality. Although Paisley Rekdal addresses her questions and essays to a fictional student concerned about cultural appropriation, the insights gleaned from this epistolary collection serve a broad audience, including the author herself. This is as much a teaching moment for Rekdal, who looks back at her own education, including her admiration (unwitting at first) of the work of a literary fraud. Appropriate is an especially fascinating read as the publishing industry has come under greater scrutiny for driving what Rekdal describes as “marketplace colonialism”—the enabling, via huge advances and marketing blitzes, of authors (often white) who attempt to adopt the lived experiences of people from marginalized groups. Despite its subtitle and Rekdal’s analysis of the American Dirt fiasco, Appropriate doesn’t focus much on the notion of “cancellation,” which is itself as willfully misunderstood as the concept of cultural appropriation. The collection is at its most compelling when Rekdal explores empathy and authenticity, raising questions about whether the former should be the endgame of all fictional works, and how a push to define the latter within a culture or group could flatten more perspectives than it fleshes out. [Danette Chavez]
Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Klara And The Sun (March 2, Knopf), is told from the point of view of an “Artificial Friend,” a human-like AI that some parents buy to keep their children company. Not unlike the narrators of Ishiguro’s most notable books—Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go—Klara is a highly observant member of the servant class; her manager tells her she is exceptional, elite in her subservience (though perhaps not as glamorous as those B3 models). Line by line, Ishiguro’s writing evinces a frictionlessness that parallels what his protagonists are so often after: nothing jutting out, no emotions riled too high. While this has made room for fruitful contradictions in his past work—narrative tensions that either rise to the surface or get buried even further—there’s a static, muffled quality to Klara And The Sun. Its world appears empty save for the main characters and a handful of extras, as though the action were taking place on a soundstage; many of the novel’s discrete elements feel assembled rather than grown, a perhaps unintentional mirroring of its artificially intelligent protagonist. Mimicking but not fully embodying the power of his previous novels, Ishiguro dips into his own uncanny valley. [Laura Adamczyk]
Big Time by Jen Spyra
The Onion’s long been heralded for its sharply observed satire and penchant for a good photoshop. But as true fans of The A.V. Club’s sister site know—those who actually click through and read the article—its writers are also expert storytellers, each headline a gateway to economic comedic world-building. The Onion is where Jen Spyra cut her teeth (and, full disclosure, shared office space with this writer) before contributing to publications like The New Yorker and McSweeney’s, and joining the staff of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—where she can still be heard announcing each night’s guests. In Spyra’s hilarious first book, Big Time (March 16, Random House), her imagination runs wild over the course of 14 short stories, showcasing her uncanny ability to conjure up entire universes with brevity. A giddy feeling accompanies the start of each new tale as the reader discovers exactly what kind of absurdist adventure Spyra’s taking them on. There’s a date with Sherlock Holmes gone terribly awry, a soaring journey that uncovers the dark side of magical snowmen, and one called “Monster Goo,” which can best be described as Goosebumps meets Lorenzo’s Oil with a killer runner about Quad City DJ’s Space Jam theme. Some stories intentionally prod at the notion of good taste (as in the jaunty, point of view-swapping “Dinner At Eight”), but Spyra’s voice is warm and welcoming, many of her protagonists optimistic and lovable even in the face of birthday girls from hell or a flop of an improv show. Brilliant and bawdy, let Big Time be your proper introduction to Jen Spyra: Creator Of Worlds. [Cameron Scheetz]
21 Comments
I was on a Jeff Vandermeer kick earlier in the month, reading some of his older stuff that I hadn’t read before.Right now I’m reading Poul Anderson’s ‘Harvest of Stars’. It was on sale so I picked it up. It is…less than good. Boring libertarian claptrap for the most part. At least Heinlein’s libertarian claptrap is exciting.
Heinlein’s stuff is like “Yeah, government and rules are bad, but incest is great!” I know, separate art from artist, but it really makes me wonder about the guy.
It ranges from Stranger in a Strange land, which is actually amazing, to Farnham’s Freehold, which is…not.The books were never boring though.
I’m reading Klara and The Sun right now and I’m definitely intrigued and in a strange way (for someone reading Ishiguro), I’m finding it to be a page turner. Ishiguro likes his slow exposition both in his best and his worst work, so reading Klara is like walking on familiar ground, and I’m very intrigued by where it might lead.
Ignore the reviewer; this book is as good as his others. The narrow scope they describe is more a feature depicting the buggy limitations of the protagonist’s awareness, not a flat out bug.I’d be curious what you think once you’re done; I have a question or two about what happened or what I think happened.
Excellent. I’m sure I’ll be done soon!
Last night I just started Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, which is off to a heck of a start. On audio I’m listening to Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, a non-fiction book about the family of 12 (!) siblings, half of whom eventually developed schizophrenia, which helped drive a lot of the modern thinking of the disorder. Prior to that, doctors were still blaming things like poor nutrition or “refrigerator mothers”.Also read so far in March:The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam WassonThe Changeover by Margaret Mahy*Fatal Vision by Joe McGinnissLast Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon GreenBetween the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi CoatesThe Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa VelkaLittle Eyes by Samanta SchweblinThe Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson*A YA book I loved as a tween, which I was inspired to re-visit because I watched the movie that was recently adapted from it. The movie was frankly not good; not awful but really sour and grim and excised so much of what made the book special. Why does it seem like entertainment for Zoomers is just no fun these days? I mean I know the world’s on fire and we’re all gonna die, but yeesh. Anyway, the book holds up!
I sometimes have similar thoughts about dystopian Zoomer entertainment, but I wonder about comparing the adaptations — specifically the ones created by an older entertainment complex — vs. stuff that is Zoomer-created. The latter of which I largely know nothing about! But I’d bet there’s more humor there, vs. what older adults like myself are giving them.
No, my gripe is specifically about stuff created for Zoomers by older generations, not anything created by Zoomers. I mean I only have TikTok to go by, but those kids seem to have a sense of humor all right.
Yeah, TikTok was what I was thinking of too. I guess adults were telling the kids of my generation they needed to stop WWIII by armed resistance or superior computer programming, so I can’t really talk here…
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam WassonNever heard of it. Ordered it now, will arrive in a couple weeks.
Finishing Half of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie… not my favorite of her works. Something about this one feels a little repetitive, even if the central story setting is interesting enough; just feels lipke a remix of her better works. Purple Hibiscus is still my personal fav of hers.Was looking over my bookshelves for something to reread and came across a trilogy, The Bridei Chronicles by Juliette Marillier, that a friend loaned me forever ago and I never fully read. Got about forty pages into the first book amd tuned out, but with me trying not to buy any new books for a while, I was thinking I’d give this one another shot… anyone else ever read? Is it worth the effort? It reminded me of Pillars of the Earth, and I just… wasn’t a fan of that book, which I know I’m not supposed to admit out loud, but, yeah. Snore.
The Cutie, by Donald Westlake — a mob enforcer has to investigate after someone in the organization is set up for murder in Westlake’s first non-porno novel. Which is very good and interesting in how it points to his obsessions with work and professionalism and their limits, the line to the Parker books is clear but where he takes this at the end anticipates The Ax much further down the line. Also reading The Getaway Car, a collection of Westlake’s letters/essays/miscellany and it’s wonderful, he’s very insightful, sometimes harsh and nearly always funny about his work and his milieu of crime fiction.The Cry Of The Owl by Patricia Highsmith — a quiet and depressed man spies on a young woman, she catches him at it and then the story really begins. The first stretch of this is surprisingly slow, wavering over the line separating the tension of deferred action from just lack of action, but then something happens and we’re in business. And then other things keep happening and the book gets more and more unsettling, Highsmith at one point writes an incredible chapter that builds to a decision that you can see coming and still not want to see, and she adds ugly characters, a cop who is not great at actual detecting but is very good at deciding to fuck with a suspect and an entitled boyfriend* and an ex-wife who is reprehensible and apparently based on a woman who Highsmith had just broken up with, yikes. (Those particulars are not necessarily discernible from the text itself but the precision of distaste Highsmith lays out is very clearly based on a real person.) Anyway, all of this builds to sadness and horror at the end, the book is about the death and chaos underneath everything and also about how societies despise people who represent that death, who break the facade. And it’s also about a guy who is in some ways the anti-Ripley and what happens to him. It’s strange and disturbing, so good stuff.*this is a great indication of Highsmith’s cruel skill as a writer — we are told his name is Greg when he is introduced and just from that he’s obviously an asshole. Sorry, Gregs I know! You’re good people! But Highsmith doesn’t hesitate to weaponize the name.
The Cry Of The Owl by Patricia HighsmithAny opinion on the movie adaptation ? I mean, it’s classic Chabrol with Mathilda May, so, supposedly classy and quite appealing. But would watching it be wasting a book ?
I’ve never seen the movie, although it looks intriguing. I’d guess moving it to France would give the small-town wagon-circling (and occasional city ventures) a different flavor than the outside Scranton vs. NYC dynamic here. I don’t have a lot of experience with Highsmith but the mundanity of the surroundings and the general ease of characters with this, perhaps to their detriment (as opposed to Ripley wanting nice things) was interesting, I wonder if that too would transfer.
Yeah, the french did quite a few transpositions that worked surprisingly well. One of my favorite movies of all time, “Clean Slate” by Tavernier with Noiret, Huppert, Marielle (and just a spectacular array of top notch actors), transposes Jim Thompson’s “Pop. 1280″ to colonial Africa. The effect is fantastic.(Certainly more convincing than, say, the super french version of Alabama in Gérard Pirès’ adaptation of Charles William’s “The Diamond Bikini”…)
I saw that 20 years ago and liked it a lot (good lord, is Huppert amazing/terrifying), and I was thinking of it here — I think the change in setting is done well but does lose something crucial from Thompson’s Gothic South. But going from a first-person novel to a movie is probably the bigger change, you lose so much of Nick’s voice that way — Owl is third-person so I think that might translate better.
Yeah, Huppert is always terrifying, whatever the movie. I always find that she acts too well for cinema, it’s unsettling. I have these huge theories about her not acting but downright lying. Or her not being aware that it’s fake, and truly believing it all happens for real. Both hypotheses being equally frightening. Basically, she’s to acting what snuff is to special effects.Also :And I haven’t read Pop. 1280, so I didn’t even know it was narrated in first person. This always implies maximum loss in transposition, unless you go heavy on voice-over. I have read The Diamond Bikini, though. And it’s a child narrating, which means taking to loss to a new level (a comedic book series, Goscinny’s “Little Nicholas”, is based on the narrator ‘child talk’, and it didn’t prevent a catastrophic attempt at making a film series out of it).But Clean Slate is Tavernier’s work. And what it loses from Thompson (including some sexist cliché, apparently), it gains from other inputs. Good movies are always more inspired by books than transcribing them (case in point : Hanson’s marvelously unfaithful “LA Confidential” compared to De Palma’s tedious but more accurate “Black Dahlia”).
I’m 100 pages into The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. I can see why Charlie Kaufman had a hard time adapting it. I can hear Nicolas Cage and Ron Livingston in my head: “It’s about flowers.” “You have the crazy plant nut guy, right? He’s funny.”They’re right! There are long passages about the wonder of orchids. I hear Chris Cooper everytime I read John Laroche’s dialog. You love this guy’s attitude right away. Orlean drops a suprising amount of references, which reminds me of Antkind.I’ve read several issues of Jason Aaron’s Mighty Thor run, which I recommend for comic nerds.
I just started the Mike Nichols biography, mentioned here a while ago. It’s absolutely wonderful.
I’ve just got the newest round of Doctor Who Target novelisations in the mail about an hour ago, which is sweet. Especially eager to read Robert Shearman’s Dalek, he’s not only an amazing Doctor Who scriptman but one of the greatest short story writers I’ve readThose should keep me going until I can pick up A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib, which is by far my most anticipated book this year