i still can’t believe the miracle that is cloud atlas, one of the best books i’ve ever read. wow. why did this book lose to the line of beauty for the booker prize? how can anyone not give this book laurel and fame?
also impressive, or at least very interesting: surveillance.
and, again, maxine hong kingston’s the fifth book of peace, which, at its third reading, and after two weeks of going through it with my students, shines more and more luminous in my pantheon.
Gio,
What is Cloud Atlas? I have just started on a graphic novel kick, beginning with Chris Ware’s dense Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth . So far the work is meticulous and compelling, though I haven’t quite gotten the hang of following the sudden shifts in perception and in reality (bizarre daydreams are incorporated into the otherwise realistic action). Then I will tackle Charles Burns’ tale of teenage angst and alien invasion Black Hole done in his signature vivid and nearly hallucinogenic style. If I teach again in the Fall, I want to put together a course “Comic Book America.”
Sorry I’ve been out of it here–our semester is just now coming to a close, and it’s still crazy.
I loved Atlas, but really it’s my least favorite Mitchell — I predict you will very much enjoy the others, Gio, particularly Ghostwritten. But they’re all superb.
I love Ware’s book, too–it’s gotta be about the saddest damn book I’ve ever read and laughed aloud at. Let me know about Black Hole; I don’t really want to buy it, but our damn library systems (academic and public) do not seem to care about graphic novels for adults, beyond Daniel Clowes and Alison Bechdel. (And–since you guys, particularly Jeff, got me into that text, I’m teaching Fun Home in the Fall.)
I’m still circling around in 9/11 fiction. I think I’m too much of a completist, but there can’t be many of these event-centered narratives I haven’t found. I dug back into the archives and read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, which was okay. I kind of liked Raban’s Surveillance, but I’d really recommend Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel, set in Scotland some years from now, with a world wholly believable based on extrapolated international tensions and media development. The coolest kick it gave was a late-novel detail which signalled that the text was an alternate history, similar to Kalfus’ move in Disorder.
I’ve also come close to being further sidetracked into looking for British fictions around 7/7, after reading the latest in Ian Rankin’s Rebus detective series, which takes place around, during, and immediately after the G8 Summit and the time of the London bombings. I usually get weary of series: every novel reiterating the same tired character mechanics, and, yeah, Rebus and his partner Siobhan Clarke do tend to return to certain common themes. But Rankin is very damn good at the social and political subtext, throughout all of the novels, and this one is pretty ambitious. (I don’t think you’d have to have read any others to “get” the story.)
But besides that possible “work,” I am also trying to read a lot of less-famous South African fiction of the last 10 years, in preparation to going there in early June. So I’m about 60 pages into The Wedding by Imraan Coovadia, which is very funny. I have lined up stuff by K. Sello Duiker, Lewis Nkosi, Morabo Morojele, Marlene van Niekerk, Tony Eprile… plus some stuff on the TRC. I’ll never get to it all.
I read Percival Everett’s God’s Country and found it funny and furious and fast; I’ve just begun the new Michael Chabon, which 30 pages in is dazzling, but I’ll withhold my rave ’til later.
Mike–you don’t need to read books about South Africa to go there! as for Burns, it’s worth getting because the drawing is stunning–even better would be the individual issues put out by Fantagraphics comics. I’m hoping at Lehigh or elsewhere to do a course loosely called “Comic Book America”–Chabon might be an excellent choice.
i wrote this comment (well, not this comment) a few days ago, but wordpress ate it. i should have heeded michael’s advice of some time ago: save you comments! here i am again.
god’s country was one of the most pleasant suprises of my reading life. percival everett is a great unrecognized writer, and this is excellent. one of those books that you want to give people for their birthdays.
i just read david mitchell’s black swan green. this man writes like god. he’s amazing. cloud atlas has a special place in my heart, partly because it was my first david mitchell, partly because of the sheer theoretical and rhetorical virtuosism of its construction, and partly because of the great affinity i feel with the themes he explores in it (this is a big “isms” book, being about, among other things, capitalism, colonialism, racism, and ageism). my favorite section was the sloosha crossing one. i wish it had never ended. i could talk about this book forever.
talking about 9/11 books, i just finished the prisoner of guantanamo, which i was pleased to see takes place for a large part in miami. i don’t read many thrillers, so i really don’t know how to judge them, but i had fun enough. i was happy to see that dan fesperman finds the status quo as corrupt, evil, and inefficient as i do. the inefficiency was particularly tickling to me.
i went to hear nathan englander read from the ministry of special cases but was not impressed.
it’s nice that the semester is over. with two brand-new preps, it was a long slog.
I too dig David Mitchell, yay! And I also very much like Black Hole though I can’t for the life of me figure out what exactly is going on in that universe. Don’t know God’s Country. Am reading a fun book about an undiscovered manuscript by Wm. Shakespeare–The Book of Shadow and Air–and it is a smart, funny little mystery. Next up: Crace’s The Pesthouse.
Michael: reading is so bound up in experiencing that it’s hard for me to imagine not reading before traveling. Or while traveling, and after traveling. Etc.
I fully intend to share whatever interesting selections I get through.
I’m sad about to hear about Englander. I’d enjoyed his collection of stories, and circled ’round this one at the bookstore, but saved the money.
I finished Chabon’s _The Yiddish Policemen’s Union_, which I think is a masterpiece at the sentence-level, full of more restrained but just as ebullient language play as his last couple of (damn good) novels. And it was coupled with the pleasures of the alternate history–a genre that I find fascinating, and maybe I’ll post something longer … some other time. I’m still reeling from the end of semester and all of its attendant crapola.