Guys, I am not going to lie. This novel knocked me over in ways I was not expecting. I had resisted reading Lincoln in the Bardo for months, because I was not sure about how good it would actually be. But when it won the Man Booker Prize (still plenty of shade for the committee to open it up to Americans; guys, we DO have the National Book Award, you know), I caved and put in a library hold. The first twenty pages made me […]
A strange but excellent thriller
I am a huge Alex Garland fan. I *loved* Ex Machina and Sunshine and have since sought out his other screenwriting ventures. When I found out that his new movie releases in 2018, I was so excited. And then I found out that there was a book attached. Even better. My sister had read and recommended Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, of which Annihilation is the first book. I thought, Let’s start here. And what a wild ride it is. Area X is thought to […]
If you like Thoreau or Emerson or the outdoors, this might be for you.
D has our book club pick for November, and we got two choices: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose or David James Duncan’s The River Why. We chose The River Why, because it was shorter. D is from the West Coast and was interested in a West Coast author, so his pick went there. I had never heard of the book, but saw its enormous ratings on Goodreads. I was sufficiently intrigued to get it from the library. Our narrator is Gus Orviston, the product of […]
A re-read that improved my experience
Something that has perplexed me as I’ve been gathering texts for my next research project has been the multi-cultural perspective within the dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel framework, besides Nnedi Okorafor’s (and even she veers more into Afro-futurism, which is fairly different, generically speaking). Thankfully, I remembered that I had read Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea two years ago for CBR7, and I decided it might be time to give him a second chance. Wow. I am so glad I did, because I think […]