It’s been brain-meltingly hot. Fortunately, one of the last things to go for me is my ability to process narrative! As usual, links go to our Bookshop.

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First up was Daryl Gregory’s The Album of Dr. Moreau. Cameron discussed another of Gregory’s novels here, and after this weird little novella, I’ll probably be reading more of his work. The story follows a Las Vegas police detective as she seeks to discover who killed a high-flying boy band’s producer after a wild night in a Vegas hotel — but the boy band is comprised of human-animal hybrids, and both the boys and their producer are keeping secrets about their origins. Which all sounds pretty goofy, but Gregory pulled it off, layering the zaniness over a tight little murder story of the several-long-interviews variety. I polished off the audiobook in a day or two, and I look forward to reading more.

The cover of one of the serial volumes, via Wikipedia.

After that, I finished a different audiobook that I’d been working on for some time: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. The novel, as I’m sure we’re all aware, follows a characteristically broad cast over the course of several years before and during the French Revolution — but despite being a work of historical fiction many aspects of the novel felt more or less like reading any other Dickens novel. That’s definitely one of the problems that attends on having a singular style, but it did also make the novel a bit of a slog. As I mentioned elsewhere, Dickens’ gothicism and atmospherics are where, at this point, he really shines for me: his descriptions of Paris during the terror were truly poetic in their gore and frenzy. I’m glad I read it, because now no one can tell me to read it, but it certainly took a while.

Another audiobook followed that, because the print book I was working on was also taking a while — Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. When the power goes out on an Anishnaabe reservation in northern Ontario, the residents assume it’s yet another power outage, though it is a little weird that the internet, phone lines, and radio connection failed at the same time. Something is definitely up, but the community’s suspicions are confirmed when two young men return from school further south: there’s been a broad-level collapse of some kind, and the community will have to fend for themselves as best they can — both to survive the bitter winter, and the fracture caused by the arrival of an arrogant stranger. Honestly, this hit a real sweet spot for me, falling as it does somewhere between the best of Jericho and 30 Days of Night. But unlike those stories, Rice hangs his conflict on the characters: although the novel mostly focuses on Evan Whitesky, one of the reservation’s infrastructure workers, he builds a compelling ensemble. Rice’s pacing and tone, too, are great — scenes have plenty of time to breathe, but the novel never loses steam, gaining in tension right through its very last pages. I understand there’s a sequel in the works, and I’m very excited to get my hands on it.

The print book that was taking me forever was a recommendation from my therapist, the first of two in this round-up, was The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio. Basically, Damasio argues that consciousness is the mind becoming aware of what the body is experiencing and processing it into emotion and reason. This offers a fundamental departure from the dualism to which I often default, and Damasio explains it pretty well, considering — but I don’t know much about neuroanatomy, beyond one or two half-remembered bits of stuff from a linguistics minor I ended up not doing, so some of his explanations got a little obtuse for me. And his prose, while admirably clear, was often pretty dry. The information was good, and I’m glad to have read it, but I can’t say it was a particularly fun reading experience.

I followed it up with Audition, Ryu Murakami’s short novel (on which the film with that scene is based), translated by Ralph McCarthy, in ebook form. The story follows Aoyama, a filmmaker and widower, who is convinced by his friend to hold and audition for a paramour. But the audition is mostly a bust: Aoyama falls immediately for the beautiful Yamasaki Asami, who has also suffered grievous loss, and he begins to woo her. I’ve read two of Murakami’s other works — Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies — though it has been a while, and I was excited to read this. Audition once again shows Murakami as a master of sticky heat, the dolly-zoom of the mind, and stuff being just… all the way off. The story fell apart a little for me at the end, but the ride was certainly something else. I am even more excited to maybe finally actually see the movie.

As a special treat to myself after work one day, I came home, laid down in bed, and burned through Denis Johnson’s seminal Jesus’ Son all in one go. I’d been talking about it to a coworker, and I’m casually seeking to reread books that made a major impression on me, and why not? Why not lounge in Denis Johnson’s sneakily braided novel, his prose so beautiful it makes you forget that the narrator fully merits the nickname “Fuckhead,” getting smacked in the face by lines like, “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine”? So I did, and I am glad of it, because I had sort of forgotten how much the narrator sucks, and the luminous prose had faded a little in my memory, and I do like getting smacked in the face by a line that sticks in your skin. What can I say that some guy in an MFA program hasn’t said? It’s fucking great and I love it.

The cover of the first edition, with art by Leo and Diane Dillon, via Wikipedia.

I next finished the first of two Le Guin novels in this round-up: The Left Hand of Darkness. Frequently recommended to me by my mother and many others, the novel is one of four in the Hainish cycle, and follows Genly, a human diplomat (of sorts) in his adventures on Winter, a planet populated by people who are only intermittently sexually dymorphic, as he seeks to convince the governments of Winter to join the Ekumen, a loose but galaxy-spanning federation of planets. It’s worth noting that almost every word in that sentence could be attended by a footnote, but I don’t want to have to put all that in, and to explain more would be to do immense disservice to the novel. If you’re reading this, chances are I don’t need to convince you that Ursula K. Le Guin is a great writer and one of the most important writers (no genre qualifier) of the twentieth century; to put bluntly, her writing and her politics absolutely fuck. While I don’t think the audiobook format served this one well — and I found Genly deeply annoying, in an interesting way — it was a great formal introduction to Le Guin, who I’ve hitherto known only by reputation and the carrier-bag essay. I’m excited to explore more of her work (as I did almost immediately), and to revisit Left Hand in print form.

Next up, in ebook form, was Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King. I’d been looking forward to this one since reading an interview with King in advance of the book’s publication; like King, I feel a certain nostalgia for the hot spume of godawful shit that characterized popular culture in her — and my — teen years. And there are some phenomenal essays in Tacky on precisely those things I recall with the most fondness: Hot Topic prior to rebranding; “warm vanilla sugar” as a fragrance; Meat Loaf (whose music I don’t so much “recall” as “intermittently blast at high volume at key periods in my life”). The “warm vanilla sugar” essay, especially, is a real banger — it’s brief, it’s funny, it suggests that that particular fragrance, marketed as it was to tweens and teens right as “tween” was being positioned as a marketable demographic, could be read as a kind of dry run for a sexualized self-presentation. When King is on, she’s really on. But several of the essays either focused on things I never got in to (moving as her recollections of watching Jersey Shore with her declining father are, I have never seen an entire episode of Jersey Shore and am ill inclined to change that), or veered from essays mostly about pop-cultural detritus with some memoir on the side into mostly memoir with some pop-cultural trappings. Frankly — and I mean this as a compliment, as a lover of the genre — I wanted to read Tacky specifically as a bathroom book, dipping into it long enough for my ass to go numb but not so long that I’m being really rude to anyone else who might need it, enjoying a little think about Creed, for example (another great essay), before going about the rest of my day. Also I think it’s funny that she has a Samuel Beckett chest piece.

It was here that I finished, in very quick succession, the first two entries in Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic Quartet; I didn’t finish the other two in time for this round-up, so they’ll be on next month’s, but I quite enjoyed them and look forward to talking about them at greater length.

Here we have another therapist recommendation, in the form of No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz. It was a weird one! Basically, Schwartz suggests using the tools of Family Systems theory (if you’ve heard the phrase “parentified children,” that’s from that) to address trauma by speaking to “parts” of an individual and helping to unburden them. If that sounds weirdly matter-of-fact for something that could easily spin off into the ether, I am only following Schwartz’s own style in the book: with references to figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Jonathan Van Ness, Schwartz remains firmly planted in the observable world, while essentially positing that the memory palace is populated by parts of the individual. I should note that I read the book straight through, rather than stopping to do the exercises, because I wanted to get the idea of it. I think I did? In any case, it’s a solid popular introduction to the topic, and an interesting technique that shows some early promise.

The cover of the first edition, with art by Fred Winkowski, via Wikipedia.

I next finished, also in audiobook form, the second Le Guin novel in this round-up: The Dispossessed. And much as when I discussed Left Hand of Darkness above, I am a little stymied on what to say about it. The plot: theoretical physicist Shevek leaves Annarres to go to Urras, which has more resources to support his theoretical work, which involves the nature of time; the novel then alternates between Shevek’s life heretofore on Annarres, and his (mis)adventures on Urras. Annarres, of course, had seceded from Urras something like a hundred years before Shevek’s lifetime, establishing a kind of utilitarian anarchist system, but as the novel progresses, the reader learns that Annarresti society has grown stagnant, bogged down by individual egos remaining in positions of power through inertia; by contrast, Urras has a wealth of resources but incredible inequity, between the binary genders and across classes and nations, and ultimately, Shevek must put the application of his theoretical works where it can do the least harm to an already badly fractured society. Like Left Hand, I do have the sense that I’ll need to reread this one in print, and I’m definitely still turning it over — but it is very much the kind of novel that rewards long consideration.

Next up, in ebook form, was a recommendation from Cameron: There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translation by Polly Barton. The novel, loosely-structured as it is, follows a woman through a string of jobs as she seeks a better fit after suffering catastrophic burnout — but each job brings with it problems mundane (talking to coworkers at lunch) and magical (writing ad copy that causes the business it advertises to become real, for example), ultimately leading her to abandon them in hopes of finding something better. Each section builds subtly from the prior one, and the narrator’s sense of burnout felt very real — which may be part of why it was a little difficult for me to finish it. But finish it I did, and I’m glad of it: it’s a fun, gentle story, and speaks to a very real set of conditions from a context with which I am less familiar than I’d like.

We close this round-up with, of all things, a craft book: Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. I’ll admit, I came to this one with a sense of skepticism, since I’ve been underwhelmed by two of Bell’s three novels (I talked about one of them here). And some of Bell’s shortcomings are clear even here — despite a fair bit of emphasis on voice and drafting practices, he devotes precious little time to constructing characters. Overall, though, the book is brisk and clear, with a refreshing focus on the material qualities of drafting, suggesting methods as diverse as resetting the line spacing and margins in your word processor to highlight different qualities of the text and creating a separate document with nothing but epigrams and citations of texts that feel in some way relevant to your own project. Most importantly, perhaps, it was concise and clear, and points the reader to a wealth of other sources, as well. I’m glad I read it.

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That’s all for now. If you want, you can follow me and Cameron on Twitter.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, July 2022