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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 13th, 2023 08:42 pmRead a couple of contemporary slice-of-life novels: Nevada by Imogen Binnie, about a trans woman who goes on a post-break-up road trip and befriends a small-town stoner who reminds her of her younger self, and in a now-annual re-read, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, about an Ojibwe bookseller haunted by the ghost of a persistent former customer during the early months of the pandemic.
Read Thinning Blood by Leah Myers, a memoir about her identity as the last person in her family line eligible to be an enrolled member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe and the women she's descended from. Shuffles myth, history, family stories, and personal experience like a deck of cards and deals them out in little vignettes.
Read The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes by Suzanne Collins, a prequel to her Hunger Games trilogy; it was actually really good?? Or at least really compelling. It felt darker than the original books, not least because it's a dystopian novel whose POV character— a young Coriolanus Snow, future dictator and main villain of the Hunger Games books— has fully bought into the ideology of the dystopia he lives in; ( ... )
Read The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano, which is what it says on the tin. I have a certain fascination with audacious public liars— like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy, or the bizarre spate of white academics pretending to be people of color a while back— so of course I've been following every bonkers twist of the George Santos saga over the past two-ish years.
I'm currently reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which fits in rather neatly with the above; the concept is basically Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot (struggling writer steals a book idea/unfinished draft from a deceased student/frenemy and passes it off as their own work) with more satire about cultural appropriation and the publishing industry.
Read Thinning Blood by Leah Myers, a memoir about her identity as the last person in her family line eligible to be an enrolled member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe and the women she's descended from. Shuffles myth, history, family stories, and personal experience like a deck of cards and deals them out in little vignettes.
Read The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes by Suzanne Collins, a prequel to her Hunger Games trilogy; it was actually really good?? Or at least really compelling. It felt darker than the original books, not least because it's a dystopian novel whose POV character— a young Coriolanus Snow, future dictator and main villain of the Hunger Games books— has fully bought into the ideology of the dystopia he lives in; ( ... )
Read The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano, which is what it says on the tin. I have a certain fascination with audacious public liars— like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy, or the bizarre spate of white academics pretending to be people of color a while back— so of course I've been following every bonkers twist of the George Santos saga over the past two-ish years.
I'm currently reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which fits in rather neatly with the above; the concept is basically Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot (struggling writer steals a book idea/unfinished draft from a deceased student/frenemy and passes it off as their own work) with more satire about cultural appropriation and the publishing industry.
