Reading List: April - June 2020
Peter Carlaftes (ed.), Faking of the President. NY: Three Rooms, 2020.
This collection of nineteen short stories is based on a simple premise: history didn’t have to happen as it did. Each entry examines a particular presidential event, usually one that did occur, through a noir lens that shows the devious, absurd, and comic consequences that arise from a small change in our assumptions. From proof that Buchanan was gay to a fight between Tipper and Laura to determine the 2000 election, it is a disturbingly funny look at alternative history.
Megan James, Innsmouth. Richmond, VA: Sink/ Swim, 2016.
This first graphic novel in a series, about an acolyte of Chutulu who is trying to forestall the end times by banishing the siggoth he has been chosen to protect, is a light and cartoony spoof of Lovecraftian lore.
Homer (trans. Emily Wilson), The Odyssey. NY: W.W. Norton, 2018.
I’m not a scholar, but over the years I have read the tale of brave Ulysses in at least four versions. This is my favorite. I would have said the Fitzgerald before; its strident, striving verse propels the great action-adventure sequences of a mythic hero’s journey in a way Pope’s rhyming couplets simply can’t match, and no other translators have impressed enough to remember their names. But Wilson’s version seems an entirely different story.
Of course it’s the same story. Ulysses angers the gods upon leaving Troy and spends another ten years trying to get home. Most of that time, he is a guest on Circe’s private island. Until now, those of us who don’t read Greek thought he was a prisoner. Come to find out, though, he was Circe’s lover. So much for missing home; Penelope can’t compete with a goddess. Still, he tires of eternity with an ageless beauty and entreats the gods; his patron Athena sees him safely back to Ithaka and vengeance. That’s all the same, but like reporters from rival papers, Wilson focuses on the home aspect while others emphasis the struggle to get there. This is a softer, calmer Odyssey in which Ulysses seems somewhat more self-aware, recognizing his trickiness as less than honorable and lamenting his lost comrades, rather than reveling in gore. It is also an extremely readable blank verse, relying on the Greek affinity for sense descriptors and imagery rather than rhetoric and rhyme for its poetic power. I think it will quickly become the classroom standard in secondary school curricula.
Brian Vaughn and Tony Harris, Ex Machina. La Jolla: Wildstorm, 2008.
This deluxe edition collects the first eleven issues -- two major story arcs -- of a 9/11 story from the former mayor of New York, a superhero thanks to his ability to command machines who rode the fame of unmasking into office.
Walter Mosley, Gone Fishin’. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1997.
The Easy Rawlins origin story, told from an hotel room in Paris as Rawlins returns from World War II, recounts the week he spent with Mouse before his friend’s wedding.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. NY: HarperPerennial, 2006.
This book would be worth reading if only for its description of a woman growing into herself under Jim Crow law and its savage declaration that nigger woman is the mule of the world, but the language, full of idiom and image, like Death as a thing with square toes, rewards attentive reading with delight.
Alexander McCall Smith, Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe. NY: Pantheon, 2014.
No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels are always fun, both as armchair mysteries (Mma Ramotswe is of traditional stature and hires out the legwork) and as a bright taste of Botswana. This case involves helping an amnesic recover her memories in order to avoid deportation. In it, McCall Smith centers geopolitical, patriarchal, and class issues in the everyday of home life, giving setting and characters life beyond their plot functions, yet making these themes ancillary to more local, more immediate concerns - as experienced by most people. And there’s a car chase, too!
Walter Mosley, Charcoal Joe. NY: Doubleday, 2016.
This episode brings us Easy Rawlins in mid-life, nearly fifty, owner of the only black business in a white building for fifty blocks in any direction of 1968 Los Angeles and one of the most dangerous men in Southern California, trying to clear an innocent man of murder.
Richard Littler, Discovering Scarfolk. London: Ebury Press, 2014.
This speculative volume tries to explain a botched real estate purchase using a notebook and accompanying collection of ephemera from the 1970s UK. Can no longer be certain it is fiction.
Tony Morrison, Home. NY: Knopf, 2012.
With compassion, insight, and deft, near unnoticeable hints at the ending, the Nobel prize winner illustrates the tangential consequences of horrific, casual violence.
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone. NY: Riverhead, 2019.
This story, told from the various perspectives of family at Melody’s cotillion, show us Melody and her mother coming to terms with their relationship, their pasts -- including the 1921 Tulsa riots and 9/11 -- and their selves. While it could be consumed in a single sitting, it is worth the time to contemplate and savor.
This collection of nineteen short stories is based on a simple premise: history didn’t have to happen as it did. Each entry examines a particular presidential event, usually one that did occur, through a noir lens that shows the devious, absurd, and comic consequences that arise from a small change in our assumptions. From proof that Buchanan was gay to a fight between Tipper and Laura to determine the 2000 election, it is a disturbingly funny look at alternative history.
Megan James, Innsmouth. Richmond, VA: Sink/ Swim, 2016.
This first graphic novel in a series, about an acolyte of Chutulu who is trying to forestall the end times by banishing the siggoth he has been chosen to protect, is a light and cartoony spoof of Lovecraftian lore.
Homer (trans. Emily Wilson), The Odyssey. NY: W.W. Norton, 2018.
I’m not a scholar, but over the years I have read the tale of brave Ulysses in at least four versions. This is my favorite. I would have said the Fitzgerald before; its strident, striving verse propels the great action-adventure sequences of a mythic hero’s journey in a way Pope’s rhyming couplets simply can’t match, and no other translators have impressed enough to remember their names. But Wilson’s version seems an entirely different story.
Of course it’s the same story. Ulysses angers the gods upon leaving Troy and spends another ten years trying to get home. Most of that time, he is a guest on Circe’s private island. Until now, those of us who don’t read Greek thought he was a prisoner. Come to find out, though, he was Circe’s lover. So much for missing home; Penelope can’t compete with a goddess. Still, he tires of eternity with an ageless beauty and entreats the gods; his patron Athena sees him safely back to Ithaka and vengeance. That’s all the same, but like reporters from rival papers, Wilson focuses on the home aspect while others emphasis the struggle to get there. This is a softer, calmer Odyssey in which Ulysses seems somewhat more self-aware, recognizing his trickiness as less than honorable and lamenting his lost comrades, rather than reveling in gore. It is also an extremely readable blank verse, relying on the Greek affinity for sense descriptors and imagery rather than rhetoric and rhyme for its poetic power. I think it will quickly become the classroom standard in secondary school curricula.
Brian Vaughn and Tony Harris, Ex Machina. La Jolla: Wildstorm, 2008.
This deluxe edition collects the first eleven issues -- two major story arcs -- of a 9/11 story from the former mayor of New York, a superhero thanks to his ability to command machines who rode the fame of unmasking into office.
Walter Mosley, Gone Fishin’. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1997.
The Easy Rawlins origin story, told from an hotel room in Paris as Rawlins returns from World War II, recounts the week he spent with Mouse before his friend’s wedding.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. NY: HarperPerennial, 2006.
This book would be worth reading if only for its description of a woman growing into herself under Jim Crow law and its savage declaration that nigger woman is the mule of the world, but the language, full of idiom and image, like Death as a thing with square toes, rewards attentive reading with delight.
Alexander McCall Smith, Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe. NY: Pantheon, 2014.
No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels are always fun, both as armchair mysteries (Mma Ramotswe is of traditional stature and hires out the legwork) and as a bright taste of Botswana. This case involves helping an amnesic recover her memories in order to avoid deportation. In it, McCall Smith centers geopolitical, patriarchal, and class issues in the everyday of home life, giving setting and characters life beyond their plot functions, yet making these themes ancillary to more local, more immediate concerns - as experienced by most people. And there’s a car chase, too!
Walter Mosley, Charcoal Joe. NY: Doubleday, 2016.
This episode brings us Easy Rawlins in mid-life, nearly fifty, owner of the only black business in a white building for fifty blocks in any direction of 1968 Los Angeles and one of the most dangerous men in Southern California, trying to clear an innocent man of murder.
Richard Littler, Discovering Scarfolk. London: Ebury Press, 2014.
This speculative volume tries to explain a botched real estate purchase using a notebook and accompanying collection of ephemera from the 1970s UK. Can no longer be certain it is fiction.
Tony Morrison, Home. NY: Knopf, 2012.
With compassion, insight, and deft, near unnoticeable hints at the ending, the Nobel prize winner illustrates the tangential consequences of horrific, casual violence.
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone. NY: Riverhead, 2019.
This story, told from the various perspectives of family at Melody’s cotillion, show us Melody and her mother coming to terms with their relationship, their pasts -- including the 1921 Tulsa riots and 9/11 -- and their selves. While it could be consumed in a single sitting, it is worth the time to contemplate and savor.
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