reading list: july - september, 2024

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. NY: Collier & Sons, 1935. Of course it can’t happen here; this is America, land of liberty and home of the brave. Fascism can’t take root here. Except, of course it can, when our liberty leads us to bravely vote in a fascist. Lewis won a Nobel Prize in part for examining what would follow if one had been elected instead of FDR, and leaves a compelling argument against voting for one now. Robert Charles Wilson, The Affinities. NY: TOR, 2015. Imagine a combination of social networks and sorority house, with all the members connected almost telepathically, in groups self-selected for cooperation. Those folks would get a lot done, no? Maybe even enough to start a war, if not enough to end one. Kerry Winfrey, Waiting for Tom Hanks. NY: Jove, 2019. A film studies grad and aspiring screenwriter, Annie has been stuck in Columbus for years. A film, shooting in her neighborhood? Quelle chance! She’s hired to supply the director with coffee, spills it on the male lead, and voila, is now staring in her own rom-com. Hey, fighting fascism is heavy stuff, and everyone needs a little down time to recuperate. I see no need to apologize for loving genre fiction. I grew up on mystery, sci-fi, and westerns -- my brother more western, me more sci-fi, but Louis L’Amour was all over the house because Mom and Dad both enjoyed him. Romance? Mom read one every night. They’re what champaign should be -- light, bubbly, refreshing, no hangover, hope in a bottle -- and as a writer who believes every story is a love story (never mind who loves what), they’re also work. Yeah, let me alone. I’m studying. Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically. NY: Berkley, 2023. This time the setting is Boston, a hardcore college town running on the backs of adjuncts like Elsie, who just finished her Ph.D. and can’t whip the research into publications because she’s teaching on three campuses and running a fake-dating side hustle to pay rent. Full of inter-departmental rivalries and academic power plays but with more explicit scenes than Jane Smiley’s Moo or The Lecture’s Tale by James Hynes. Bonus: includes a rare fiction sighting of the Sapir-Warff Hypothesis. Ali Hazelwood, Check and Mate. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023. In which attention turns to the high-stakes world of professional chess, where purses can reach the millions. An insular, unwelcomingly misogynistic environment, it nonetheless makes room for the amateur woman who shocks everyone by checkmating the champion in an open event. She then runs away, and he is smitten. Kerry Winfrey, Not Like in the Movies. NY: Berkley, 2020. Remember the Columbus screenwriter above? Tis is her best friend, upon whom her movie was based, living out her own rom-com. Its just like the movie! Jenny Holiday, Canadian Boyfriend. NY: Hachette, 2024. A shy girl crushed on an out-of-town guest at her coffee stand, eventually building a “relationship” via letters never sent. Then she meets him, ten years later, and he’s everything she’d hoped -- except her boyfriend. Kate Meader, Rebel Yule. 2021. Another about the fictional Chicago hockey team: this time, a goalie with face blindness (it’s really a thing?!?) doesn’t recognize the one who got away when she begins working for the team -- and she doesn’t take it well. Walter M Miller Jr, Canticle for Leibowitz. NY: Banta, 1959. I love a good apocalypse, so how could I not love this, in which we end civilization with a flame deluge not once, but twice? Yet somehow, the church -- and with it, some relics of an earlier age -- survives the centuries. Even as we destroy ourselves, there is hope. Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward, Sturgeon’s West. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973. I first saw this title on an endcap in the Ann Arbor used book store where I worked after grad school. When I went back to check it out -- I’ve loved Sturgeon since high school -- it was already gone. Twenty five years later -- it was worth the wait. While best know for science fiction, Sturgeon’s keen eye and sharp insight into people and relationships mean his work is good, no matter the setting. Ginger Strand, Brothers Vonnegut. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Uncle Kurt has been gone for a minute now, though I’m still refusing to accept it -- I have more to read; he’s still here, and not even done talking yet. This, unlike the Shields bio And So It Goes, isn’t even a life. It’s an examination of Bernard and Kurt’s time, much of it together, at General Electric in Schenectady after the war, and how this showed up in fiction (hint: everything up to Slaughterhouse -V). Only possible because Bernard’s work on weather control had finally been declassified, it is both fascinating and easy to read. Seamus Heaney (translator), Beowulf. NY: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2000. This is what I read to the pup during her late-night piddle-pad excursions? No wonder she took to walkies so quickly... a monster breaks n and kills sleeping soldiers at will? Keep it away, Daddy. Kill it and its Momma comes for revenge? This isn’t a fun story, Daddy. And you can’t pronounce the Old English, conveniently presented for us to follow along and try translating a few lines.... Now she’s fully trained, and I’ll have to finish the epic without her. Nikki Payne, Sex, Lies, and Sensibility. NY: Berkley, 2024. Another Austen remake? Yet I keep subjecting myself to them because they continue to impress: everyone knows the source material, so writers are forced to put up their best when handling it. For Payne, that means the Bennets make a cameo as acquaintances of the leading lady, whose history o impulsiveness may biter her yet again.