October '24
A rare introduction: you can skip to the next section if you just want the book recommendations.
I had a plan. I actually had a plan for last month but someone who really wanted to read the book I had in mind couldn’t make it and so I kicked it to this month but after having read The Coin my plan has changed yet again. Although The Coin and Pink Slime couldn’t be more different in both form and content, and although the book I had planned couldn’t be further from both of those two titles, but as I read the excerpt I realized that they all share a destabilizing quality. This month I want to give us something on some firmer ground, somewhere to plant our feet for a minute.
But I did have a plan and, like the narrators of the books we continue to read, I lack resilience. My plan was to propose the title that I had in mind and then three titles that have never made the cut for book club and a bit about why they haven’t. It’s sort of buzzed around in my brain that we read a lot of books with some overlap and often more than a few of my own interests and also there’s a whole cadre of books that I read or long to read that I don’t bring to book club for a number of reasons. So this is a list of interesting rejects—after four years(!) of reading together I sometimes wonder if there’s other things that might work or things we should try so this is a list of them and why they wouldn’t usually show up.
So, yes, there are a lot of white Americans in this list. Being a white American is obviously not disqualifying! We’ve read some, I’ve suggested many! But I usually try to make a list that is balanced in plot and point of view and positioning in a variety of ways. This time I threw all that out and thought of some of the books that don’t make it but would still be fantastic reads and why they don’t make it.
In the wake of countless campus scandals How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto imagines taking all of the problematic professors—the bigots and boundary-less alike—and giving them their own campus, on an island as a way to squirm out of those iron-clad tenure contracts: a Lord of the Flies university filled with goatees and race science. When a PhD student on the verge of a major breakthrough with superconductors sees her mentor shipped off to Cancelled U she decides to join him with her devoted and deeply concerned boyfriend in tow.
Look, the reviews on this are great and the excerpt is a pitch perfect send up of what passes for cancellation these days. The university, fueled by billions in dark money is a resounding success (depending on how you define success) and every lecherous little freak is living the libertarian dream. It’s a book about how we talk about consequences, how we enact consequences, and the ambitions that brought us to hell in the first place. It’s funny, it’s quick, it’s well written.
On the other hand: it’s so American and it’s a campus novel. Campus novels always feel like they threaten to veer off into in-jokes and asides. Almost every American writer is also a professor and, at their worst, campus novels can imagine that readers are also campus dwellers: MFA students, MFA graduates, or professors—the life cycle of the American writer and, often, the American reader. Will this book be remembered in 10 years? Definitely not. Will it be a good time? Seems like it.
Excerpt here.
E.M. Carroll is a writer that I’ve followed for many years. With each project her ambition grows. They started with webcomics that used the medium of the internet in novel ways—playing with GIFs and click through links in a way that employed web design as story telling. Later their stories grew longer and moved to print. Now they’ve come with their first graphic novel with some real heft.
A Guest in the House riffs off of so much classic gothic horror: a new, younger wife comes to live with her husband and step-daughter. Her husband has secrets and whatever happened to his first wife? The art is beautiful and Carroll understands how to move from disquieting to frightening and back again, playing with tension. It’s probably also gay but I don’t know how but usually there’s gay stuff.
The plot sounds familiar because Carroll often plays with tropes: lesbian vampires, dark woods, spooky skin care—but her takes are never stale, she reinvents rather than rehashes.
We’ve done one graphic novel and it sucked. I took the L, it’s fine. I love the form and I know that some folks aren’t completely sold. When I bring one to this group I want to know that we will have a lot to dig into and that can be a little unpredictable with graphic novels, even as they have an immediate pleasure to the reading experience. I think this will be a banger but I keep waiting for the perfect comic to crack the code and bring to the group but comics will never unlock their secrets until you read them. Especially because everything has to come together to make them work.
Excerpt here (in a sort of funny spot under the cover with an eye icon).
I love a work novel. I know the joke is that the theme of book club is cannibalism (five titles, if I’m remembering correctly) but it could just as easily be work novels. Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil is about landing a good job, a job with a tech company on driverless cars, after years of struggling to find solid footing. But not all jobs with tech companies are good jobs.
This is one of those books that the publisher seems to want to guard the plot twists and avoid spoilers as much as possible so the details are a bit sparse. But it really seems to be about the deepening divide between the working class and the middle class and what technological advances and convenience look like in a gig economy.
The formatting errors in this page drive me crazy but the excerpt is here.
Finally, The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi: a struggling young translator is stalled out in her career while her middling boyfriend seems to keep acquiring more and more languages (and more and more work). His secret: The Centre, an invite only organization that promises language acquisition in just two weeks. The cost is high and the hidden costs might be even higher.
This one looks really fun, if not maybe a bit light. It's from an imprint founded by one of the supermarket mystery writers that I actually really like (she joins the elite tier of Stephen king, vc Andrews, Agatha Christie, and Patricia highsmith) I won't say her name cuz you'll judge me but it's printed on the book and I'm absolutely sure that I'm correct.
But this excerpt fucking sucks. This is a book about cultural understanding, deals with the devil worth making, and the spooky cost of cultural appropriation: it could be rad but this stupid publisher gave me some shit about how a brown girl gets the ick from her cracker ass boyfriend once they hit the homeland. Okay? We, as a group are at the point where we read about women dealing with their oppression by pretending to be pregnant or scrubbing their buttholes with toothbrushes or eating people, I just think we might be a little beyond being passive aggressive to your boyfriend in a political way.
Excerpt here.