Light reading email for my students

 I may yet do a "books I've loved" post, not sure though and thought I'd share this in the meantime.

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Literary fiction

 

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You and Cleanness

 

Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

 

Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

 

Ling Ma, Severance

 

SFF

 

Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

 

Rebecca Kuang, The Poppy War trilogy (3 novels)

 

Fonda Lee, The Green Bone trilogy (3 novels)

 

Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Trilogy (3 novels)

 

Crime

 

S. A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

 

Peter Temple, The Broken Shore

 

YA

 

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

 

The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angelina Boulley

 

Garth Nix, The Abhorsen novels (new installment out this fall is Terciel and Elinor)

 

Romance

 

Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient

"Copiousness is the desired effect"

The vortex of the spring semester has engulfed me. (That, and Facebook leaching off minor life commentary.) A lot of tabs to close and light reading to log, only perhaps not just now. Instead, a delightful piece by John Mullan about George R. R. Martin and fantasy fiction more generally. Here's his description of the pilgrimage he paid to Tolkien as a teenager:

I vividly remember one day, aged 14, climbing like a pilgrim the worn wooden steps to Tolkien’s room in Merton college, Oxford in the company of his grandson, who was a school friend. I was clutching my battered paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings, much reread. And there was the great man in his beautiful room, crowded bookshelves up to the ceiling, a vision of lawns beyond. He sucked his pipe and chatted benignly. I was encountering the most important writer in the world, as it then seemed, though I was struck by the mismatch of this tweedy English grandfather and his lofty Wagnerian creation. He was telling me of the physical pleasure of writing. “Did I enjoy the sensation of using a really good ink pen?” I could see why he might be asking this when he signed my copy of his magnum opus: runic is the only word for the style of the inscription. Seeing Professor Tolkien in situ suddenly made it obvious how bookish an endeavour it was, this business of creating of an alternative world.

In it

Did I ever link to this at the time? Anyway, some thoughts on immersion - in novels, in games, in water - following the publication of The Magic Circle.

The quiet volume

I went and saw a funny thing today with my friend T. - it is a sort of immersive piece, not entirely unlike one of the games in my new novel, that takes place in a reading room at the NYU library. Though it is a piece about reading, I'm really not the ideal spectator for it - I have thought too much about reading, my opinions are too strong and my knowledge too copious to immerse myself in the experience as I am supposed to! I thought it was better in the idea than in the execution, though again this may be partly due to my own excessive reading speed - they have set it up to accommodate readers of different speed, but they do not really take into account the truly abnormal, which I fear mine is. I wanted the makers of the piece to read Thomas Warton's amazing book about reading, The Logogryph, which I loved and am now keen to revisit.

One of the three books in the pile in front of me - the most interesting thing about the piece, I think, and probably the locus of interest for its makers, is the way it makes you think about the physical position of the reader sitting next to you - was a novel I loathe, in theory and in practice: Jose Saramago's Blindness. I had time to read much more of it than I think I was intended to.

(With the thought running in the back of my head, about the notebook with text produced by the piece's "authors" - "There are many typos on p. 35!" At various times the recorded text coming in through the ears was at odds in ways minor to moderate from the printed text one was asked to find and follow, but I could not imagine that they had deliberately misspelled those words on that page. It was highly distracting.)