As summer approaches, I’ve managed to compile a monster of a reading list. With over 20 titles scribbled on my trusty take-with-me-everywhere notepad, I readily admit that I may be overextending myself. While I may be more ambitious list maker than book reader, below are the starred and solid few that I'll devour over the next few months. Tell me what made it onto your reading lists this summer.
Busy Monsters seems cool for a variety of reasons. It follows the odyssey-like journey of Charles Homar, who in an effort to prove him self and win back the affections of his fiancé, travels across the United States fighting mythical and metaphorical monsters. We come across bigfoot, aliens, body builders and prostitutes in what’s been proclaimed, “An exuberant modern-day picaresque about the cost of love-struck obsession and the inevitable monsters of every human heart.”
It was via mentalfloss that I first encountered Ransom Rigg’s and his photo essays. His projects contain a haunting and often chilling quality. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children combines fiction and an eerie brand of vintage photography, to tell the story of sixteen-year-old Jacob who discovers an abandoned orphanage and several curious photographs. As he explores more of the orphanage he begins to unravel the perhaps dangerous truth behind the children that once lived there.
I’ve heard nothing but positives of Brook’s 2030. Part science fiction, part social commentary, only funny man Albert Brooks, whose turns in films as diverse as Taxi Driver and Finding Nemo, could brings us 2030. It's been described as an Orwellian tale of what the nearby future holds for Americans that simultaneous manages to spell our realistic demise and bring us to laughter.
Silver Sparrow is the tale of two sisters, the daughters of a man who keeps two wives and two distinct families. One sister, Dana, grows with the knowledge that she has a sister, while the other, Bunny, does not. The books begins with the words, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” and from there on asks us to examine our ideas about love and monogamy, the ties that bind sisters and our notions of half sisters and the lies we tell to the people we love most.
Walking to Hollywood finds Will Self on a journey from England to Hollywood. Described as a modern satire, Self becomes convinced famous actors are portraying the people around him, from agents to bums, and that only he can discover who killed the movies. A memoir that isn’t really a memoir, Walking to Hollywood promises laughs in addition to lingering feelings of alienation.
China Miéville dances in an out of genre, never fully settling into any one distinct category and often elevating the form. His latest, Embassytown, described as “hard science fiction,” seeks to examine the meaning of language. In Embassytown,humans have settled on the planet of the Ariekei, beings with a language unique in the universe that only select and chosen humans can understand. Avice, the novel’s protagonist, is not one such human, and yet she has become a part of the language. As upheavals and political machinations threaten to make rifts between humans and aliens, Avice must decide where her loyalties lie.
The book’s dust jacket explains it best. “Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living–and whom he does it for.” The Sisters Brothers has been called dark, grotesque, brutal, strange, touching, cinematic and even funny. I love me a Western, and deWitt seems to have written the best kind.
Sarah McBride is a self-proclaimed pop-culture enthusiast. Her thoughts on music, film, lit and life can be found at sarahism.com. You can follow her on twitter @sarahism.
picture via ginnerobot's flickr stream