Savory reads, as of late
Graduate school is over. What a strange, mostly shitty two years that was! It's not entirely academia's fault, or my specific institution's fault either, although it didn't help that what was supposed to be a "teaching assistantship" often felt more like grief counseling or group therapy with students dealing with a variety of personal traumas. I'm simply not equipped, professionally, personally, or otherwise, to provide that kind of care, especially for $13K a year. Christ, what a mess. Onward and upward!
Now that hundreds of pages of weekly reading assignments are off of my plate, I've had more time to read for pleasure, an activity I sometimes forget how much I enjoy until I pick up a book and dive in. Admittedly, I still haven't been reading as much as you might presume an English master's graduate would. There's just so much shit to watch...Still, here are a couple/few things I've been sludging through between moving apartments, looking for a job, and inhaling The Sopranos.
Karen Tei Yamashita
If graduate school was good for anything, it was introducing me to Karen Tei Yamashita, who has quickly become one of my favorite writers. In many ways, she's a postmodernist in the traditional sense: she experiments with form, uses fragmentation and other methods of subverting linear narratives, embraces the (very) weird and bizarre. But she is also undoubtedly a post-colonial author who infuses tons of different styles – magical realism, maximalism, historical fiction, absurdism – throughout her work. Her debut novel, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, is sort of all of the above, and it's what made me fall in love with Yamashita's writing when it was assigned in a literature course last spring. I like virtually everything about the book, especially the way it critiques transnational capitalism, but the most refreshing thing about it is that hardly any of it takes place in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, very little of Yamashita's writing focuses on the Anglo-American experience. None of the three novels of hers that I've read – Tropic of Orange, I, Hotel, and Rainforest – center on white characters. As a Japanese-American writer who spent a considerable chunk of her life in Brazil, her stories emphasize the complicated, often violent convergence of cultures and the firsthand experiences of polyglots. Yamashita at once belongs among the ranks of the so-called titans of American postmodernism (Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut) while telling very, very different kinds of stories.
Elena Ferrante
Like a lot of postmodern fiction, Yamashita's work can be, let's say, difficult, at times; the fracturing of time, space, and POV gets inevitably cumbersome. This is especially true of her massive experimental door-stopper, I, Hotel, which took me nearly six months to get through. To provide some relief between sections that are literally hundreds of pages long, I decided to finally pick up an Elena Ferrante novel after years of friends and classmates recommending them (plus, Maggie Gyllenhaal's Lost Daughter adaptation had just come out). I've been completely enamored by My Brilliant Friend, which I'm nearly finished with. Ferrante's writing is so engaging. Much like a Jane Austen or James Joyce novel, the plot isn't packed with suspense and excitement; sometimes it's just a few teenaged girls exploring the boundaries of their Neapolitan neighborhood. Instead, it's the way Ferrante expresses her characters' motivations and how those motivations manifest themselves in interpersonal behavior that make the story so addicting. Plus, it's just so readable: you'll knock out a handful of chapters without blinking. Sometimes you just wanna flip those pages! I'm excited to snag copies of the rest of the Neapolitan series. Perfect summer reading.
George Saunders always
Many of you know that George Saunders is my favorite writer. I never really stop reading him; I just take little breaks between revisiting his story collections and essays. Recently, though, I subscribed to his Substack, which is a nice mix of commentary on various stories and his own writing pedagogy. Vis-à-vis the latter, Saunders released a book in 2020 called A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, where he "teaches" the reader about the craft of fiction using a dozen stories by Russian writers whom Saunders finds especially influential. In 2017 I sent a hail-mary application to Syracuse's MFA program in hopes of working with Saunders, which obviously didn't work out, but this feels like the next-best thing. He has a really non-pretentious, visceral approach to writing that feels refreshing compared to some professors who've tried to tell me that there is a "correct" way to tell a story. I'd recommend it to anyone who's trying to improve their fiction or just has an interest in craft.
Next week, Netflix is releasing an adaptation of one of Saunders's stories, "Escape from Spiderhead," featuring Miles Teller, Charles Parnell, and Chris Hemsworth. The guys who directed Deadpool are doing it. I hope it's good, but I'm almost positive it won't be. Sad.
What's everyone else reading? I have no idea if you can leave comments on these posts, but feel free to email me some tasty reads. I'm unemployed, so I got all the time in the world, baby (which reminds me, you can also email me any job prospects...thanks in advance).