May 28, 2020

Releases I'm Ready For, Summer 2020

This is not going to be the summer anyone planned, but at least there will still be new books. These are the upcoming releases I'm most looking forward to:

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett (June 2): Bennett's first novel, THE MOTHERS, demonstrated her skill at depicting characters and the way their relationships change over time. This new book promises to draw on those talents again to tell the story of identical twin sisters who grow up to assume different racial identities, a fascinating premise.

THE LIGHTNESS by Emily Temple (June 16): This is a debut from a writer whose work I've read for years on the site Literary Hub. The story involves a teen girl at a strange summer program, and the description intriguingly notes that it "juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these."

MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (June 30): I read Moreno-Garcia's novella PRIME MERIDIAN and have been intending to pick up more of her work, which spans a range of genres. MEXICAN GOTHIC is, naturally, a gothic horror story, and I'm prepared to be creeped out by a spooky mansion and dark family secrets.

THE RELENTLESS MOON by Mary Robinette Kowal (July 14) is the third book in the Lady Astronaut series, in which a climate disaster in the 1950s accelerates the quest to colonize space. I largely enjoyed the first two books, despite some flaws, and I'm looking forward to switching to a different character's point of view for this installment.

BIG FRIENDSHIP: HOW WE KEEP EACH OTHER CLOSE by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (July 14): Sow and Friedman host the excellent podcast Call Your Girlfriend, covering a variety of topics from a feminist perspective and sharing honest talk about their long-distance friendship and business partnership. I gather the book will be partly a memoir of their friendship and partly a look at friendships in general, and I'm excited to read it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Ronnie Scott writes for The Guardian about publishing a book right now: "Like every Australian novelist putting a book out this month, I'm publishing it into a different world than the one I wrote it in. The Adversary is a novel of manners, meaning it's a book where people hang out and socialise and not a lot actually goes on. There are two best friends. They're both gay men. They have to change their friendship. Along the way, they share cigarettes and touch each other's hair. They step over strangers to find the right spot at a shockingly populous pool, where they sweat liberally, sweat stickily and share meaningful bites of their food."

May 6, 2020

April Reading Recap

The three novels I read last month were all different from each other, and pretty different from any other books I've read:

WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL by Rahul Kanakia: Nandan's friends are constantly giving him advice about wooing girls, so he's glad to be the voice of authority for a change with his more hapless classmate Dave. After an evening of partying on the Santa Cruz beach and strategizing over girls, Nandan is surprised but drunkenly pleased when he and Dave hook up. Nandan isn't sure how to label his sexuality, because he certainly hasn't stopped thinking about getting back together with his ex-girlfriend, but at least he's having fun figuring it out, except when he really isn't.

WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL deals with the anguish of teenage uncertainty about attraction, friendship, and how to fit into the world. While the story is structurally simple, with nothing in the way of subplots, the thoughts Nandan is grappling with are complex and nuanced. His narrative voice reads as realistically adolescent to me, without feeling as emotionally overblown as YA sometimes is to my jaded adult self. Kanakia is a strong and careful writer, and I look forward to more of her work, particularly the adult novel she's revising now.

NEW WAVES by Kevin Nguyen: Margo and Lucas become good friends at a New York City tech company, where they both deal with the grind of daily racism. She's a rare black woman engineer, either ignored and told to assert herself, or warned to be less aggressive. He's Asian and always assumed to be an engineer, then looked down on for actually working in customer service. The two of them commiserate in bars after work, share conversations that are alternately deep and ridiculous, and drunkenly steal proprietary data one night after Margo is fired. And then Margo dies in an accident, and Lucas is left with the password to her laptop and the growing recognition that he didn't know his best friend very well at all.

This is an emotionally engaging novel about grief in the digital age and the difficulties of human connection. It's not, as the jacket copy suggests, a heist or a mystery, beyond the mystery of people trying to understand one another. The early part of the book led me to expect a more strongly plotted story, so I was disappointed that certain threads didn't wind up somewhere more significant, but I appreciated the cerebral and somewhat messy novel this turned out to be. Nguyen is very perceptive about how both people and technology work, and this story contains great depictions of tech culture, office life, and complicated friendship.

THE NIX by Nathan Hill: Samuel is a disillusioned English professor, a failed novelist, and a secret videogamer. His mother ran off when he was young, and her whereabouts have remained unknown, so he's stunned when Faye shows up in the news after attacking a conservative governor. Even stranger are the reports of her history as a political protestor, a part of her life Samuel knows nothing about. The story unfolds in multiple timelines to reveal the past events that brought Samuel and Faye to this point, and a variety of side characters also get their turns in the spotlight.

This novel was a lot of fun to read, with amusing lines, absurd incidents, and a fairly light tone despite upsetting material that includes compulsive behavior, betrayal, and police brutality. Samuel and Faye are sympathetically flawed, complex characters, and the people around them are an interesting mix of realistic, cartoonish, or both. Hill does a great job weaving together the collection of unusual plots so that the insights combine in a satisfying way. The story covers many fascinating topics and settings: the protest movements of several eras, massively multiplayer online games, Norwegian folk tales, and much more. The book is long and could have been shortened throughout with less description, but it rarely drags. Recommended if you want to spend some time in an intricate, odd, and often funny story world.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laurie Penny at Wired breaks down why This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For: "I was expecting Half-Life. I was expecting World War Z. I've been dressing like I'm in The Matrix since 2003. I was not expecting to be facing this sort of thing in snuggly socks and a dressing gown, thousands of miles from home, trying not to panic and craving a proper cup of tea. This apocalypse is less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams."