I’ve never understood why summer was considered the best
time for light reading. It’s a time when many people are working less and
therefore better suited to take on those tough, long books they’ve always
wanted to read. (Plus, taking a giant book to the beach makes you look really
cool.) Here are a few of my favorite anti-beach reads, all of them challenging,
fun, and available at PWPL.
FIC BOL
The book, in the form of diary entries and interviews,
reconstructs the lives of a young man and a group of avant garde poets with
whom he gets involved in Mexico. Bolaño delights in giving fragments of a
story—sometimes via untranslated poems, sometimes via journal entries that stop
abruptly—and having readers figure out the big picture for themselves. The book
is impressive in the sheer number of characters and settings it manages to
include. Despite its title, this is not a standard detective novel: it concerns
a mystery that seems as deep as life itself, and after you finish the book you
won’t be able to stop thinking about it.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood
Meridian, 1985
FIC MCC
If you’ve read much Cormac McCarthy, you probably know the
setup—a 19th-century young man goes on a quest through the southern
US and quickly finds himself in circumstances he isn’t prepared for. As with
many other McCarthy books, both the landscapes and people in Blood Meridian are relentless. This one
of the first books I checked out from PWPL, and it is perhaps most challenging
in its sentences, which stretch many of the rules of the English language.
(There is one sentence in this book that will have you floored; you’ll know it
when you get to it.) McCarthy can deftly pack pages’ worth of detail into a
single paragraph, and although this means the reader has to do some unpacking,
it is as much fun as work.
FIC MIT
If you’ve seen the movie, you’re familiar with the concept:
there are six different stories from the past, present, and future—encompassing
everything from a 19th-century composer to a futuristic cyborg
society. The stories, each with their own narrators and styles, change into each
other abruptly, and part of the fun for the reader is figuring out how they’re
all linked together. Mitchell shows an impressive ability to convincingly write
in six different genres, and more importantly, this is not just a pretentious
concept; the stories are all fun and engaging, and together they deliver a
powerful message about humanity.
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010
FIC EGA
This is another book that spans genres, time periods, and
perspectives. At its heart are a few people in the music industry, and the book
involves the people they spend their time with as well as the people they
become. Each chapter is told by a different character, and while the chapters all
work as short stories, they also form a larger narrative. Despite having a
complicated structure, this book is accessible and fun. Not to mention, one of
the chapters is in PowerPoint Slides, and Egan makes it compelling!
New FIC SCH
This novel,
translated from Spanish, seems like the perfect beach read—it’s short, and its
title suggests pulpy horror—but there is something deeper at work. A dying
woman talks with a young boy, and although their conversation seems clear
enough, the reader begins to think that they can’t possibly be talking about what it seems they’re talking about. The
woman starts to tell a story, and it gets crazier from there. The fact that
Schweblin can take simple sentences and images and create a discordant,
gripping, and wholly new story out of
them is remarkable.
--Ben
Kinney, Youth Services
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