It’s that time of year again – time to snuggle up next to the fire with a good book or two. Here’s what’s on our Fall bookshelf.
Geo’s books
Currently reading: The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
I’m only about 60 pages in, but I already think The Rest Is Noise might be a top 10 book for me. Certainly it’ll be the best book on music I’ve read so far. And like many books you come to love, they seem to have had an uncanny way of entering your life at just the right moment.
Over the past two years my musical tastes have expanded a vast horizon’s worth. My growing interest in classical music to jazz to noise- and krautrock, in addition to my undying long loves of punk and Prince, have inexplicably danced around my brain and made me wonder: how are they all related? What came from what? What led to what?
The Rest Is Noise covers a great deal of these questions, starting just before the twentieth century with European composers like Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, and eventually tying in the historical and political events that changed, shaped, and created the music we’ve been listening to for more than a hundred years.
Next: Watership Down by Richard Adams
I’ve been thinking a lot and writing about animals and their relationship to humans, which has of course led me to thinking about animals portrayed in literature. If you think about it, animals are nearly everywhere in literature, especially children’s literature, and they are often anthropomorphised a great deal, which complicates the way we come to regard animals in real life.
It is perhaps unsurprising to note that my two favourite novels are about animals. In Moby-Dick, the titular whale represents itself and a great many other things, since our collective knowledge of the animal kingdom is still so mysterious that it lends itself almost perfectly to the great unknowns of our psyche. Animal Farm manages to satirise animal anthropomorphising, animal cruelty, and Stalinism in a little over 100 pages.
And so I am excited to read another novel featuring animals, Watership Down, to see how these rabbits are portrayed, what they’ll represent, and why another human writer continues to choose the ‘voicelessness’ of the animal to convey a story.
Sarah’s books
Currently reading: A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
As you’re hopefully aware, we here at the Urchin Movement think Dave Eggers is something of a legend. So when I saw him, well, one of his books, sitting on a shelf at library, I just couldn’t leave without it. Published in 2012, A Hologram for the King is Dave’s second most recent novel (his very latest, The Circle, was released two weeks ago).
Like all of Dave’s works following his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, it addresses the issues of humankind on both personal and societal levels. Set in Saudi Arabia, the novel follows a washed up businessman from the U.S. as he attempts to make a business deal with the Saudi Arabian king. From a failed marriage and the trials of fatherhood to the movement of U.S. production to Asia and shifts in the global economy, Dave covers a lot of ground. While not all of it is page-turning, all of it is important.
I actually just finished this book, and despite what felt like a bit of a rushed or abrupt ending, it was an enjoyable read, and, it was, as always, nice to catch up with Dave. In writing this, however, I’ve just uncovered the nauseating news that the novel is set to be made into a movie starring guess who as the the down and out businessman. I’ll give you a hint: one of the most boring and least compelling actors of our time (though I always get a lot of flack for this opinion, and may be the only one who actually thinks so. I’d also like to clarify that he seems like a wonderful human being.) It’s Tom Hanks. And the movie will be a flop. It was Dave’s special, intimate way with words that made this story readable. Subtract that and add Tom Hanks? Good luck staying awake.
Next: There But For The by Ali Smith
Time to visit another old friend! It was so nice seeing what Dave’s been up to that when I recently saw Ali Smith, okay fine, one of her books, at library, I brought her home, too. Like Dave’s A Hologram for the King, There But For The is Smith’s second most recent novel, published in 2011. (Hey, what do you expect? This is library, after all.) Smith is a modernist genius, and I truly can’t wait to see how her style has evolved over the past few years. She is always experimenting, always trying new forms, styles, and methods. And like Dave, she has an uncanny ability to make her writing so intimate you can almost feel it physically in your heart. I don’t know what to expect from this novel, but as long as it doesn’t ultimately turn out to be a movie starring Tom Hanks, I think it will be just fine.
