Erik's Book Club: November Selections

I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent.

The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out.

Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a cautionary tale in that it warns us how our greatest scientific triumphs can lead to human destruction.  It's a wildly imaginative and fascinating book that I strongly recommend.

Apple and Knife is a collection of shocking short stories by the Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, who now lives and teaches in the U.S. Let me quote the front cover:  "This collection is dark, subversive...Here are fairly tales and myths reworked with a feminist bent." These are intense, macabre, often sexual stories that delve into frightening and taboo terrain. I found this collection spicier than tabasco, thought-provoking, surreal, and well worth reading.

Another Indonesian book I read was Ars Poetica and Other Thought Pieces by Hasif Amini, a literary critic. These thought pieces are a series of brief reflections on poetry that Amini wrote for an Indonesian newspaper several years ago. They are profound little gems on topics like Irony, the role of the reader, and Chiyo-ni, a Japanese woman who created haiku in the 18th Century. These miniature essays are simple, yet incredibly insightful.  If I ever taught poetry again, I would definitely share a few of these with students. This book is published by Lontar, a non-profit foundation that is dedicated to printing little-known, yet outstanding, Indonesian literature and essays for distribution to a wider audience. What's even more fun is that these books are trilingual, containing the original Indonesian, as well as German and English translations.  I don't think these editions are readily available outside Indonesia, but if you can find any Lontar publications, you should grab one, if this fine collection of thought is any indication. 

Book 5 is a short essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We Should All Be Feminists. It's a clear argument for feminism and should be required reading for everyone, especially for the men out there who are woefully ignorant as to what the concept of feminism really means. It would make a wonderful stocking stuffer!

My final book was an E-book, Peril, the new politcal expose by Bob Woodward.  It's a good book, but I am totally sick of reading about Trump.  It was over 800 pages and with most of it I was already familiar. It's been so abundantly documented that Trump is evil and the worst thing that's ever happened to American democracy, that this doesn't add much to the mix, though the section on the days between the election and January 6 has some interesting tidbits. The book is also written at, what seemed to me, a fourth-grade reading level, which I found annoying.  One super-important note: Though Trump and his evil minions have attacked Woodward and this book, not one fact in this book has been debunked or disproven.  And not one source has taken back his or her claims against Trump.  They yell "fake news," but nothing Woodward has written in this book or his previous one on Trump has ever been discredited. Though it's a piece of great journalism, don't bother with this book. We've identified the Anti-Christ, now we must just do what we can to defeat him.  Read one of the other five books instead.

Even if you never follow any of my recommendations, please read at least one book this upcoming month.  You'll be shocked at how your horizons will be broadened.  Happy Reading!