The LJ/School Library Journal “What We’re Reading” people find inspiration on Twitter, in the headlines, at the beach, and in Montana City this week.
Mahnaz Dar, Associate Editor, SLJ Reviews
This weekend I started reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (Random). So far I’m only a few chapters in, but I’ve already learned what L. Ron Hubbard was like as a young writer (and I even learned that he would go on to become the most published author of all time). Observe a passage from his early writings as a teen:
Rex Fraser mounted the knoll and setting his hat more securely against the wind squinted at the huddle of unpainted shacks below him.
“So this,” he said to his horse, “is Montana City.”
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
Twitter made me very happy last week. I follow two of my favorite writers, Megan Abbott and Elizabeth Hand, and when Megan tweeted that Liz’s new short novel, Wylding Hall (Open Road Media), was available for a low price—and that it was about a British folk-rock psychedelic band in the 1970s—I hied over to the online bookstore to procure a copy. I was well rewarded. Hand absolutely nails it: the period detail; the music and the making of it; the friction and factionalizing of bandmates who are also roommates (and lovers, of course); the fashions; the drugs. And then she adds a shimmer of supernatural. I described the book this way to a friend: A Steeleye Spannish band decamps to a deserted manse for the summer and shite gets wyrde. My e-reader was my constant companion over the weekend as I raced through the book. Thank you, Twitter; thank you, Ms. Abbott; and thank you, Ms. Hand!
Barbara A. Genco, Special Projects Manager, LJ
Barbara G. is our Go Set a Watchman WWR commenter this week. Here’s what she had to say on Goodreads:
The main plot hinges on Jean Louise Finch’s return to her Maycomb, AL, hometown only to discover that her saintly father has feet of clay. She is devastated to learn that what she thought was a highly vaunted sense of justice was in fact (simplistically) a love of the law and not, as she believed, an embrace of “color-blind” justice. Her sometime fiancé and old sweetheart Hank is also a major disappointment. He, too, has taken the road most traveled. Hank has embraced the racist rhetoric, a 19th-century antebellum and anti-Reconstruction worldview, and the openly hostile anti-NAACP stance of his employer and mentor, country lawyer/legislator Atticus Finch. And both are now active members of the Local White Citizens Council. Jean Louise learns that she can’t go home again. It sickens and angers her.
She has changed in her time away from the South, and the South has moved on, too—but not in the direction she either expected or anticipated. Despite all the controversy about this book (should it/shouldn’t it have even been published), I found this a mostly effective and affecting first novel. The strongest sections are Jean Louise’s childhood reminiscences—the real “roots” of To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM). Some fine atmospheric, local color writing. The character of her retired Uncle Jack (Atticus’s brother), once a distinguished physician, a “bone man,” and later a Victorian literature autodidact, is a quirky delight. I loved their exchanges—though even I, a lover of Southern literature, found them a bit too over the top and more than a tad overlong. On balance Watchman may actually be far more reflective of its time than TKAM ever was. The Atticus of TKAM was always too much of a wise, lawyerly father/saint for my taste. But it was what we desperately wanted those times to be. I fear they were not, and they are not now. After reading GSAW I wonder, could Harper Lee’s own epitaph now be (to paraphrase John O’Hara’s own self-composed epitaph): “Better than anyone else, (s)he told the truth about…(her) time.” Even the ugly truth.
Lisa Peet, Associate Editor, News & Features, LJ
Elsewhere (OK, Twitter) I described Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (NYRB) as my literary summer soundtrack, and I’m not sure I can come up with a better description than that. Originally published in 1968, Talk is a transcript of three friends conversing in the Hamptons during the summer of 1965—originally a number of people taped by Rosenkrantz, distilled down to two women and their gay male best friend. They’re in their late 20s/early 30s, involved in the 1960s New York art scene—Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler are name-dropped—and everyone, as was the fashion, is in analysis: talking on the beach, in cars, over meals and drinks. The conversations veer from banal to deep, self-centered to compassionate, trite to interesting, and cover a lot of bases in which sex, art, food, drugs, relationships, and therapy are concerned. In fact, the chatter is weirdly delightful, even when the speakers themselves get tiresome—the rhythms of the conversation of friendship make it work. There’s a kind of music to it, even when the reader thinks—often—that they’re all slightly narcissistic and immature. But aren’t we all sometimes?—and even more to the point, don’t we think so about our nearest and dearest, inwardly rolling our eyes even as we still love them? Talk is like that exactly, and it swings along cheerfully even as it takes some dark turns. It’s a fine summertime read, guaranteed to put a little burnish on your own shooting the breeze with friends—like a summer song, it’s frothy but still reverberates in your head for a good while after it ends.