Bored to Death book club posted: " My monthly recommendation post filled with books and other literary things you might want to try. New Releases The Archer by Shruti Swamy As a child, Vidya exists to serve her family, watch over her younger brother, and make sense of a moth"
As a child, Vidya exists to serve her family, watch over her younger brother, and make sense of a motherless world. One day she catches sight of a class where the students are learning Kathak, a precise, dazzling form of dance that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Kathak quickly becomes the organizing principle of Vidya's life, even as she leaves home for college, falls in love with her best friend, and battles demands on her time, her future, and her body. Can Vidya give herself over to her art and also be a wife in Bombay's carefully delineated society? Can she shed the legacy of her own imperfect, unknowable mother? Must she, herself, also become a mother?
Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn't know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom with bleeding wrists that mutters of revenge.
As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie's death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie's nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble, letting in the phantom that hungers for him.
One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.
As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend's trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.
At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?
The world will soon find out.
Not so new Releases
Let's not only talk about new books! Here are three 'older' books I liked this month that sound real cool:
A campus novel is the best way to start the new school year.
A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry--particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed "Gang Bang Central" and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture--but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
A strange Greek modern classic where the young female author gets compared to Proust makes me very curious
Margarita Karapanou's Kassandra and the Wolf was first published in 1976, and went on to become a contemporary classic in Greece, receive international acclaim, and establish its 28-year-old author as an intensely original new talent, who garnered comparisons to Proust and Schulz. Six-year-old Kassandra is given a doll: "I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she'd fit," she tells us, "Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn't be so heavy. Now I love her very much." Kassandra is an unforgettable narrator, a perfect, brutal guide to childhood as we've never seen it, a journey that passes through the looking glass but finds the darkest corners of the real world.
Objects behaving strangely is kind of my kryptonite
Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the 'symptomers', humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species.
But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won't stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat.
A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists.
I haven't finished N.K. Jemisin's other series yet, but I had a hankering for strange places so I started reading The City We Became. A novel about cities being birthed and humans being avatars brought aware to protect them. This one focuses on New York and how the birth of this new city is going absolutely incredibly wrong. I'm nearing the end and the world building and characters are absolutely amazing as always.
I'm starting spooky season early and decided to try another Stephen Graham Jones novel. I read and liked The Only Good Indians, but didn't love it and so far My Heart is a Chainsaw is doing the same for me. It's about a girl obsessed with slashers who is absolutely convinced her town will be central to a slasher showing up real real soon.
Other literary things
I love recommending short stories and this month I finally get to recommend one I wrote! Check out my story Light Industry over at Bear Creek Gazette. It's written in customer complaint emails where the cause of the complaint is something eerie and strange. And while you are there, read the other banging stories in the latest issue. You won't regret it!
Writing/Journal Thoughts for September
I still think of September as the start of a new year. It's not entirely the same as January, but I've never been able to shake off the feeling of beginning a new academic year either. It's the moment after the summer slump, a time where people start talking about getting back to it and start up new projects.
Although I hate this sentiment when it comes to corporate life (I've worked all summer as well, why do I suddenly need to work even harder in September), I kind of like it for 'academic' goals. By 'academic' goals I mean my creative endeavors or things that I'd like to learn about and not so much achievements, creative or otherwise. It gives me a moment to check in with what I've been doing and what I still want to do or learn in the remaining months of the year. It's the time of the year when I start reading my next Proust novel (one a year, always starting in September), where I think about what I want to do with the book club and when I always start to think about joining NaNoWriMo again even though I really really don't have the time.
My approach to studying was probably a weird one, because I loved studying just for the h*ck of it. I made not so career clever decisions by studying Philosophy and Literature, but I had a really fun time doing so and still love learning about these things. I've recently started an online poetry course through Yale and doing a bit of homework and watching a class has been really fun and super nostalgic. I know that studying definitely had its drawbacks, but right now - just before going back to work after my holiday - I have a hard time seeing them.
So for me, September is the moment where I want to challenge myself by taking up lofty goals like reading difficult novels or writing one. It's where I think about going back to school and learning new skills that don't have to be useful, but will be fulfilling. What are some things you'd like to do during this new academic year. Anything you want to learn? Tell me about your fun projects and your most useless lessons. I want to learn it all.
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