Chaparral 2021-2022: 30.3 What Are You Reading?

I just finished reading They Called Us Enemy by beloved actor and activist George Takei. This is a graphic novel about Takei's experience as a young boy being interned with his family during WWII. Wonderfully illustrated and effectively told, this first-hand account of the injustices of the Japanese American internment camps and the racism these Americans faced during this period is a perfect introduction for students learning about this time in U.S. history.

Margaret Lopez
Library

I'm reading The Making of TRON: How TRON Changed Visual Effects and Disney Forever by William Kallay.

I would definitely recommend it. If you want to know about the painful birth of Computer Graphics in movies, who was involved and how it changed Disney, this book is for you. A who’s who of the pioneers of Computer Graphics. How was Xerox involved? Has a great summary of the history of Disney and the players involved.

TRON made an indelible impression on me as a teenager.

Zareh Gorjian
Computer Science Information Systems

Will Not Attend by Adam Resnick

The dry-witted Resnick – he of David Letterman famed – offers a memoir (of sorts) in the form of loosely related essays that sketch out his life of general misanthropy and an almost doggedly determined neurosis. Whether he's a young lad trying to get out of going to a kid's Easter party; a teen ordering hexes and spells through the mail to bedevil his hostile brothers; or trying to get his hands on an obscure Bob Wills record via breaking-and-entering an elderly woman's home, Resnick brings the funny. If you're a fan of Letterman, Chris Elliot, or Dostoyevsky when he's been drinking, this book may be for you.

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

As a thin, pasty goth-kid, I knew "Charlotte Sometimes" only as a trippy tune by The Cure. Turns out, it's a trippy children's novel by a too-little-read British writer. Part time-travel tale, part outsider story, the novel follows the titular character as she attempts to adjust to boarding school. Her first morning finds her waking up some forty years in the past as a totally different little girl. Honestly, I have never read anything like it. There is some weird-whimsy similar to Travers' Mary Poppins, but there is also an eerie edge that, frankly, puts me in mind of Edgar Wright's film Last Night in Soho.

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald

The late, lamented Macdonald left an unexpected gift in the wake of his unexpected death. If Hunter S Thompson joined in unholy alchemy with Anton Chekov, and if that combination were distilled like Wild Turkey through Mark Twain's mustache, you might come up with Based on a True Story. Subtitled "not a memoir", this strange, hilarious, friendly, and always surprising book is at turns hilarious, folksy, profound, and absurd. Discerning what might be true from what might be fiction is a good 25% of the fun. The other 75% of the fun is simply enjoying the remarkable prose stylings of Macdonald. Even if you are only interested in his SNL experiences, you are bound to be pleasantly confounded by the conflation of the memoir and the tall-tale the book proffers. If you can discern the difference, Norm has a morphine-dipped cigarette for you.

David Fulton
English

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

Antony Doerr wrote All the Light We Cannot See (for which he won the Pulitzer), and while this novel has similar themes, it is structured a bit more operatically. It spans millennia, from the middle ages to the far future and links three complex stories– one set during the fall of Constantinople, one set in both contemporary times and during the U.S.-Korean war, and one set in an intergalactic spaceship following a post-eco-apocalypse. The stories are bound by and echo a fourth story – a fantastical and comedic fable from a "lost ancient Greek manuscript" by Antonius Diogenes. They're threaded by stories of love, sacrifice, powerlessness, courage, redemption, philosophical mystery and they also investigate the human response to climate crisis. Because the lost manuscript is part of all of the stories, it is story itself that binds and saves us. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a love song to story itself.

I would recommend it!

The Dreamers , by Karen Thompson Walker

I wanted to like this more than I did. The novel is an existential interrogation – a meditation on reality, time, and the world of dreams, disguised as a contemporary plague story. Or else it's an epidemic mystery that periodically mediates on the nature of reality and time.

The plot centers on an outbreak of a "sleeping sickness" on a rural California college campus. Although published a year before the COVID pandemic, the scenes of the outbreak containment were eerily close to home. The writing is sometimes beautiful and sometimes mundane, but it’s never as lyrical as I was hoping it would be. The contemplation of the experiences of those who are perpetually asleep and dreaming as an exploration of the nature of reality is overt -  in an almost post-modern way. On the other hand, the characters' relationships, as they are affected by the epidemic, are sometimes moving, and a few scenes at the end felt worth the price of admission. If you loved Station Eleven or similar texts, and you're okay with loving this less, then I might recommend it.

Our Country Friends, by Gary Shteyngart

I did not think I would like Our Country Friends, the “first Coronavirus pandemic novel" (it is set March – August 2020), which began as Shteyngart channeling Chekhov at an upstate New York farmhouse-with-iPhones. I had so very loved one of Shteyngart’s earlier novels, Super Sad True Love Story, and his original voice is what made it so extraordinary. I was disappointed at the beginning because the style, themes, tone and even plot seemed so imitative. It takes a while, but Shtyngart’s voice does emerge with its wit, social satire, clever winks and moral ponderings. As the novel reaches a crescendo (and it does start to feel very musical), it embodies much of the chaos and unmoored feeling that was 2020 (and beyond!). The final sections of the novel function in a kind of a fugue state (skillfully jazz-like), and the early Chekhov-imitation pays off with peeks behind the curtain of the novel’s insides and, eventually, a peeling away of the curtain into something that felt for me, in November of 2021, transcendent.

Julie Gamberg
English

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Highly recommend! Beautiful magical realism in the traditions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Laura Esquivel. A quest narrative that blends Aztec mythology and depictions of Mexico in the early 20th century.

Jessica Groper
English

I'm reading the book Keep Sharp, by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, MD. I'm taking my time with this book because it's dense with information about how to keep your brain sharp, and avoid getting various forms of dementia. He backs everything up with studies and research. It's almost like reading a textbook and I'm benefitting from this wealth of information.

Karen Knotts
Library