[Busy with a
bunch of book talks at the moment—on which more in a few weeks—so a series of
brief posts highlighting great new books I’ve read this year. Add your own
recent reads, whether new books or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend
reading list!]
I’ve written
before in this space about my general preference for ambitious, messy,
sprawling epics over tightly controlled, perfectly constructed gems. I certainly
appreciate and often enjoy the latter, but would say that many of my favorite
books fall into the former category. And this year has held true to form, as
one of my favorite recent reads, Richard
Powers’ The Overstory (2018), is
an ambitious, messy, sprawling epic if ever there was one. Powers’s epic
narrates the stories of nearly a dozen main characters and their families
across multiple centuries of American history, all through a unifying narrative
structure that adds one more hugely ambitious element to the mix: the lives and
perspectives (to a degree—this isn’t epic fantasy) of trees. In so doing he
also crafts one of the great environmental novels, as well as an impassioned example
of
climate change literature (or cli-fi, as it’s sometimes called). If that
sounds like too much, well, we might have different literary tastes; but if it
sounds appealing, I promise you won’t find a more inventive and compelling
read.
Next recent read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this book? Other recent reads you’d share?
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