Tuesday, September 17, 2024

September 17, 2024: Summer Reads: Interior Chinatown

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I didn’t mention the 2020 TV adaptation of The Good Lord Bird in yesterday’s post, but of course I look forward to checking out Ethan Hawke as John Brown and Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass at some point soon (and have heard good things about the limited series overall). Not yet available but on the horizon is a TV adaptation of another novel I read this summer: Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020). I suppose I’ll check that one out as well but I can’t lie, the amazingly experimental structure and style of Yu’s novel seems very unlikely to be successfully adapted to a visual medium (which is ironic, as the novel is centrally and thoughtfully interested in visual media like TV and film, but it’s nonetheless the case). At the very least, I would implore everyone to read Yu’s novel, as it is quite simply one of the most innovative and captivating literary works I’ve read in a long, long time.

Next summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

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