09.1.2010 5 Great End Of Summer Reading Suggestions
Some of my top summer reads, I highly recommend all of these titles.
STILL LIFE WITH JUNE by Darren Greer
Cameron Dodds has just turned thirty. A writer, he get his ideas from the lives of others, often borrowing stories from the patients of his workplace, a Salvation Army Treatment Centre. When one of the patients hangs himself, Cameron sees an opportunity for a story -- maybe even a novel. He begins to research the dead mans past and discovers he has a sister, June, a grown woman with Down''s Syndrome. As Cameron develops a relationship with June, he makes many discoveries, none of which is more surprising than the one he makes about himself.
BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago
This is quite simply the best, and most personally relevant book I have ever read. The story of an unexplained mass epidemic of site loss afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The author chronicles a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctor’s patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor’s wife has escaped the blindness. Somehow she is the only person immune to the contagion of blindness. The novel delves into some brilliantly brave and insightful themes when it suggests that it may not be good fortune after all, and may really be a fate worse than blindness?
Her sighted reality forces her into becoming responsible for the blind inmates, yet she admits that the pressures of caring for a band of helpless people exhausts her, and she even begins to wish she too were blind. She murders two sadistic inmates in the asylum where the blind are contained and helps the others escape the quarantine. As often happens in times of plague, the immune are viewed with mistrust and disdain, in this case by the other city dwellers, as no one knows how or why she retained her sight when the rest of the country was struck blind.
HEY NOSTRADAMUS! by Douglas Coupland
A disturbing, though ultimately very human novel by Canadian author, Douglas Coupland, the Gen X poster boy of the 90's. It centres around a fictional 1988 school shooting in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath(more than loosely based on the events of the Columbine massacre) in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath.
This is Coupland's most critically acclaimed novel, first published by Random House of Canada in 2003. The novel takes an ambitious premise by employing four first-person narratives, each from the perspective of a character directly or indirectly affected by the shooting. Intertwining substantial themes, of adolescent love, sex, religion, prayer, grief, and human frailty, this is a work that will stay with you weeks after you close the last page.
PROMISCUITY'S by Naomi Wolf
Some of you may recal that in 2008 I posted a video by Naomi Wolf, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, where the author takes a historical look at the rise of Fascism in America.
Promiscuity's, from a decade and a half earlier, is another seering indictment of current culture and it's disastrous effects on the sexuality of young women.
Through a wonderfully personal, yet academically focused narrative, Wolf reports on and analyzes the shifting patterns of contemporary adolescent sexuality, often with convincing claims that the staples of modern literature are rife with examples of male coming-of-age stories, covered autobiographically by D. H. Lawrence, Tobias Wolff, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway, and covered misogyny by Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.
Wolf insists, however, that female accounts of adolescent sexuality have been systematically suppressed. She adduces cross-cultural material to demonstrate that women have, trans historically, been celebrated as more carnal than men. Wolf also argues that women must reclaim the legitimacy of their own sexuality by shattering the polarization of women with male centric line divisions such as the still powerful virgin / whore paradigm.
Anyone who, like Ms. Wolf, was born in the 1960s--will have a very hard time putting down 'Promiscuities'. Told through a series of emotive reflections and brave confessions, her book is a fascinating exploration of the complex and still largely unexamined themes around the sexuality and desire of women.
DO IT ANYWAY by Courtney Martin
The author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, and a regular blogger at Feministing, Ciourtney Martin brings us Do It Anyway, a refreshing take on social justice issues, and how each of us personally navigates the complex process of deciding what it is that really matters, what it is we truly believe, and what it is we stand for in a world where standing for something has never been more urgent.
From the publishers notes:
For anyone who cares about social change but hate feel-good platitudes, "Do It Anyway " is the book for you. Courtney Martin's rich profiles of the new generation of activists dig deep, to ask the questions that really matter: How do you create a meaningful life? Can one person even begin to make a difference in our hugely complex, globalized world?
Though what I really connected to in Courtney's book was her clear allowance of room for a type of activism appropriate to the individual, based on a number of complex identity pillars. Never has the phrase, "the personal is the political" been given better application. While making sure not to descend into the assimilation slide of "appropriate" activism, Courtney holds personal comfort with actions as an individual, fluid decision, always open and changing with experience and context. Stripping that idea down to it's base form, her message is simple; there is room for everyone if the goal is to make the world measurably better than it is.
So what are you reading this September?
Arts, Writing | tagged books / authors 
