Rich Mintz  

The books listed below are available free to anyone in the world — the first person who emails or DMs me with a request and a postal address gets them. I will put the book in an envelope and mail it to you, no obligation. There are only a few rules:

1. Please only request a book if you want to read it.
2. After reading, give away this book (or keep it and give away another book), or leave it on the bus, or otherwise share the love.
3. If you can, drop some small token (of no commercial value — bookmark? local chocolate bar? tourist map of your town?) back in the mail to me. Part of the fun is exchanging something with someone far away, like we did back when there was no Internet, and the mail was one of the few ways to acquire surprising knowledge of foreign lands (like Pittsburgh, where I had a pen pal once upon a time).

That’s it! And now to this week’s list:

• Alison Sinclair, Cavalcade — mass-market paperback, well-used. A science fiction novel about an unusual first contact with an alien race.
• Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow — trade paperback, well-used.
• Jeffrey Archer, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less — mass-market paperback, well-used. The first novel (1976!) by the British author, political figure, and convicted perjurer. Actually quite a good story about a financial caper that ends with a twist; a fun weekend’s reading.

Just finished Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, closing an odd hole in my reading history. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh twenty years ago when it first came out, and remember loving it. (I’m almost exactly the same age as Chabon, who was 24 when he sold that book.) But somehow when I tried Wonder Boys a few years later, I just… couldn’t… break in. Perhaps there was just too much “dudes drinking and getting high” in the book for me to tolerate in those days.

In any event, I’ve kept up with Chabon (I think Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of my two or three favorite books of all time), and so when a copy of Wonder Boys fell into my hands, I decided to give it another try. And this time I really got drawn in.

Perhaps it’s simply that I’m older, and have had more life experience (and suffered more disappointment, and accumulated more of the wisdom that comes from just living through another few years) — but then again, Chabon wasn’t that old when he wrote it (but then again again, he’d had the experience of working for ages on a tormenting novel he eventually abandoned, or so says his biography, and that sounds twice as bad as the ordinary variety of life experience that normal people have). In any case, read it.

Brooklyn-based author Joshua Henkin, director of the Brooklyn College MFA program (and someone I know from years ago), was kind enough to send me a copy of his recently released novel, The World Without You, and I just finished it today.

Joshua Henkin is a comfortable storyteller. The story — a family of sisters returned home to their childhood summer home, a year after the sudden death of a beloved family member in a war zone — is largely a reflective and introspective one, but it held my attention, and didn’t ever feel “stuck.” And there are frequent moments of surprise and delight in Henkin’s prose.

The book reminded me of Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters, which I read earlier this year — not just because of the superficial similarities (somewhat estranged sisters, with different emotional states and relationship histories, coming home to a small town at a moment of family crisis), but also because, as Brown did, Henkin does a remarkably good job of capturing the subtleties of character. The very different motivations and emotional burdens of all the members of a large family were well individuated in the course of The World Without You, without making the book feel overly dense or difficult to follow, and by the end I was feeling some special empathy for everyone in the broad cast of characters.

Indeed, I came to the end feeling satisfied but also feeling like I wouldn’t have minded it if the book had been longer. If Henkin hasn’t completely tired of this family, I’d be interested to read more about them someday.

For more about The World Without You, here’s Joshua Henkin’s recent interview with The Rumpus.

Talking with someone about Rudy Rucker, and an offhand mention on YouTube, made me pick up JIm Munroe’s Everyone in Silico, my favorite of the “shed your inconvenient meat body and upload your consciousness” stories I’ve read. This one’s a full novel, which paints a picture of a highly corporatized near future in which pretty much everyone is abandoning Vancouver for a post-corporeal existence inside an enormous simulation. I read this 3 or 4 years ago (when I was first getting my footing in this genre, starting with Cory Doctorow and expanding outward) and I highly recommend it. More here.

Just finished reading Second Honeymoon, which is Joanna Trollope’s newest novel (or I think her newest). I’d never read anything by her, and given how popular she is with the book-club set I kind of assumed it would be tripe, but it was a superb extended comedy (in the Aristotelian sense) of adult family life, told with respect and good humor and grace. In fact, I read it basically in one continuous session (and it was a long book) and am hungry for more. So more fool me for having let my preconceptions keep me away from such a good writer up to now.

I’m about a hundred pages into Nadine Gordimer’s new post-apartheid novel, and it’s not any easier slogging now than it was the other day. I’ve read plenty of thinky fiction about Africa (including what felt at the time like 10,000 pages of Norman Rush) and it’s definitely the book, not the subject. (It doesn’t help that the digitization was sloppy.)

Anyone would think this book was heavy. I think even its characters, in whose minds most of the slow, significant, non-action happens, would set it down after 50 pages and go do something else. But I’m going to try to stick with it.

I did, however, take a break to read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, an incisive and approachable book of cultural criticism. Rewarding as expected. Klosterman’s one of the smartest people writing on popular culture at the moment, and one of those who seems to have the least to “prove.” It takes significant art to convince me to read an essay about basketball and an essay about Weezer in the same 12-hour period, so there you go.

I’m reading Nadine Gordimer’s new “post-apartheid” novel, No Time Like the Present, and I’m finding it rough going. Stilted phrasing and roundabout locutions, preachiness and messaginess — this isn’t my first Gordimer, but so far (about 30 pages in) the book hasn’t been gentle. Hope it loosens up, because if not I’m not sticking with it for another 400 pages.

If you like nanobots in your space opera, you could do worse than drop 99 cents on David Simpson’s Post-Human. The hard science is full of holes (say that again? people can commute from Vancouver to Venus by flying there in magnetic bubbles, no ship required?), but it’s no worse than a Doctor Who episode. I’m about three-quarters in and I can’t wait to see the evil A.I. vanquished.

This relatively light novel by Lauren Beukes can be gobbled up in a morning (which is how I read it) — it’s a near-future mashup of techno-dystopian corporatist-statism and genetic engineering in a world where everything happens on your phone and your social legitimacy is defined by your SIM ID. (Oddly, people still wear watches.) It takes place in and around Cape Town, which I found interesting (and I kept popping over to Google Maps to geolocate the action).

I would have enjoyed a bit more dystopia and a bit less rage-against-the-machine, but if you like your Charlie Stross (and I do), you’ll probably like this.

Incidentally, Amazon recommended this to me based on all the dystopia I’ve been buying. Good call.

Just finished Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, part of my near-future-dystopia binge. It was a bit softer and more sociological than some of the other sci-fi I’ve ready recently, which isn’t surprising because it’s set about 15 years in the future in a United States that’s recognizable as a place we might be heading toward right now. There hasn’t been an alien invasion, there hasn’t been a revolution. The economy and the social order have just gradually deteriorated, in the way that some would argue they’re already deteriorating now, and the authorities and the elites haven’t been able to keep a handle on it.

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.