Covid knocked me a little on my ass this week although it was mercifully brief. As an upside, it gave me a little time to get some good reading done. Here’s a catch-up on three books that helped me enjoyably spend the time off: Blessings, Volcanoland, and Supplication.
Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s novel Blessings follows main character Obiefuna’s growth into queerness from an early age to adulthood. His relationship with family changes even as Nigerian society becomes more hostile to LGBTQ communities through two broad sections of the book that explore his maturation through boarding school and then as an adult. The writing is unadorned, only sometimes lyrical, but always generous. 3/5
Tamsin Mather’s Adventures in Volcanoland wasn’t as sprightly written as some of the recent STEM I’ve read, nor as accessible, but it’s nonetheless a very worthwhile read and absolutely fascinating. There was enough history in the book to keep my interest very piqued even if sometimes I found following the science slightly challenging. Readers will appreciate, I think, her honesty with respect to how much geologists still don’t know about exactly what’s happening deep beneath the Earth’s crust: more exciting than frustrating, Mather convincingly makes the case that those outstanding questions are an opportunity to better understand not just the rocks upon which we walk and air that we breathe, but also who we are and how we came to be. 4/5
I was going to set this down several times over the course of a couple days’ reading, worried that it was a sophomoric exercise more academically-inclined than readable. I’m glad, though, that for a few hours I was able to shut out life’s distraction to read and hear and feel the words on the page to the point where I was taking notes as the conclusion neared. Author Nour Abi-Nakhoul, at least as far as I can glean from an excellent exploration of Supplication in the Star, is a literate, progressive writer. Her social media feed is full of indie works on the far margins of popular culture. What I struggled with is that as I read through the various tableaus that make up the main character’s journey the landscape began to seem very familiar. There are objects in the novel that connect the reader to settings they know at some level. The knife, the gun, the drugs, the alcohol, the gasoline, the boots, the car, all those chairs in which characters sit all hearken us back to Springsteen’s Nebraska, the landscapes of Truman Capote’s In Full Blood, Mike Hammer’s office in a Mickey Spillane work of pulp fiction. It’s a landscape of southern gothic and noir tropes. All that changes in the final scene when things take a decidedly Arthur C. Clarke turn.
In the Star article, Abi-Nakhoul speaks in subversive terms about the need to maintain distance between the avant-garde and established genre. It could be that the very American imagery from a universally-recognized canon are deliberate, but I’m not sure. It speaks, though, to the opportunities for reader connection with a difficult text that it’s even a possibility. In my own reading, I was suddenly engrossed in Supplication’s potential as a feminist, anti-capitalist work. Smarter readers able to focus more quickly will doubtless find their own connections more quickly, but I’m glad that I eventually made the plunge. 4/5
