Six Books That Make Great Christmas Gifts
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Thanks to the pandemic, this year’s best books have been slow to print and difficult to obtain, although so have the worst books, of course. (The worst is Jonathan Franzen’s “Crossroads” on 1970s Midwestern Lutheran American sincerity, uber-Franzen.) Look for these beautiful books and I hope they arrive by Christmas.
âOur Country Friendsâ, by Gary Shteyngart. It’s a true masterpiece, the last thing I expected this year from this wonderful Russian-American novelist who recently wrote about his physical agony at 40 from the long-term effects of a wildly bad circumcision in his life. seven years. The Russians are suffering. This is what they do. Jewish Russians suffer the most. Shteyngart has retired with friends to his New York State country home to overcome the pandemic, and as the resulting novel makes clear, the exiles cannot escape their own nature. Friends, as bright as they seem, suffer from failure, fame distortion, envy, nostalgia, narcissism, anomie, paranoia, internet, app damage, etc. Nobody comes out of it intact. It’s painfully funny about stress, autism, Korean cuisine, not so much about the hallucinatory agonies of coronavirus death. He will stop at nothing.
âShutdown: How COVID Shook the Global Economy,â by Adam Tooze. If you can’t afford a house or expect the price of your bouncy house to never lose its buzz, or if you can, how did Kipling put it, “lose out and start over. debut / And never breathe a word about your loss, “you’ll enjoy the historian’s crisp explanations of how markets worked during the pandemic. They did and they didn’t. I sometimes despair of disinterest readers for the global finance that accompanies them on a daily basis. Reading about the massive economic forces that dominate the individual is not pleasant. But better to know why the world is changing with or without your help. Tooze has a talent for it. explanation It leaves the reader feeling elegant.
“The Morning Star”, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s August. This is Norway. Without warning or explanation, a giant bright star appears in the sky. Like the killer coronavirus floating in invisible clouds on the streets and highways, there is something terrifying in motion. Five characters – professor, priest, journalist, father, psychiatric nurse – go through their days. There are three sections, day one, day two, then a long essay, a Knausgaard classic that I call The Bit You Don’t Have to Read. As always, he writes about epic psychic greatness, our place on a planet we’ve destroyed and minute-by-minute affairs, how we turn off the lights, close the door, and pour ourselves a glass of water while the star is shining. . There is an atmosphere of dread that is pleasantly familiar in this year 2021. Knausgaard is exactly the writer to understand how uncomfortable we are, how disconnected we are, how likely we are to melt. in tears.
âUninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Momentâ, edited by Sarah Milroy. This fascinating art book accompanies a McMichael exhibition of women artists whose work has been and is being ignored in favor of the Group of Seven. As one studies paintings of humans and the built world, one begins to resent them. to the guys from the Group of Seven. Even though I love their work, I look at it and say, âIt’s a tree. No doubt about it. “While Yvonne McKague Housser’s paintings of northern towns, empty sidewalks and mills leave me bewildered and bewildered. As Sara Angel writes, a painting of Cobalt, a city, has been altered to make it brighter and prettier so that it can sell, but thoughtful readers will prefer the darker view It is a vision of a Secret Canada populated by Secret Visionary Women.
“Four thousand weeks”, by Oliver Burkeman. When Burkeman, an eloquent Briton, explained that the average human lifespan is 4000 weeks, you could have pushed me with a peony. Sounds more like 72,000, doesn’t it, more if you have roommates. Burkeman wants us to make better use of our brief time, but not in a way that we tick off a list. Before the industrial revolution, people rested after hard work. Now we are wasting our off-peak hours. Did you know that if people live to 100 years old, at what point more people are born who then live to 100 years old, the Renaissance was only five lifetimes ago? Get cracked, folks. What I don’t know, but better start now.
“Framley’s Incomplete Examiner”. This is a small town British newspaper exit from a parody website and it’s the funniest thing I (and actor Bob Odenkirk) have ever read. We all live in Framley. We’re all in turmoil about housing, dogs, trash cans, vandals, the new truncated cycle path that is “not even as long as a small cycle” leaving “Framley cyclists furious at the news. Framley cyclist facility â. The Framley Examiner is your vicious local Facebook page, but it’s mostly BlogTO, dapper, teenage and illiterate, stuffed with mystifying headlines: “Local man neither local nor man” “Newby’s treats is the customer” “The man waits two weeks to be served in a local restaurant “” The mayor of Ainty lands on the moon “Posted abroad, you can buy it at bookdepository.com. Eventually it will appear.
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