Extra Credit
Besides what you have to read, are you currently face deep in some fun-reading?
Of all the fiction I have read recently, my Postmod faves are:
There, There by Tommy Orange, a novel that weaves Radiohead, Joyce Carol Oates, and Native American cultures together powerfully. It's a mystery around a pow pow in Oakland. It tells stories of displacement - of being exiled from your home and community, forcing you to create new communities of your own, because if you try to return home, there is no there, there. It's gone.
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito, definitely the top Manga that I read this year. I'm relatively new to this genre, so I went with a 2013 classic. It takes place in a Japanese sounding town that has been invaded by spirals. The shape, in Postmodernist Magical Realist style, becomes a fixation, then a menace that deforms the entire community. Nobody raises an eyebrow even though people are bending themselves into spirals or growing new body parts shaped as spirals. It is a deeply unsettling tale. I couldn't sleep for a while after I finished it.
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison, an old short story from 1967 that was pitched to me on YouTube as the most optimistic post-apocalyptic story of humanity ever. The singularity has occurred, and the new master of the cosmos is "AM," an artificial intelligence that HATES humanity. AM takes it out on the few remaining people left. This is a smorgasbord of Postmodern treats.
The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, the most fun I had with a book series. These are hilarious Postmodern romps through the psyche of a "murderbot" who swears it/she/he/they have no human qualities, then proceeds to demonstrate more humanity than any of the homo sapiens in the story. This is the perfect blend of Postmodern paranoia, black humor, and parody.
I finally finished the "Wheel of Time" series. Hey, it's 14 books. Thanks, KB! I really needed to know how Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World was going to resolve! It's a postmodern blend of fantasy, gritty reality, futuristic dystopia, and folksy love stories. Fabulism was where my postmodern heart was right then...
I also read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. This is a mash-up of secret lives, secret wells, and generational joy. I'm still not over the ending. Thank you, Monkey Pants. IYKYK.
Last year I read The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He's a well-known nonfiction writer, but this book is a Postmodernist paella of temporal distortion, historiographic metafiction, hyperreality, and black humor. This has magic, Harriet Tubman, and some of the most beautiful prose I have read.
Another book I recently read, coincidentally similar in setting, is The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. This one does with the legends surrounding America's Underground Railroad what Quentin Tarantino does with the Manson murders in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's part gritty history, part fabulism, lots of wish-fulfillment, and all terrific.
Hansel pd. 3
In middle school, I read a book called "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls, which was one of the saddest and beautiful books I have ever read. It is a memoire of Jeannette's life packed with maximalist descriptions of each home her family stays in and temporal distortion as time passes in a blur during some ages and drags on for chapters during others. It also shows the gritty lifestyles of the poor, and how her father promised to build her a glass castle to spend the rest of their lives in never came true before he died. While the book is not fiction, the story is so magical and the events so unbelievable it sometimes feels that way. I highly recommend reading this if you have not already, I already got my little sister to read it and she cried at the ending as well.