Extra Credit
Besides what you have to read, are you currently face deep in some fun-reading? Here are some Postmodernist faves of mine.
I'm wrapped up in the "Wheel of Time" series. Thanks, KB! I really need to know how Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World is going to resolve! It's a postmodern blend of fantasy, gritty reality, futuristic dystopia, and folksy love stories. Fabulism is where my postmodern heart is right now...
Last week I finished 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.