Reading List + Recommendations (Revived)

“Walking the stacks in a library, running your finger down the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.” - Robin Sloan

[sleepingspirits]

Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders, 2017 - 2019 Book Ten

[sleepingspirits]

Last Line: and we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen.

[sleepingspirits]

[sleepingspirits]

Opening Line

“On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.”

- Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders -

[sleepingspirits]

The Sentimental Sadist

Ghosts and schmaltz haunt George Saunders’s first novel.

What They Said:

Reviewed by Caleb Crain

“In form, the novel is a combination of film script and Lincoln-focused scrapbook, alternating dialogue among the ghosts with excerpts from historical accounts of the Civil War era, some genuine and some invented.”

[sleepingspirits]

2019 - Book Ten

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

[sleepingspirits]

[sleepingspirits]

Right now I’m smoking in the night, looking up at a sky full of glimmering pinpricks of light, and I know them to be stars and also diamonds.

Last Line.

Golden State.

Ben H Winters.

[sleepingspirits]

Golden State:

“The world as I understood it is slipping out from under me and I ought to stop but I can’t. I can’t stop. I keep reading and as I read the book settles down over me, it becomes reality as I read it, the air becomes fuzzed, to the point that when I look up it is like the reality of my room is less real than the reality inside the book.”

- Ben H Winters

[sleepingspirits]

That’s love, as best as I can figure it: love isn’t how you feel when you’re together, it’s how you feel, how often you feel it, when you’re apart.

[sleepingspirits]

This is a novel.

All of the words of it are true.

Opening Lines, Golden State, Ben H. Winters

[sleepingspirits]

Review | Imagine a country that prioritizes truth-telling above all else. Is it an improvement?

Ben Winters’s “Golden State” takes place in a fact-obsessed society.

What They Said:

Reviewed by Jon Michaud

“Imagine a country so traumatized by deception, lies and gaslighting that it opts to prioritize facts and truth-telling above all else. Here’s what your life would be like: Ubiquitous video cameras would capture your every word and action and feed them into a permanent record of all that is “Objectively So.” Like every other citizen, you would keep a detailed account of your life, gathering diary pages, receipts and annotated conversations, and sealing them in a Mylar bag each night. If there’s ever a question about what happened on a given day, this archive can be accessed to determine the truth. If you were found to have lied or fabricated any fact in the record, you could face imprisonment or even exile. And in accordance with the national ethos, all fictional storytelling — whether on the page, the stage or the screen — is outlawed. No novels, movies, plays or Internet. Would this be a paradise or a hell for you?”

[sleepingspirits]

[sleepingspirits]

Early Riser - Jasper Fforde, 2018 - 2019 Book Eight

[sleepingspirits]

“Again.”

Last Line

Early Riser

Jasper Fforde

[sleepingspirits]

Mrs. Tiffen could play the bouzouki.

Opening Line - Early Riser - Jasper Fforde

[sleepingspirits]

Oh What A Miserable Winter: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Once upon a time, not so very long ago at all, you could set your watch by Jasper Fforde. This was way back when we wore watches that needed

What They Said:

Reviewed by Niall Alexander

“It’s interesting in the end, and full of neat ideas that hold a far-from-flattering mirror to elements of our own existence, but so poorly paced and plot heavy that the remainder is the rub. Similarly, the setting is engrossing and almost criminally original, but Albion is a world built on the back of interminable info-dumps and masses of jargon. And all this hangs on a central character who might be witty and well-meaning, but proves so exasperatingly passive that even he might as well be asleep.

Which is a shame. Early Riser has a lot to say and, for the most part, says it in an interesting way. The message, in short, is sound—but the medium, in this particular instance? Maybe not so much.”