Now that we’re deep into the summer, it’s time for another reading list! Here’s what I’ve been reading this summer.
How about you?
Ally Condie – Matched
This was one of the major books of the ‘teen dystopia’ wave of the 2000s and 2010s. It came out right on the heels of Hunger Games and before Divergent. In this one, the story centers on a love triangle.
So, what’s the basic setup? An all-controlling group called the Society runs things in the world – or at least in one country, as we never learn its exact borders. The Society tells people which jobs they take, where they go to school, and, most important to the story, who they ultimately marry. In return, people live relatively long, healthy, and seemingly happy lives.
On the whole, it seems like a decent deal, especially in comparison to the imagined nightmare that must have preceded it. But our main character gets a good reason to doubt her Match, and questioning of the Society ensues…
Is it a good book? No. But it’s an interesting enough quick read.
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
My book club had a ‘classics’ month, and we picked this one. It wasn’t what came to mind immediately to me when I thought about ‘classics,’ but it’s certainly a mid-20th century hit.
Mentally, I had associated the book with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, and Kesey doesn’t disappoint. The novel follows a group of people in a psychiatry ward with a million different conditions, united only by the fact that they all seem inconvenient to society.
The Big Nurse dominates the ward, using a variety of tools to maintain control of the operation.
Our main character, McMurphy, enters and shakes things up. He challenges his fellow residents to fight back, and he gets himself and the others into a variety of adventures.
I won’t say much else, in order to avoid spoilers. But the story is narrated by a long-term Native American resident who seems to be both everywhere and invisible to almost everyone except McMurphy. Questions about how the narration filters the story lingered in my mind after reading.
Marc Raimondi – Say Hello to the Bad Guys
The idea of reading a book on professional wrestling – particularly the 1990s wrestling of the WCW – wasn’t really at the top of my mind.
It’s not that I didn’t love wrestling as a kid. I did. It’s that my era of wrestling was the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. This was the era of over the top, cartoon character heroes and villains. And it was an era dominated by the WWF of Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan.
So what’s different about this book? Well, it covers the mid to late 1990s in the second leading promotion, one I rarely watched. And it covers an era that occurred largely after I grew out of watching wrestling.
But it was an influential era. And it involved Hulk Hogan himself, albeit in a different guise.
In this era of wrestling, Hulk Hogan became a villain. And he – along with Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Eric Bischoff, and others – spearheaded a new era of grittier, more ‘realistic’ professional wrestling to match the edgier culture of the 90s.
Raimondi reports on this skillfully, showing how Hogan and company changed pro wrestling and the broader culture. I’d recommend it. Reading good writing about pro wrestling always imparts key knowledge about what life is really like in the U.S.
Toby Wilkinson – The Last Dynasty
This is an extensive history of the Ptolemy dynasty in Egypt from the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great, through the consolidation and expansion of empire under the early Ptolemys, to the decline of the empire and its fall to Rome under the famous Cleopatra.
We get a narrative of imperial expansion into the eastern Mediterranean under the first two Ptolemys. This sets up the configuration that would hold under the Roman and Byzantine empires until the 7th century CE. And then we get the eclipse of the Ptolemaic Empire first by the Seleukids and then by the Romans.
The most interesting part of the history concerns how Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II meld together Greek and native Egyptian forms into a semi-unified whole. They staff their armies with Greek immigrants and then rule over a native Egyptian population that never fully integrates. At the same time, they adopt native Egyptian forms and religious customs, appearing as simultaneous Greek Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs.
Despite my deep familiarity with the Hellenistic era, I learned quite a bit from Wilkinson’s history.
Tom Wolfe – A Man in Full
This enormous novel from Tom Wolfe set in Atlanta. It’s a satirization of Atlanta politics and ‘race relations,’ as well as a book that comes with a dusting of Stoic philosophy.
While it focuses on a real estate mogul who’s in decline and being chased by his creditors, it hits at all levels of the Atlanta social scene. From the mayor to the business interests on down to a football player who has arisen from the slums, Wolfe shows Atlanta social and political interactions in exaggerated form.
While it’s an interesting novel, it’s a bit all over the place. Wolfe takes nearly 400 pages to introduce the full cast of characters. And the central conflict of the novel – a rape allegation by a rich white girl against a black football player – is handled clumsily, at best.
The best part of the story is probably a working class guy in one of the mogul’s food production facilities who goes to jail, converts to Stoicism, and then manages to convert the mogul to the same Stoic views.
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