August Books Report

Books Consumed:

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Benjamin Stevens

The Trees, Percival Everett

The Land and Its People, David Sedaris (audiobook)

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, Benjamin Stevenson

Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, Will Sommer (audiobook)

I’m a shameless sucker for a whodunnit. That’s the immediate thought I had when I gave into algorithms constantly suggesting Benjamin Stevenson’s Ernest Cunningham books And found myself having a blast.

What I loved more than the mystery was the cheeky, post-modern voice of narrator Cunningham. It’s with a knowing wink to all the tricks and tropes that came before him that he tells the reader: I am your reliable guide through this story. It’s an earned cheekiness because the character, in the first book of the series, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, is an author of digital ebooks geared toward would-be mystery writers; he writes how-to guides that sell on Amazon for dirt cheap. As a result, he’s constantly commenting on the structure of the story he’s telling, interjecting to remind you that he wants you to find out the mystery but also wants you to know that his hands are tied when it comes to how quickly you get the answer; he must follow the rules that we all expect these books to follow.

I enjoyed the Australia of it all. The settings, the sayings, imagining them described with that unmistakable accent.

The Trees absolutely took over my life for a day or two. Sadly, that’s all it took to finish it, for I would have gladly given over much more of my attention.

I bought it while on vacation in Asheville, North Carolina. If you find yourself there, don’t miss out on Malaprop’s Bookstore, a truly first-rate independent shop. My toxic trait (one of them) is to believe it’s my solemn duty to patronize every single independent bookstore I can find. My mere presence and foot traffic isn’t enough; I’m duty bound to give them some money. I was buying a handful of other items, non-book category, so I decided my actual book purchase should be a paperback. A small selection of Percival Everett’s work made the decision easy.

Now, here’s a confession I’m not proud of: I haven’t yet read James (though a perfectly lovely signed hardcover copy is right here under this very roof, just waiting for me). The only book I’ve read is Erasure, which Courtney and I tackled as one of our very first book club selections. We devoured it. Couldn’t get enough. So I don’t find it the least bit surprising that, at any spare moment on a jam-packed trip, I was itching to get back to this book.

It's so propulsive; I was rocketed through the next page. And funny. So funny. But it's also bleak and sad, a reminder of the utter brutality of lynching. Only a true master of the craft could weave those two together so seamlessly.

If ever there were an author made for the medium of audiobooks, surely it must be David Sedaris. Since so much of his career and fame is essentially him selling out venues so that fans can come and listen to him read the essays he's written, his audiobook publishers have wised up, invested in some production value at some of those events, and simply turned the live readings into the audiobooks. The experience is as reliable as a Lee Child novel: You know exactly what you were wanting when you picked it up and the author delivered. The Land and Its People has many stories of such slight — "importance" isn't quite the right word, but maybe "heft"? — that I found myself remembering a high school art teacher's response to my pft-I-could-do-that reaction to a piece of minimalist art: "But you didn't." The stories work mainly because it's David Sedaris telling them, because honestly, I wouldn't listen to even my closest friends ramble on about their Duolingo streaks. But I did for him. I missed the stories featuring his dad, and I felt a little sad to realize how freely he writes now that his father's passed: He very much did not like the man, and I'd always imagined he was just exasperated by a parent the way most of us are. I can't pretend to know what life with his father had been like, but I liked to remember the stories in Calypso, especially, as ones that presented the possibility of softening on the old man. I have no dog in this fight, no overriding desire to rehabilitate the reputation of some crusty old bastard who made life miserable for family members, but I can't help but think about this through the lens of the last time Sedaris came to Columbia, I had tried, without luck, to give away tickets to a meet-and-greet and his show because I was home in Tennessee for my own father's final days.

I'm hooked, apparently. No sooner had I finished Stevenson's first entry in the series did I say, "Wow, I'll have more of that please." And the second entry was an even juicier proposition due to its extra potential for meta treatment: not only was it another locked-room-style whodunnit, but it was on a train. You could practically hear the author saying, "I know, I know, it's been done before (by some of the best to ever do it), but that's what will make this one all the more fun."

It was also a canvas for meta commentary of another type: the publishing industry. The narrator Ernest Cunningham is now a published author (in the book world, he wrote the text of Stevenson's first book, and it was received pretty much as it was in the real world). The peek behind the curtain felt similar to the V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke team-up The Ending Writes Itself that I read last month. Perhaps it's such a fertile field because of mysteries unique spot in the genre v. literary divide: There is perhaps no better or more reliable genre than the mystery (see some of the ballots from the recent genius foray into list-making by the New York Times: 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century) and when done well, we are happy to count it among the literary class. Well, now that I think about it: Should mystery fall into the thriller category? I've always casually thrown them around as almost interchangeable. Diehards would probably disagree. Although the Times Book Review's very own thriller columnist Sarah Lyall said on Sunday episode of The Daily in response to the question, "What constitutes a thriller?":

Well, I think, as you say, it’s a pretty personal understanding. There’s no real definition of a thriller. But I would say, at the heart, it has to have a lot of suspense. It has to have a plot that moves you along. You have to be dying to find out what happened.

Certainly sounds like these novels should count. But I digress.

Maybe the meta/winking takedowns of the publishing industry and its hierarchy of genre fiction versus literary fiction perfectly illustrates the arbitrariness of that distinction in the first place: How can a book that hooks a reader so deeply not be considered great, even if the writing is rather pedestrian? I'm not sure what's in the water that we've gotten so many self-reflexive looks at the publishing industry through the eyes of mystery-writer characters, but alas, I'm here for it.

I'd recently listened to an interesting episode of The New Yorker's Critics At Large podcast that I'd missed about idiots, idiocy and the American brand of both. It was a wonderful listen in its own right, but it reminded me of an audiobook I had sitting on my digital shelf that I wanted to return to after a few false starts: Will Sommer's Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.

Subject matter is self-explanatory, and maybe you'd moved on with your life and not thought of that nonsense in a long while. Good for you, reader. As you should have.

But I think about it from time to time whenever the news cycle brings up some other moronic piece of world happenings, and I pause, probably squint a bit, and inevitably say, "Really???"

That's how all of QAnon felt to me. But I cannot pretend it doesn't fascinate me deeply. The how of it. The why of it. Not so much on the part of whoever started and continued the farce as Q (though that part is fun to try to solve). That specific element of the book reminded me a lot of the HBO documentary series, Q: Into the Storm, where director Cullen Hoback seems to have pretty convincingly identified the person(s) behind the account for at least a significant portion of its reign. Indeed, the book even references the film's conclusion and seems to agree with it. No, the part that fascinates me so deeply is the people who believe it, fall for it, convert to it, and make it their life's mission to convert others.

I wonder if they actually believe it or if it's all a bit (for the influencer class, I assume it's simply a grift for the money). But the regular adherents, the ones who are indoctrinated by a steady stream of the content, what do they really think? If they do believe it, is it the product of idiocy of the type The New Yorker's podcast explored? What the book made clear (and was totally lost on me) is that the appetite for conspiracy theories, even those as patently ridiculous as QAnon, isn't purely an American one; Q may have started here, but it broke containment and infected much more of the world than seems possible.

One can't help but wonder if maybe this all could have been avoided if more people just read some books instead of watching TV and mainlining social media content online.