Beowulf

Beowulf

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, The Classics

Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of the iconic Old English poem, Beowulf (2020) presents modern readers with a perfect blend of direct translations of Old English phrases and hyperbolically contemporary verbiage. Indeed, she translate kenning (the compound word phrases frequently used in Old English poems) after kenning alongside words like “bro,” “hashtag,” and, yes, “fuck” (although the later may well have been frequently used among the warrior class of individuals depicted in Beowulf). What Headley presents is not traditional high poetry like that championed by many medievalist of yesteryear (among them the likes of Tolkien), but it is lyrical, delightfully readable, and very accessible. What’s more, it is arguably representative of the original feel of Beowulf’s oral roots. Alliterations and lyrical turns of phrase collide with 21st-century slang in Headley’s entertaining and approachable new translation of this oldest of English poems.

My Murder

My Murder

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

What if science could bring people back to life complete with memories created prior to premature death? Surely such abilities would be fraught with ethical questions and ramifications. What if a serially killer targeted young women alone in the dark? What would the tipping point be at which the public would rally for these women to be brought back? These are some of the questions from which Katie Williams’ novel My Murder (2023) stems. Williams’ novel takes readers to a not-so-distant future when technology—medical and otherwise—changes certain fundamental certainties in life. Most notably, My Murder is set during a time when death need not be forever.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro.

The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction, Reading & Parenting

You don’t need to be a social psychologist to recognize the social crisis of modernity. It seems particularly visible among the generation currently coming-of-age with record high levels of mental illness and increasing instances of “failure to launch.” If you happen to be a social psychologist, however, you might find yourself better equipped to unpack the underlying reasons for the generational shift. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024), Jonathon Haidt, famous for previous books like The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American (2018, see previous review), zooms in on the questions of why Gen Z faces such unique challenges.

Excellent Women

Excellent Women

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

One of the things I love about reading books like Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) is the way the characters and language transport me to mid-20th century England—London in this case—and highlight the myriad Britishism that a Yank like me pauses and considers. Surely, we think “slut” must mean something else; as in: “‘You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut,' she said, almost proudly” (4). And, indeed it does. But the linguistic differences is just the start of what makes Excellent Women so, well, excellent. Pym’s novel emerges from the first person perspective of Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties” (in her own words on page 1). Her world quickly alters as Mrs. Napier moves in to the flat below her; the flat with which she shares a bathroom. Mrs. Napier and her husband, the much-anticipated Rockingham, are not what one might expect from a married couple. Excellent Women quickly populates—around the life of Miss Lathbury—with eccentric and entertaining characters. While the novel is set in London, it has a decidedly village feel and Mildred Lathbury is a wildly likable narrator.

The Fell

The Fell

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Try as we may, all of us remember the feeling during Covid lockdowns and quarantines when we wanted to escape the confines, climb out of our skin, anything to escape the mindless numb of every day. Sarah Moss puts flesh on those feelings in her post-pandemic novella, The Fell (2021, first American edition 2022). Coming in just under 200 pages, Moss’s latest fiction will haunt readers just as much as our own memories of COVID’s darkest days.

Damnation Spring

Damnation Spring

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Some books zoom in on a place and its local culture, bound to the setting both in terms of geography and time in ways that pull the reader in. Ash Davidson’s debut novel Damnation Spring (2021) does just that. Readers cozy up with the book firmly in the 21st-century, but within sentences Davidson’s prose transports them to 1977 amid the coastal redwoods and gritty logging families of Northern California. As anyone with knowledge of 1970s logging communities knows, this book deals with some very difficult themes (things like premature death, poverty, miscarriage, and adultery to name a few). Rural towns like the one readers come to know intimately in Damnation Spring, witnessed major cultural upheaval during the 1970s. Growing public environmentalist sentiment and dwindling old growth logging opportunities led to heated conflicts which often pitted neighbor against neighbor. It is a conflict that continues to play out in logging

Home

Home

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) is the story of a family with a son whose sorted past and heavy heart, continue to define and limit him well into middle age. As his father—“Reverend” to even his sons— faces the final journey after a long and upstanding life, Jack returns home to the town of Gilead, Iowa to face his inner demons and the setting for his earliest shame. This novel tells the story of his return, reception, and renewal. Robinson writes this novel, the second of four in the Gilead series, alternating close third-person perspectives between Jack, the wayward son, and his youngest sister Glory.

Wellness

Wellness

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peals the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are crushingly depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago contemporary storyline are a number of backstory character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult

The Summer Book

The Summer Book

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is perhaps the most famous Finnish writer and artist of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting, she was of the Swedish speaking minority. She is best known for her Moomintroll books of animated characters that continue to charm generations of readers. Jansson also wrote crisp, flowing prose. Her slender book, The Summer Book (originally published in 1978) is a beautiful story about life on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.

The Covenant of Water

The Covenant of Water

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

The Covenant of Water (2023) by Abraham Verghese well-deserves the title of (my personal) most anticipated book of the year. As soon as I heard that Verghese, author of the beautiful, difficult book Cutting for Stone, had a new book coming out, this one set predominantly in India, I got a little giddy. Verghese’s career as a surgeon (he is faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, after all) blends with his incredibly artful prose to make moving, fascinating reads. Even after many months of anticipation, The Covenant of Water wowed me, moved me, and left me feeling connected to something bigger and more beautiful than any single life.

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads

The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.

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