September may be the end of summer reads, but no doubt that I am still trudging through a reading list longer than I care to admit. My lack of completed tomes this last few weeks has less to do with the quantity of reading I am going and more to do with my ability to focus on just one book. It would seem that my digital distractibility in this department is no less a problem than the analog version.
That said, I have been reading. And reading. And reading some more.
And lately I’ve read…
James by Percival Everett
James is a horror story. Flipping the perspective on a book I literally just read, it instead retells the events of the famous Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn from the view of the runaway slave Jim. But where Twain’s original text is merely a weighty adventure romp with a moral imperative baked into its layers, all of it nudging and imploring readers to examine their notions of the racial divide in the Americas of that time, James wraps Jim in a kind of fictionally-driven agency to offer a story that is both compelling in its context and chilling in its implications. It is made no better, of course, that the all-too-real monster chasing James as a runaway slave through the pre-civil war south is the great grand-pappy ancestor of the same monster now creeping out of the shadows and into seats of vengeful political power in the US in 2025. Being a white, middle-aged Canadian man leaves me in no good position to offer any opinion on what this book does right or what it is supposed to mean or how it should be read. All I know is that it shook me, shook me to the point that like a horror story I often had to put it down for days at a time to process the descriptions of inhuman cruelty written inside. It is a fictionalized account, of course, and rightly so told as it is as a counterpoint to a “great American novel.” My reread of Huckleberry Finn recently was still quite fresh in my head, of course, and having just revisited the raft ride down the Mississippi I was all too aware of the weight of that story in the modern context of American neo-racism and an orange menace normalizing two hundred year old ideas that should have long been sent to their grave. But naivety of reality is the greatest ally of the dark impulses of humanity and one’s greatest weapon is education of the horrors as painted in even just a fictional tale, and empathy for the fact that while James is fictional his is a story built upon more truth than many of us can stomach.
Shit, Actually by Lindy West
There are days when I fashion myself a humorist of a sort, attempting to write clever reflections of life, the universe and everything—but mostly books and video games if I’m being honest. But that said, even if I can’t always measure up in my own witty writing, I do have a vibe and am drawn to reading the kind of observational kinds of reviews that I wish I could churn out with my little keyboard here at a Starbucks. This book of clever film reviews of a bunch of movies, all of which I have almost certainly seen every last one (except Twilight, I’ve never seen that one!) multiple times, showed up as a recommendation in my audiobook feed—and there I was looking for a low risk, light-hearted listen with a credit burning a hole in my digital pocket. I am also, notably, a fan of the oft-chided podcast rewatch genre, which has led me into similar additional reading expeditions. In other words, this wee book checked a lot of boxes for me. I consumed the whole damn thing inside of two days, all seven hours of short essays read by the author, providing clever, witty and jabbing summaries spectacularly mediocre movies while sticking her finger into the gaping plot holes of the same. And what else is there to say. I was funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, which startled me almost as much as it did the other people in the room where I was listening with headphones.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The day I finished re-reading this classic all tangled up in the history of American racism and slavery as it definitively is, the government of my (Canadian) province released a book ban list to the public, which given the company it would have been among—classics of political reaction like 1984, cautionary tales of amoral governments tangled up in religion like The Handmaid’s Tale—it was almost surprising that there was no Twain on the list. We live in dark times here in the mid-20s and while I’m not exactly sure the motivation for Twain to have written a book and a character like Huckleberry Finn, and can’t help but believe it was, too, a reaction to dark times. The book, obviously, is an indictment of American slavery told from the perspective of young adventurous Huck Finn whose adventures in a previous novel landed him a rich kid with an abusive, alcoholic father (all too normalized by the society in which Finn lives.). He escapes by faking his own murder and lands up in a classic travelling-the-river tale in the company of Jim, a slave who has also escaped. The duo’s adventures are a fictionalized glimpse at middle America of an era, one assumes, peppered with the moral maturing of Huck as he faces down the complex questions of right and wrong in a society that taught him that certain people are property and that what he is doing is abetting a crime the likes of which he figures will condemn him to hell, all the while we as the reader look at it from the modern perspective of Finn’s innate judgement being the right one. And still it is a hard book to read, not because of anything particularly narratively confusing, but if only because does at time feel as though the demon Twain was shining sunlight upon has risen up once again, never truly departed from this world. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this wind up on the banned list of any American politician who had both read and understood its story.
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