Dear Reader

Michael struggles with an unconventional mashup of holocaust memoir and sports-based dystopia in Georges Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood, while Emily is captivated by the sexual politics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, yet frustrated by its open-ended narrative. They talk about trauma, memory, age gaps in dating, and visualizing the things you read.

Michael is captivated by the brutality and isolation of pre-modern Newfoundland in Michael Crummey's The Innocents, while Emily delights in the “tragedy of manners” and the woes of bored rich people fallen on hard times in Patrick deWitt’s French Exit. They talk about puberty, death, forgiveness, the neuroses of the wealthy, and how to be friends in the 21st century.

Michael posits that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (“the most Victorian of Victorian novels”) is the anti-Atlas Shrugged, while Emily considers just how much thicker blood is than water with Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. They talk about sibling bonds, literary awards, adolescent reading habits, and trying to be a good person.

Michael joins his name-twin on the greatest adventure undertaken by humankind and finds him companionable, warm, and wise in Carrying the Fire, while Emily breaks down the walls of the “chick lit” ghetto to revel in City of Girls, a surprising story of feminine sexual liberation. They talk about utopian projects, the curse of popularity, non-traditional chosen families, and the value of blending the sciences and the humanities.

Emily strongly recommends an encounter with the disorienting bleakness and collapse of Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s Blindness, while Michael strongly recommends an encounter with the soul-wracking cruelty and violence of Megan Gail Coles’s Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club. They talk about a relentless duty of care forced on women, social breakdowns, Portugal, misogyny, and vulnerability.

Michael thinks about history and community through reading Newfoundland Portfolio, a collection of obituaries by J M. Sullivan, while Emily considers the abnormality of the hypernormal and different ways of being happy in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. They talk about Newfoundland, independent bookstores, summer reading, the service industry, and problematic attitudes toward low-prestige jobs.

Michael picks at the banality of evil protrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, while Emily desperately wants to finish Isabel Allende's enchanting work of magical realism, The House of the Spirits, but is prevented from it by living on a windswept rock in the North Atlantic.

Emily thinks the world would be a better place if everyone read Lucy Knisley's graphic novel account of her difficult pregnany, Kid Gloves, while Michael rhapsodizes about experiments in empathy and postmodern mysticism spurred on by Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place.

Michael found the formal experiments and wild content of Darcie Wilder’s literally show me a healthy person to be compelling but not without knots, while Emily enjoys the nuance of Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Wife.

Emily and Michael talk about The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood), Circe (Madeline Miller), The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Yukiko Motoya), and what books not to bring to the hospital.

Emily found Caitlin Moran’s How to Be Famous to be both hilarious and politically necessary. Michael went on a 16-bit nostalgia binge with Michael P. Wilson’s Chrono Trigger. They talk about bad sex in the #metoo era, the art of translation, persistence in the face of catastrophe, and burning out on reading.

Coming soon to Megaphonic: Dear Reader. Two old friends want to know: What have you read lately?