Steven’s Summer Reads

The greatest trick Steve(n) W. ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.  When he isn’t busy silently and invisibly pulling humanity’s strings this Summer, Steve(n) can be found in his darkened lair shrouded in exotic beasts and manipulating the flow of information by absorbing society’s creative mojo through its Earth-books.

1. Drinking At the Movies by Julia Wertz
Julia Wertz’s sparing illustrations and clever juxtaposition of the crass and the profound make this graphic memoir an engrossing, startlingly funny experience.  Drinking At the Movies documents the maturation of the author both as an artist and a human being as she plumbs the mundane for inspiration, chronicling the perpetually ridiculous and insightful intricacies that consume her life.

2. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Conspiracy, persecution, espionage, drug trafficking, punk rock, and performance art are all treated with the playful whimsy they deserve in Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern, northern Californian thriller.  This sprawling, acid-fried noir will rearrange your thoughts into a new configuration that somehow just seems to hit the spot.  A mind-bending, nonlinear romp through Vineland is sure to take the edge off of even the most stressful day.

3. A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel
This short story collection, while abstract and bizarre, manages to perfectly encapsulate and thematically describe the stages of life (in reverse) despite the surreal treatment of the subject matter.  The internally consistent logic of these winding streams of consciousness swirl around defining moments of the human experience, elaborating on reality with artistic flourish while remaining faithful to the existential tone of life.

4. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson
Building friendships often involves making compromises and accepting awkward truths about yourself and others.  Chief among those truths might be the fact that your probationary buddy doesn’t sleep and never has.  You may ask yourself: “How does this affect me, the potentially befriended?”  You may then answer your question with another question: “How do I feel about manifesting psychic weapons to protect this wackadoo from a shady government organization that wants to harvest his brain juice to make energy drinks?”  You may find yourself surprisingly agreeable to the terms of this new found camaraderie.

5. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
The freak show was a unique piece of Americana firmly entrenched in its era and indicative of an attitude now largely abandoned by our culture.  Set in the declining years of the freak show, Geek Love follows a peripatetic band of genetic entrepreneurs whose devotion to phenotypic novelty violates all possible social, personal, and medical conventions.  This summer, sprawl out under a fumigation tent and breathe deeply the hallucinatory fumes of transgressive literature while Katherine Dunn mutates your imagination.