Good evening!
Back to regular posting -- again, haven’t been reading too much because I’ve been up to my eyes in PhD work and a commission but I can always make a mountain out of a molehill.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
After my little flurry of intense reading at the beginning of May, I have spent two calender weeks reading Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and I’m still not quite finished. I’ve enjoyed it very much but it is so sad, which is why I’ve been taking breaks from it. Demon himself constantly says ‘I always expect something bad to happen to me, and it usually does’, which instils this kind of dread in me that things will somehow get worse for him.
I think I said in my last reading update that the novel is an adaptation of Dickens’ David Copperfield, and though it largely follows the narrative, it does make deviations at points so sometimes you don’t know if a good thing from the original text will happen or not. I appreciated this because it is a commentary on a society that is different to the Victorian London context of Dickens’ novel, and so things don’t go the same way because it isn’t feasible. Overall, Kingsolver has done an excellent job of commenting on the late ‘90s, early ‘00s opioid crisis while remaining faithful to David Copperhead, which says a lot about how you can transfer Dickens’ commentary on class into contemporary society. Which is…quite bad. It’s been like 200 years we should not be having the same issues.
I don’t generally go for ‘updated’ versions of things that aren’t straight adaptations; I’ve largely left the dearth of Greek and Roman myth updates alone (although I did enjoy The Song of Achilles (2011)) and haven’t gone anywhere near stuff like Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016) and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), both of which are based on Shakespeare. (I recognise that Hamnet is a fictionalisation of Shakespeare’s son and not an update on one of his plays but it hits a bit too close to all that). I don’t really know what my reservations about these stories are really. I think it’s part of a general look around at the publishing industry in the last few years and seeing a lot of similar stuff. I get that trends happen, and publishers are businesses who will obv capitalise on trends, but it does make it hard to find good writing within it all. (As a side note, I think we’re moving away from a lot of established trends at the moment, with some genuinely exciting and different texts coming out. Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special is a good example, in that it picks a specific and underwritten historical period to write great characters into, and Kathryn Scanlon’s Kick the Latch plays with form in a way that we’re not used to in the current landscape).
Anyway, if you’re like me and don’t usually go for that kind of text, I would abandon these notions for Demon Copperhead. It’s really excellent and stands well on its own as a story about the opioid crisis. The only extended thing I’ve taken in about the crisis is the episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on Massachusetts, which was hit hard. Young men who had injuries from sport were prescribed gateway drugs that they were told were not addictive, but very much were. When their prescriptions ran out, they got them through nefarious means, or moved onto harder drugs, notably heroin and meth. I’d encourage you to watch this episode (which incidentally has my fave line of the whole series in it, ‘If something is good, it’s good forever’) as a little primer because it presents it really well and clearly. I thought back to it a lot while reading Demon Copperhead, which I think says a lot about the success of its status as an adaptation, as I wasn’t constantly thinking about the original novel but rather, what else was relevant to it.
I will say that one of the funniest updates from David Copperfield was Uriah Heep, the horrible, creeping man that constantly tries to undermine David, turning into someone nicknamed U-Haul, because he was always driving people or things around. He was also horrible but the leap between the two characterizations made me laugh a lot.
Something else I read that I’d like to draw your attention to was Imo’s Guardian long read on the history of Guinness World Records, which she has been working on for about two years, and is really, really good. I cannot stop thinking about someone applying to break the world record of the longest drawing of an evil train.
Books on my radar
I’ve just been sent a proof of Going Mainstream by Julia Ebner, which is published by Bonnier Books this year. I’m really excited about it because it hits on a lot of things I’ve been thinking about, such as the spread of conspiracy theories online and radicalisation.