What sort of mood are you in?
One of my favorite books is A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. It has a light, breezy, funny tone. It’s about a British couple who moves to the French countryside, and all the quirkyness, friendly locals, and great food they encounter there over the course of a year. For example, they visit a small village on a day when the whole town turns out to see a goat race and place bets on it. There’s only one road through town and it’s packed with the audience, street vendors, and wayward goats. An uptight British tourist tries to drive through and is just met with shrugs from everyone. The goats themselves stop to nibble the grass, wander off in the wrong direction, or just poop on the racetrack- finally, one of them meanders over the finish line. Mayle’s narration is wry and observational, and the book leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling like curling up with a mug of hot cocoa.
If you’ve ever wasted time on cracked.com, you’ll like John Dies at the End by David Wong. (He writes for the website.) The juxtapositions of shitty suburban slackerdom and terrifying eldritch abominations are great. Dave and John are two small-town slackers who take a drug called Soy Sauce that opens a door to another dimension. There are purposely terrible puns everywhere, and the tone’s very deadpan and snarky. For example, they meet a skinny blond Limp Bizkit fan who gets possessed by a swarm of grublike flying things that worm their way under his skin. After he’s posessed, he says, “You can call us shitload… cause there’s a shitload of us in here, yo.” Dave’s interjections are pretty funny, too, like when he sees a dead body in a tarp and thinks, “A murder burrito!”
I’d also recommend The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s about two young men in 1940s Brooklyn who create one of the first ever superhero comics. But there’s so much more to it than that. Joe Kavalier grew up idolizing Houdini, so he dedicated himself to learning tricks of escape. Later, these skills enabled him to be one of the last Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, but he had to leave his family behind. He travels to Brooklyn to live with his cousin, Sam Clay, and they create The Escapist. Anyway, this book is a real page-turner, but also very thoughtful. The tension never lets up, but you learn about each character’s deep motivations, the artistic process, and arcane topics like acts of escape or Golems. Meanwhile, the characters are very real; they are flawed and each go through a satisfying arc. Sometimes they do crazy things, but you always understand why.
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Composing members:
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